Phoenix is a browser only version of mozilla. We will need Kmeleon anymore?

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/nightly/latest-trunk/phoenix-win32.zip

"Only" makes an 8MB baby? Ooofda.

Can you customize it as easy as you can with K-Meleon, or is it the mozilla browser with out the other components?

The whole point in K-Meleon is you can make the browser fit the way you use it, rather than you having to fit the browser.

hello everyone,
i never posted here before but i use k-meleon since one year. so here is my question:
what is easy to customize in K-Meleon. maybe I missed something.
in my opinion the ability to customize K-Meleon is worse than the ability to customize Mozilla.

and hey, i thought the goal of K-Meleon was to create a _fast_ and _small_ browser not a browser that lets you change every detail of it's appearance.

K-Meleon rocks on slow computers, Phoenix rocks on fast machines, that's it.

And easy to customize are both.

and Phoenix IS under development. you can even test the beta without subscribing to something, never understood this anyhow.

regards
philipp

ps: sorry if this post offends someone, i did not want to be rude.

Try changing context menu in Phoenix. Like try to move "frame source" from second level to first level. Then compare how easy it is in KM.

Or better yet - try changing button images

I downloaded Phoenix. One thing about it, it is very fast....much faster than Mozilla 1.1, at least on my computer.

phoenix is a XUL based gui browser that works with windows and linux.
kmeleon is windows native thats why its UI is much faster than phoenix or mozilla. phoenix included windows native MfcEmbed version but its not supported and its pretty basic and crap! Kmeleon is much better and will always be faster than XUL.

Philipp - you miss the point on the customization, it's not just cosmetic. The real fun is in adjusting the functionality. Making the menus your own way, playing with macros. I like being able to toggle font size within a range I define (my eyes are older and cruddier than anybody's computer).
As for the beta thing, that is nothing to get miffed about. The non-public releases are part of the development process that you wouldn't get a whiff of with other software. I haven't stuck my neck out for testing because my system has been so unstable that I feel it's better to avoid installing too many wild horses. ;-) wheee - crash - lol
No offense taken, or - I hope - given.
I don't think I want to bother installing Phoenix, sounds like just another big cow.

> and hey, i thought the goal of K-Meleon was to create a _fast_ and _small_
> browser not a browser that lets you change every detail of it's appearance.

the only purely cosmetic improvement i think i've ever seen the developers tackle in the last few versions is the non-transparency of the background of the little 'padlock' icon in the bottom right corner of the window... otherwise, it's not even really 'skinnable' in any hardcore sense of the word... most of the configurability is very much aimed towards function, which can equate to speed in ways that are hard to benchmark, but very real; you never realize how much more efficiently a customized interface lets you do things, until you have to do them without it... those are the moments i have the warm-fuzziest feelings about this project.

"phoenix is a XUL based gui browser that works with windows and linux.
kmeleon is windows native thats why its UI is much faster than phoenix or mozilla. phoenix included windows native MfcEmbed version but its not supported and its pretty basic and crap! Kmeleon is much better and will always be faster than XUL."

I hate to say it, however all these little Mozilla spin-off projects, like Beonex and Phoenix, are really pointless considering the fact that, apart from a different name, and maybe an altered installer, you still aren't gaining anything different over the plain vanilla Mozilla browser. Call them a different name if you will, however if the interface is still based on XUL, and the engine is still Gecko, then it's just Mozilla. That's the thing that sets K-Meleon aprt from these other Gecko browsers; at least it's different enough. K-Meleon takes the Gecko engine, and embeds it in a different frame-work, plus adds configurability options via the use of macros. None of these other browsers do that.
Ah, I think that one was worth two cents... :-)

To be fair here - I do see point in Phoenix.
Removing everything but the browser should theoretically reduce memory footprint, responsiveness etc. Present Phoenix build really don't have all that yet, unfortunately. Comparing memory footprints reveals them to be exactly the same at the moment.

I found Phoenix to really be in its early alpha stage . They have alot of ground to cover and alot of bugs. The browser no where near compares to K-Meleon right now mainly because its early in tis developement . Yet it may have potential on down the road in the near future.

The most interesting thing with Phoenix IMO is that they are trying to show that Mozilla shouldn't be only 1 thread.

Personallyu I hate when eg my Mozilla browser hangs/crash ... & brings IRC, mail and whatever else you might have up down with it...
Highly annoying even if it doesn't happen too often. It shouldn't happen at all.

