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Phoenix

PhoenixHave I got a treat for you all today! Forget everything I've said about Mozilla and uninstall it. What you want now is Phoenix!!

Don't worry, it's not yet another browser to worry about designing your pages for. It's just a light-weight version of Mozilla. All the best bits without the things you don't want like mail client, address books etc. Because it's built on the same rendering engine your pages will appear exactly the same as in Mozilla.

The first thing you will notice with Phoenix, apart from how cute it looks, is how much quicker it is to load than it heavier cousin. The bloatiness of Mozilla is probably the one thing that's stopped me making the complete switch from IE. Now I feel happier to make that move. Other little things that kept me loyal to IE were the shortcut keys Alt + D to take the cursor to the Address Bar and Ctrl + Enter to turn "jakehowlett" to "www.jakehowlett.com". Phoenix included these indespensable tools. Nice.

Phoenix codestore searchAnother nice feature is the search box to the right of the Address Bar. By default is allows you to search Google and the DMOZ. Well, I've done a bit of hacking and come up with a codestore version so you can search this site. Once you've got Phoenix up and running (I'd suggest the latest milestone as I had trouble with the nightly-builds) come back here install the search plugin by clicking this link.

Note: The above install link seems a bit hit-and-miss to me so you might have to do it manually by adding these two files in to the "searchplugins" folder in your Phoenix install and restarting. Any other problems let me know...

Comments

    • avatar
    • Ben Poole
    • Thu 11 Jul 2002 08:03

    Likewise if you want a lightweight Gecko-based browser for the Mac, you must go with Chimera!

    • avatar
    • Tone
    • Thu 11 Jul 2002 10:18

    Looks good. I hate sluggish applications, I'll be downloading Phoenix this weekend for sure.

    Another thing I wonder about Mozilla/Phoenix is why hovering the mouse over images doesn't reveal the alt text. It uses ALT text while the image is loading (a very good feature when navigation is done with image links), but doesn't popup the text when hovered over. Maybe it uses the TITLE atribute for this instead, but I don't see why it couldn't do both: showing the text from the ALT attribute when no TITLE attribute is present, or something anyway.

    Oh, and thanks for doing my surfing for me (again)! Link filled blogs are great, aren't they?

  1. Your Plugin Works ... :) cool

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Thu 11 Jul 2002 11:24

    Mark - No need to sound surprised ;o)

    Tone - you answered your own question.

    • avatar
    • Stan Rogers
    • Thu 11 Jul 2002 15:15

    I've been telling people for years that ALT text popping up on mouseover was a browser dealie, and should never be relied upon as a tooltip. Would they listen? No-o-o-o!

  2. Totally agree on that Pheonix is a great browser. I've previosly swithed to Mozilla but now I've switched again! Been running it for a few weeks and it's really good.

  3. Personally, I do miss some of Mozilla's features in Phoenix! But what really made my heart jump (appart from the lightning speed) is that (like in IE) there is a "Details" button in the Accept Cookie Dialog. Finaly! How can I know if I want to accept a cookie or not if I don't know WHO wants to store WHAT for HOW LONG?

    • avatar
    • Rajiv
    • Fri 15 Nov 2002 05:25

    Did u know abt Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+Enter for .net and .org respectively that has been added to Phoenix..really nice

    http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback/read.php?f=15&i=771&t=770

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Fri 15 Nov 2002 06:24

    Cool! Thanks Rajiv.

    I think they must be reading what I say ;o)

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Written by Jake Howlett on Thu 7 Nov 2002

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

You can find me on Twitter and on Linked In.

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