[WEB4LIB] Phoenix joins the fray

[Andrew I. Mutch]

A few additional points about Phoenix. First, Phoenix has several
advantages over the standard Mozilla install:

1) It's a browser-only application and doesn't include features like
Composer and Mail (in theory, there's actually a bug where you can expose
these applications but that is supposed to be corrected at some point).

2) The toolbar is configurable and allows you to add a Home button to the
Navigation toolbar. 

3) The menus have been redesigned and slimmed down to make them much more
user friendly.

However, Phoenix still suffers from the same major disadvantage as Mozilla
-  the interface is written in XUL. While it is possible to hack the
interface to remove or change various menus and features, this requires
more work than most people are going to be willing to do, especially until
the browser code stabilizes. I've asked the Phoenix people if they plan on
supporting "kiosk" features like the old "-k" modes available in Netscape
4.x. They've indicated that those features are not in their plans.

As the Release Notes point out, this release is buggy and missing many
features. I expect that future releases will be much more polished.

Andrew Mutch
Library Systems Technician
Waterford Township Public Library
Waterford, MI




On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 george at library.caltech.edu wrote:

> Phoenix 0.1 (Pescadero) was released last night
> <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/phoenix-release-notes.html>.  To
> quote from the site:
> 
> Phoenix is a redesign of the Mozilla browser component, similar to Galeon,
> K-Meleon and Chimera, but written using the XUL user interface language and
> designed to be cross-platform.
> 
> George S. Porter
> Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
> Caltech, 1-43
> Pasadena, CA  91125-4300
> Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681
>