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.