phoenix

By anders pearson 31 Oct 2002

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.

Tags: programming mozilla xul phoenix