history
phoenix
by anders pearson
Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:20:10
i must say that i'm impressed with <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/">phoenix</a>.
it's a new lightweight browser built on top of the <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/">mozilla</a> platform but intended just as a simple web-browser. so no email client, javascript debugger, DOM inspector, or html editor.
the 0.4 release includes every mozilla feature that i've become reliant on like popup blocking, good cookie handling, tabbed browsing and type ahead find. and it's so fast. on my machine it feels even faster than <a href="http://galeon.sourceforge.net/">galeon</a>, which is surprising since phoenix uses XUL for its interface rather than native GTK like galeon. XUL is basically just dhtml on steroids and was intended to be easy and flexible, but hasn't previously been thought of as terribly efficient. that may all have to change.
phoenix development has reportedly slowed down after the 0.4 release. but that doesn't seem like much of a problem when you consider that a very small team of netscape engineers went from <em>absolutely nothing</em> to IMO, the best web browser out there in just a couple weeks (the 0.1 release was september 23rd). that is unreal. there aren't really any missing features. future development is apparently aimed at making it <em>even smaller and faster</em> and polishing the code up.
this really speaks volumes about the potential of mozilla and XUL as a cross-platform application development platform that's just starting to be realized since mozilla stabilized after 1.0. i've been reading <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mozilla/index.html">Creating Applications with Mozilla</a> recently and i'm becoming more and more convinced that mozilla is nothing less than revolutionary. the skillset needed to develop reasonably sophisticated applications in mozilla isn't much beyond what any skilled web designer who's dabbled in javascript already has. mozilla isn't competing with internet explorer anymore, it's competing with Visual Basic as a rapid, easy development platform and it has the significant edge of being naturally cross-platform.
things are starting to get really interesting.
comments
anders pearson - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:21:10
oh. and phoenix 0.5 is <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-release-notes.html">out now</a>. no real feature improvements as far as i'm concerned (the tabbed browsing, popup blocking and type-ahead find already made it a perfect browser featurewise in my eyes) but it's even smaller and faster now.sarah - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:22:10
DOn't know phoenix, but heard. I'm so sad that Mozilla sucks so completely on Macs. I'm using Navigator, which is fine, but it sounds like they just don't care aboutmaking mozilla load in less than 30 seconds on OS X. Moan and cry.anders pearson - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:24:10
have you tried <a href="http://chimera.mozdev.org/">chimera</a>? the X users i know are raving about it. apple, unfortunately has spent the last 20 years earning the enmity of developers, both commercial and open-source. it's widely understood that if you release some code for the mac that actually does well, apple will probably release their own copycat version and bundle it with the next release of the OS, thus effectively putting you out of business. apple pretty much insists on having every aspect of their OS under their control. with OS X, they've already been forbidding programmers from doing anything that changes or enhances the UI or look and feel. they've also been slowly replacing all the little open source unix utilities with less useful, but apple-written versions. so finding people (or even companies) with the know-how to work on mozilla on the mac who haven't already been burned by apple is becoming increasingly difficult.Mark Boudreau - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:25:10
I decided to take a look at Chimera now that they've reached version .6. So far, I'm quite pleased. All I want from it is some better privacy features, and more sophisticated javascript blocking and it will be good enough for my laptop.Mark Boudreau - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:23:10
Well, I'm posting this from Apple's new Konquerer based browser, Safari. So far, I'm moderately pleased. It's a bit more slick than Chimera, plenty fast, but missing some of the features I've come to rely on in Mozilla (TABS!). I'm going to send it through it's paces for a few days and see how it goes. It was a painless install though. Some web sites look a little funky (thraxil's dropdown menus stack because the widgets expand to be as long as the longest menu item), but it seems pretty standards compliant. Now I'm going to finally install X11.anders pearson - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:26:10
mark pilgrim has a <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/07.html#safari_review">pretty good review</a> of Safari from a web designer's perspective.Mark Boudreau - Thu 31 Oct 2002 00:27:10
I was just about to post that link...ya beat me to it. The good thing is that with the guys that Apple has working on it, we may see a lot of those bugs squashed before too long which will help both Safari and the other KHTML based browsers. Maybe instead of a browser war, we see a standards compliance war...wouldn't that be something.