Mozilla Phoenix

[Brett_Tabke]

The Mozilla team has released a bit of a slimmed down version of Mozilla called Phoenix. It attempts to address some of the core Moz problem of bloat and speed.

[mozilla.org...]

Although obviously still in alpha stage, it looks very promising. The biggest new feature is the ability to finally edit the toolbars of their ackward mozilla defaults. In side-by-side tests of Mozilla, there was not difference in page load or rendering speed here. If anything, mozilla was faster than Phoenix for me.

[dingman]

I don't see much if any difference in page load time with the two, but I do get a much faster start time for Phoenix than I do for Mozilla. Not a huge deal in my life, since I tend to load a whole bunch of browsers at the beginning of my (day at work ¦ month-plus login session at home) and just leave them there. However, it's enough to make me think it might be worth installing in some places where I wish I could have Mozilla, but don't want to install something that's going to take 5 minutes to start up.

[Winooski]

In this age of code bloat and feature creep, anyone who's willing to come up with streamlined, efficient versions of existing apps deserves a medal. Wouldn't it be great if developers of insecure, bloated (Micro)software followed Mozilla's lead?

[RFranzen]

I am puzzled by the "speed" advantage. Mozilla 1.01 and Netscape 7 seem to be every bit as fast as IE 6 on my system. IE starts up faster, but a lot of it is put into into memory during boot-up.

There are some pages which Mozilla loads faster than IE. I have not noticed any which IE loads faster.

-- Rich

[dingman]

Not sure about anyone else in here, but I'm comparing Mozilla against other open-source browsers, not IE. It's not so much that I don't care about how it stacks up as that IE doesn't run on my computer, 'cause I don't have (or want) a Bill-approved OS. Thanks, but I like my "viraly licensed" OS. Then, at work I tend to start up Moz first, and then just check the pages in IE every now and again, 'cause Moz is more familliar to me than IE, and I really like tabbed browsing, which AFAIK IE doesn't do. The upshot is that I don't know how IE performs at all, because I never use it for general web surfing, just for stuff I wrote myself.

[SethCall]

Well, I downloaded Phoenix (on Windows XP) and I am absolutely certain it renders all pages that I tried faster than anything I have ever seen. The only limiting factor is the page's upload speed.

And I *really* like its appearance: very very austere.

[aspr1n]

Phoenix is a great (not yet little) browser, I definately prefer it to Mozilla. Interestingly, the icons are a skin I was using on Opera 6! FYI, the last nightly build is stable, has more toolbar configuration options, and proxy configuration now works, which in the milestone release didn't.

Rather relevant for a CSS/HTML forum I thought this link might come in handy for anyone that fancies using their CSS skills:

[mozilla.org...]

asp

[Brett_Tabke]

I installed in on a slower (500mhz) system this weekend, and it was certainly faster than Moz. (moz is snail on that system)

[NetGrease]

I'm certainly impressed with Pheonix, even at such an early stage. Two out of the four systems I regularly use could be classed succintly as "dinosaurs", and Pheonix literally 'flew' ;) on these systems in comparison to Moz 1.1.

Definately a project worth watching IMHO...

[dingman]

Now I just want a way to tell it to forget a password of mine it got hold of when I clicked "OK" a second before it dawned on me what the dialog actually *said*.

Granted, I should change that password anyway since for a while I used it from machines I know had key-logging software installed, but even so Phoenix now remembers whatever I type into that form, and there's nothing in any dialogs to tell me how to change that.

[NetGrease]

Glad someone else has spotted this too. :(

It would really benefit from having the identity and password management put back in. Maybe the next milestone (0.3) will have it?

My other bug-bear is that you can't set the size of the search box (top-right); it's pretty piddly, and not as useable as it could be - unless you only ever do single (short) word searches.

On a more positive note however, editing the search box's source code couldn't be easier. If you want the Google option to point to, say, Google UK, simply browse to your Pheonix directory, then the searchplugins directory inside. Find the google.src file and make a backup of it. ;) Open google.src and change the action property of the <search> tag to read action="http://www.google.co.uk/search".

Simple, yet effective...

