The Mozilla Organization's Phoenix
 

As you may have read on Slashdot, The Mozilla Organization has released a lightweight browser based on Mozilla. It's called Phoenix, and this release was 0.1. Anyway, let's get links out of the way before we talk about it.

Here's the project page on mozilla.org: http://mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/...ase-notes.html

And here's what it looks like as I write this page: http://www.metastudios.com/images/ss-phoenix.jpg

That's the only theme you can use for now. The preferences are stripped down but are being implemented. Major development work is going into it, so I'm expecting a pretty nice lightweight browser some time very soon.

I find it pleasant to work with and look at so far. I guess only time will tell. But for all of you who are using Mozilla, you owe it to yourselves to download it and give it a shot.

Now. Comments? :)

Gave it whirl, its looking good, i think ill move over when half the functions are enabled again and the import bookmarks function works. Will be nice though, i don't need half the crud in mozilla.

i dig it. anyone want to explain to me why the little 'C' logo shows up in the address bar (see dhams screenshot) in phoenix but not in mozilla?

by the way. i fucking hate the new download manager.

~james

'cause it's Phoenix, not Mozilla. :)

The download manager is being revamped and should be nice in version 0.2. We'll see. :)

Does it use a different method for getting icons from the server? I thought Mozilla was pretty good about displaying site icons when it's supposed to.

Is the phoenix download manager different from the mozilla one? I'm not too wild about it either.. it needs a setting to automatically clear finished items. I also should be able to tell it that I'm a big boy and can decide for myself whether I want to execute .exe's right from a server w/o saving them first.

BTW.. I thought I had heard rumblings a while back about Mozilla incorporating the ability to store preferences and bookmarks on an LDAP server.. anyone know anything about this?

How do you guys keep bookmarks in sync between computers and/or browsers? I've seen various commercial products (FusionOne, BookmarkSync, etc) but wasn't too impressed.

Import/export? If you sync other files you can sync them, after all moz just keeps them in bookmarks.htm in your profile dir.

you know, now that i think about it...

using phoenix was the first time i _ever_ saw that 'c'. ie6 doesnt display it, mozilla doesnt display it and i dont have netscape installed, so im not sure there, but i assume it would behave similarly to mozilla. in fairness, ie6 seems to suck at doing that in general. mozilla does show the 'm' at www.memepool.com but ie doesnt. oh, well. nitpicky, i guess.

~james

OK, I just added the necessary tag to get the icon to display in Moz. Won't work on all pages, but most of 'em.

Moz does have the ability to retrieve the favicon.ico automatically, but they decided against enabling it. There's a hidden option to turn it on, apparently.

Yeah, I find them a little annoying, actually. So i'm glad it's an option. They are neat, though.

thanks UT. i dig it. :)

~james

The icons work every once in a great while on IE, but then mysteriously stop after a while. Just one of those Windows things.

Simply syncing the bookmark file with a file sync program won't work. If I add one favorite on a computer at work and one at home, and then sync, both show that the file is updated.

I need something that will combine changes on the per-bookmark level. The programs I mentioned will do that, and even sync between IE and Mozilla/Netscape.

I like being able to easily distinguish which tab is from which site, at least for the sites I visit most often.

I've downloaded Phoenix, but haven't bothered to copy over the user preferences that allow Mouse Gestures (they haven't put in the ability to allow them with the GUI yet, at least not as far as my Phoenix version) and thus I have yet to start using Phoenix seriously. It also seems a bit more crash-prone?

It was absolutely hilarious reading about Mozilla and Phoenix on the weblogs of the major Mozilla developers, such as asa's weblog.

For me, this would involve having 10-12 'C's across the top of my page. :) But I can see how that would be useful.

Yikes! Mozilla crashes plenty often for me, thanks. Not that it's horrible -- maybe once every few days. But that's still plenty for me, esp. when I have ten tabs open and lose it all.

what do you do with 10 tabs? i start losing track of what im doing after around 4. i keep the cellar in one, my email in another, and 2 for surfing. i cant imagine needing 10.

mozilla crashes on me maybe 1-2 times a day. fair tradeoff, i think, for the features it provides (no unrequested windows!)

~james

Galeon has an option where if it crashes, when you re-load it, it re-opens all the webpages that you had open when it crashed.

Mozilla hasn't crashed on me since 1.0RC1. Phoenix hasn't crashed on me yet. Chimera "unexpectedly quit" once. Dunno how you people are having such problems. :)

Yeah, I've been using Phoenix almost exclusively since it was released and I haven't had a problem yet. Mozilla seemed way more crash-prone, but that may have been from bloat.

By the way, for those who don't know - 0.2 of Phoenix is out. Go get it. :)

I get about one crash per week of Mozilla, with a *ton* of use.

It's far better than it was a year ago, when nightly builds would bring about one crash per day. For me, on reliability, it's on par with IE, no better no worse. (That's not considering security.)

My only problem with Mozilla is in how it renders pages. Even CNN, which has a banner showing its affiliation with Netscape on top, doesn't display correctly (although it does just fine in IE).

hermit22 - thats the fault of the page designer, not Moz. I'm with Ut - i get the occasional crash, but i use it every day a heap so. Once you've got the plugins going (which should be more streamlined or included really, it could be quite a turnoff for a newbie if they did not understand how to get flash) its a damn sweet browser.

i still use IE for onlien banking though, moz seems to utterly mangle it.

Have anyone else noticed that Mozilla would eat up all memory after being running about a week without restarting? I have a Mozilla 1.1 under Windows NT 4.0 at work running 24/7. It would eat up all available memory thus crashing all applications including the Mozilla itself.

I've noticed it does go up if i left it for a few days, leaking somewhere, nothing too serious though.

So Dave, how ya liking 0.2?

Tabs
 

Since my connection is dismal, I have a habit of clicking on links and loading them in the background while I read a page. I've had many occasions where I have had 40 to 50 tabs of Mozilla open. I also suffer from "oh this is cool i'll click here" syndrome. When I still used IE I kept running into the limitations of the Windows taskbar.

Mozilla only crashes once every few weeks on me. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to watch on Win2k's Performance meters while Mozilla was crashing. It was pretty cool; everything greyed out inside the window and then Mozilla drifted upwards and upwards in memory usage for approximately a minute until it spat out an error and died.

Liking it quite a bit. I use it for browsing at work and at home (except on Mac OS X, where I use Chimera, which is a stripped-down Mozilla for... Mac OS X :) ). It's definitely faster than Mozilla, and it's been plenty stable for me so far, so no complaints.

I also dig that I can customize the toolbar (almost) exactly how I want it. Now if I could make the location bar shorter and add bookmarks to the main toolbar, life would be complete. Hopefully in 0.3 or 0.5 or something. :)

version 0.3 is out. seems faster to me, at least so far.

I'm using 0.2 on my laptop. Seems pretty stable so far, but I miss some of Mozilla's features. Looks like it's maturing quite nicely though.