Wow, they just keep cranking out new releases...

I wonder what their defintion of long is. All the other releases were quite quick.

Phoenix has been cranking out releases ... with 1.2 around the corner, this gives us a breather!

.. I was laughing when people were going "Phoenix is going to be the real IE killer". And yes, I had tried it and tested it.. Yesterday, I installed the nightly build and quickly replaced the default theme with Qute (I *hate* Orbit's icons for some reason.. probably the colors and the stop-button that seems so out of place) and I must say I was extremely positively surprised. With a more neutral default theme that nobody will hate (something along the lines of Mozilla's Classic, Qute or Luna) and all the missing features (such as the password manager UI, missing preferences options etc.) and a liiiitle bit more stability and we're having a *real* killer app on our hands!

Now the question becomes, how do we get the rest of the world to find out? I've always followed Netscape and Mozilla closely, even before Netscape's first 1.0 release back in 1994 (or 1995 or whatever). And even I was very sceptical about Phoenix, even with my knowledge about who was working on the project and what the goals of it were (which are goals that I agree with 100%). Perhaps there's some need for some really distinct separate branding from Mozilla. Basically, I'm suggesting that a really clear Phoenix brand be established, naturally so that it's clear that it's based on Mozilla, but so that there's a clear website to go to and link to when some site does a review of Phoenix and people come looking for more information. This hypothetical site would not be in the form of a zine but more along the lines of a traditional company software product web page.

Phoenix is a very important step in the *zilla evolution and could really take off with the right marketting.

A nice them, distinct icons and a dedicated site will all help sell Phoenix.

Perhaps Microsoft can be persuaded to bundle Phoenix on the Windows desktop, now it is a chastened company :)

I'm a Big Fan of Phoenix and Mozilla (made the decision to install the latter on several hundred PCs in a public library serving about 400k residents), I followed Netscape from 0.9, yadda yadda, so I'm asking as a friend: will any Mozilla-ish browser ever approach snappyness? Here's my definition of snappy: On a 1Ghz Pentium-III w/ 256MB RAM under Windows 2000, Opera gives the impression on cached and "local" pages up to about 50k in size with a few images (from servers on the same LAN as the browsing computer), that the page is displayed even before you have a chance to take your finger off the mouse button (or alt-arrow key). Well okay, if you're spastic about it you can remove your finger before you see the page, but only by a few tens of milliseconds. How about another unit of measure, the Blink. (Hey, if Swatch can make a "Beat", I can make a "Blink".) Using the same configuration as above, cached or local pages on Opera take about one Blink to load (I close my eyes and simultaneously click a navigation button, then open my eyes as quickly as possible and the page has in most cases already loaded). The same navigation pattern on Mozilla-ish browsers takes 2-4 Blinks to load pages. An unchromed Mozilla is somewhat faster than a chromed one, but still doesn't approach Opera's speed.

I heard that after Mozilla 1.0 was released, there was going to be a really serious all-out gung-ho effort towards improving all-around (but especially rendering) performance, but I can't say I've really seen any difference in the past five months. Phoenix has certainly provided SOME improvement however.

Now for my stupid look-into-your-crystal-ball question: will any Gecko-based browser even come close to Opera's rendering speed? Mozilla doesn't. Phoenix doesn't. K-Meleon doesn't. Netscape 7 doesn't...

I've been pretty disappointed so far with the Phoenix releases, actually. I'm extremely picky about my browser, and my acquired taste is pretty close to Netscape 4's UI. I was originally excited about Phoenix because it promised to be a leaner, meaner Mozilla, but in the last release I tried there were more features turned on than in my Mozilla prefs but in Phoenix there was no way to turn them off. I realize that Phoenix is still in early development, but is a full set of preferences on the way? If I can't turn off things like that menu of choices that pops up when you type something in the URL bar (thanks IE for the inspiration?), I'll frankly be happier with the full Mozilla.

If it's merely the prefs UI that is incomplete but there is some way I can change a file and get rid of the "features" I don't want, that works for me and I would be glad if someone could point me to documentation if there is any, or give me some basic tips on what to change and where. The biggest gripe that I can remember is the URL completion, but there may have been others.