[The_Warden]

Phoenix is pretty amazing for the speed of rendering web pages. Also the coolest feature I think is customizing the toolbars (Phoenix v0.2). Simple drag and drop and a few clicks and your done. Love to see this in Mozilla.

Though Phoenix is good I doubt I would chance since I like to do my mail/newsgroups in Mozilla. Good for those that just need a browser!

The main question that comes to mind is why can we not have Mozilla render pages just as fast?

[shelleycat]

I tried Mozilla 1.1 when it came out but found that after an hour or so my entire system started slowing down (a lot) and I had to reboot within about two hours. Mozilla 1.0 was also slightly slower than IE 5.5 (which I normally use) although not to this extent. I ended up uninstalling 1.1 in less than a week because obviously my computer is just too old to handle it (Cyrix 200Mhz chip, makes Brett's slow 500 look speedy ;)).

So when I read this thread I decided to try Phoenix. Not only do webpages render slightly faster but my system doesn't slow down at all. I've used it for several hours on a couple of occasions and didn't have to reboot once. Before I switch completely and make it the default I need to try it out while running a number of other programmes (as this is how I normally browse and was impossible with 1.1) but based on results so far I think it will be OK.

A stripped down browser like this is just what I need, I don't want a load of fancy features because I don't use them anyway. And I want to ditch IE if I can. So I'm happy :)

[starway]

I am surprised by posts I read here.
I downloaded Phoenix for the only purpose: to test it's so highly advertized speed of webpage loading. This is what really important, unlike the aplication loading time.

After several tests I came to such a conclusion: there's no any difference in webpage loading speed between Phoenix 0.1 and Mozilla 1.1. They are absolutely the same.

If you talk about application loading time - Phoenix is deafinitely faster. But this is not was emphasized in some articles I read. It was said that it loads pages much faster! Now I can tell that this is not correct (or just a lie - depending on how you call it).

By the way, Opera is still the fastest in complete page loading in ~95% of all cases. By "complete page" I mean: html + graphics + all the rest. While very often Mozilla shows text faster than Opera, it is almost always far behind when we talk about complete page.

[Brett_Tabke]

Phoenix was recently updated to v.4

[mozilla.org...]

[littleman]

Wrote some highlights here [webmasterworld.com]. It is shaping up nicely.

[lorax]

Is Phoenix a Mozilla replacement or is it being offered as yet another browser?

[Son_House]

I'm pretty sure I read at Mozilla.org that Phoenix is yet another browser. The people working on Phoenix think that Mozilla is getting to fat.

[SethCall]

Yes you are right, Pheonix is essentially a "new" browser, or, at least, will be.

It is not affiliated with Mozilla other than through codebase, as I understand it, though that does of course make the two quite "related".

[joeblakesley]

I have been using this browser for a while and just got version 0.4. All I can say is I like it. It looks very promising and I am using it more and more. It has some bugs but it is a good browser for simple quick browsing. I use Mozilla a lot too though. I used to use Opera a lot but less so now because it really has little over Moz and seems a bit blated and crashes sometimes. (Opera 7 beta looks prmising but I only just installed it a few minutes ago.)

I can us Mozilla for when i want all the bells and whistles - i have lots of toolbars installed with Moz too - but Phoenix is a great little browser. I am using Phoenix at college nearly all the time. The PrefBar and tabbed browsing extensions are handy too.

In some aspects it is still about as hoggy as Moz though (e.g.: CPU use, HDD space) but hopefully this should change. Considering it is relatively new it has made a big impact on me and certainly is filling a gap. It is different from Moz and I think complements Moz quite well.

Joe

[kcartlidge]

My only concern with Pheonix is that although it is definitely faster than IE/NN/Opera, it's text rendering appears buggy.

On my Win2K virgin installation it shows the text fine mostly but, maybe for a single line per screenful on average, the lettering gets stretched slightly vertically leading to a rather nasty display.

It's not a real problem, but it even happens on these forums.

[kcartlidge]

My previous note still applies, but I have to say on Win2K at work it's perfect.
No other browser has this quirk, though?

In any case, Phoenix is now my browser of choice.