I just installed Phoenix yesterday and played with it for a while. It seems to have the "Sidebar" footprint, but not the functionality. I.E. it does have a panels.rdf file with a list of sidebars, and it will add a sidebar when you click one of those "Add to Netscape 6" buttons. BUT it doesn't display the sidebars. I couldn't find anything in the UI that would let me display sidebars. It MAY be buried in some config files and not implemented in the UI.

Anyway, if it has a panels.rdf (a tiny little file really) but doesn't use it, what other stuff does it have that increases the footprint but isn't used?

For the type of browsing I do it seems quite adequate.

The thing with phoenix is that it's being spear headed by the developers of mozilla. The purpose of this browser is to be lightweight, yet functional. The developers didn't like the way some things turned out in mozilla, and they created this project to fix the shortcomings. There's only 3 developers, but they are among the best out of mozilla.org. I believe this is the project to watch because of the developers involved in the coding, and their views on the current state of mozilla. Updates will be regular, not like k-meleon.

Michael, try F9 for sidebar. I can't test on Phoenix right now but it's the default Mozilla hotkey for sidebar.

"Updates will be regular, not like k-meleon."

I guess that depends on what you mean by updates. According to our logs, we have had 25 code changes checked in the past week. Some were major, some were minor. but all helped us move towards K-Meleon 0.7. If you mean updates as in releasing a build every night, we don't currently do that. But unlike the Mozilla (Netscape) coders, no one here is getting paid to do that. It would be nice but most of the people who are that hard-core about testing K-Meleon already roll their own and anyone is free to pull code from CVS and build K-Meleon every night, if they are so inclined.

Nope. Sorry Sven F9 doesn't do it. I suspect the Panels.rdf file just got left in the build, but the sidebar functionality was removed. As I say, that's fine by me, I was just trying to make the point that the "footprint" is bigger than the foot. (If Phoenix tries to walk a mile in those shoes it'll get blisters!

Author: sven (---.spin.ee)
Date: 09-16-02 02:36

Michael, try F9 for sidebar. I can't test on Phoenix right now but it's the default Mozilla hotkey for sidebar.

Ain't there a Phoenix forum somewhere???

I don't think a forum for Phoenix is available yet. They did say that there would be one at some point. Not sure how useful that will be. I've found the Mozilla forum for embedding apps to pretty limited.

> the only purely cosmetic improvement i think i've ever seen the developers tackle in >the last few versions is the non-transparency of the background of the little 'padlock' >icon in the bottom right corner of the window...

Actually, po, unless you're talking about a beta I don't have, it's not really transparent. On the version I'm using (0.6), the padlock is in a "Windows gray" square.

> unless you're talking about a beta I don't have, it's not really transparent.
> On the version I'm using (0.6), the padlock is in a "Windows gray" square.

now that i think about it, yes, that was fixed shortly after the 6.0 release... no grey square in the next version.

Phoenix 0.1 (Pescadero) Released

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-release-notes.html

I'm a big fan of K-Meleon. I've been using it for over a year as my main browser. I don't do alot of customization to the browser, but I like the speed with which pages are rendered, the ability to turn off popups and the ability to change the user agent value sent to the server. However, there must be some other differences between K-Meleon and Phoenix because the same page is rendered differently in each browser.

I use ESPN.com as a test case for browsers because they do some nifty things and the site is M$ centric, so I can test the user agent spoofing. The rendering of today's NFL section is different in K-Meleon than in Phoenix. The caption for the image related to the main story renders properly in Phoenix but renders over top of the image in K-Meleon. Like I said, I haven't tweaked K-Meleon at all. I'm using the K-Meleon .65 beta and Phoenix .1 release.

y0yodyne,

Which beta are you using (build number)?

Build 142.

How embarassing. I'm over 300 builds behind....

Okay, I just upgraded to Build 488. Same difference.

Now I remember why I never go to espn.com, since they are in with microsoft, they now require IE in order to see their site. Oh well, cnnsi.com works, so I can still find out anything I want to know in the world of sports.

Well, changing the user agent string to one of the IE versions lets me into the site. I can view the site in Phoenix without this spoof, but that's probably cuz espn hasn't configured their site to "show you the door" if it detects phoenix. From what I can tell, there's really nothing that dictates that IE must be used (like IE specific tags, etc). It's probably the M$ payolla that's making them put the browser test in there...