Mozilla overhaul to throw out the kitchen sink

[JamesR]

In the biggest development in the Mozilla project since the 1.0 release, mozilla.org has announced that Mozilla 1.4 will be the last version of Mozilla to be an application suite. After 1.4, the minimal Phoenix browser and Minotaur (aka Thunderbird) mail clients will take over and work on a single Gecko Runtime Environment (which all Mozilla-based apps can share rather than each app having to use its own) will be thrown into high gear. Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0?

[KennyR]

Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0?

Only if it makes it easier, which I actually doubt it will.

[odin]

So phoenix is becoming the 'official' mozilla browser or something? That can only be a good thing :-). I'm a phoenix addict myself.

[mikeymike]

*Jaw drops*

/me checks the date, to make sure it's not April 1st...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Mozilla may be a bit clunky in places, but Phoenix tops the clunkiness scale, then invents a few new places of its own!  Premier league Clunky, Champions League of Clunky, and the World Cup of Clunkiness!



AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

They cannot be serious.   :-o

I just took a quick extra look at Phoenix just to re-familiarise why I stayed the hell away from it.  Oh yeah.  The bookmarks menu on the personal toolbar is exactly like IE's... BAD!  Menu appearance/disappearance is as clunky as hell, and the memory footprint is as bad or worse than Mozilla's!  I'm sorry, what was the point in Phoenix again?  Oh.  It starts a little bit faster.  And what's with the IE-like placing of stuff in the menus?  Who are the developers, high priests of IE advocacy?

If Phoenix is going to get better, they should have held off this decision until it hit at least 1.0 release... right now it is in no shape to replace Mozilla Navigator.

[Bezzen]

@mikeymike

Hmm.... that's not right, that's what I think of Mozilla.  :-D

I've gone from Netscape, to Opera, to Mozilla and to Phoenix... and I have no intention of going back since this is the smoothest browser I've had installed on my machine. (There are still a couple of bugs though).

[amigamad]

I would never use mozilla its slow and ugly i hate it, opera is the best browser followed by intenet explorer.  :-D

[Blomberg]

I never really liked Mozilla's browser. In fact, up until a week or two ago, I mostly used IE (!) even though I had Opera 6, 7, Mozilla, K-meleon and Netscape installed (the latter one not for long, tho :-D)

But since i discovered Phoenix (thx zudo, odin ;-) ) I haven't used anything else. I like the customization options for the toolbars, which is what I found lacking in all the others (except K-meleon, which I had some other issues with).
It still has a long way to go, but I think it looks *very* promising and an Amiga port would be great, IMO.

[Siggy]

Perhaps this will help persuade the Amiga community to port Mozilla to Amiga OS 4.0

I think the biggest persuasive factor would be the release of Amiga OS 4.0.

Never know, after that we may see all kinds of stuff ported...

Siggy.

(Is it just me, or is there an upsurge in carriage before the horse going on around here?)

[mikeymike]

At the moment, I'm using Mozilla 1.3 for web and mailnews.  Because it is a bit slow when dealing with huge amounts of mail (I have large mail archives), I have Mozilla and my profile both in ramdisk.  This makes it very very fast :-)

Phoenix claims to be faster than Mozilla.  Ok, it normally has a slight edge on it when cold starting, but on my system there's no difference at all (both in ramdisk and their profiles).  Performance using both applications is nigh-on identical.

Phoenix claims to have a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla.  Who are they kidding?!?

Mozilla may be heavier generally, but I like where everything is and it is nice and snappy in general usage.  The menus in Phoenix are as clunky as hell and the bookmarks shortcut you can have on the personal toolbar is ripped straight out of IE.  And I don't appreciate the stupid positioning of stuff in the menus just to make it a bit more IE ish.  Since when are a programs preferences to be found in the 'Tools' menu?!?

If Mozilla is to be split up into smaller, faster, seperate apps, PORT THEM DIRECTLY!  I don't want to be the victim of what some little IE advocate thought would be a good idea at the time!

[Waccoon]

Who cares about memory footprints?  Why don't they take care of real design problems first?

The reason I dumped Mozilla and went back to IE is because Mozilla is the least responsive browser I've ever used.  Visit a page, and it has to download the whole thing before it refreshes the display.  At least with IE, you can read the top of the page while the rest is downloading.  A better download manager would be nice, too.

Mozilla has some strong points here and there, like the ability to display partially corrupt image files (instead of blocking them like IE), and, of course, pop-up supression, but on the whole it's not very well designed at all.

Sheesh.  Geeks.

[mikeymike]

I've just found the nightly builds for Phoenix, I'll give it another chance :-)

[mikeymike]

@ Waccoon

Let me guess, you're a WinXP user with 1GB RAM?

You don't care about memory footprints? I really don't know what to say to that!!!

Of course getting rid of the major problems first is a good plan, and large memory footprints are down to debug libraries in memory as well, so the two are linked together, but the Phoenix team are claiming that CURRENTLY it has a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla, which is blatantly not true!

[Page loading issues?] When was the last time you tried Mozilla?  If it's pre 1.2.1, you really ought to try it again, you'll notice a big difference.

The download manager in Mozilla isn't very good, true.  But I don't use it, so it doesn't affect me

Pop-up suppression works brilliantly in 1.3, again, give it a try.

"Geeks"?

[KennyR]

My own order of preference for browsers I've used:

1. Opera 7 (I use this when I have to use my PC, which I don't feel the need to do often).
2. IBrowse 2.3 (I use this 95% of the time)
3. Voyager (QNX)
4. Mozilla 1.x
5. AWeb 2
6. Phoenix
7. Netscape 7
8. Lynx (amiga gg port)
9. Voyager 3 (V3 on Amiga)
10. Internet Explorer 6

My preference is based on stability first, speed second, convenience 3rd, and compatibility last (if a site has flash or java or weird js usually avoid it like the plague). Note also that I don't use Linux. ;-)

[olegil]

It doesn't have to load the whole page before displaying, it's just got a delay of some hundred milliseconds or so from start of loading until it starts displaying. You can tweak that if you know where it's set...

[ne_one]

People, the browser application itself is practically irrelevant here -- it's the rendering engine that's critical. By componentizing the suite it definitely makes an Amiga port more realistic.

Everyone has their favourites, but right now none of these are available as alternatives. We desperately need this.