Mozilla’s HTML engine, named Gecko, has been powering a number of other browsers on many platforms for a while now, like Galeon, Chimera and more. Vote for your favorite one! Oh, and being on the subject, K-Meleon 0.7, Galeon 2-dev, Salamander 0.3 and Phoenix 0.4 are all very recently released.Note: This poll is not about Mozilla, but Gecko’s other browsers. It takes Mozilla for “granted” and it asks your opinion about the rest of the Gecko-based browsers. This poll is all about “the best alternative Gecko browser”, so Mozilla can’t be part of this poll, as it is not an alternative, but the “original”.
Note2: The Poll is now closed. Thank you for participating.
BTW, for Mozilla-only users, scroll down on any OSNews page and you will see an icon called “Add Mozilla Sidebar”. Try it, it will add the OSNews headlines on your Mozilla, updating live!
Couldnt see Mozilla there?
Mozilla is nice, but Galeon…WOW, best browser i’ve ever used, and it beats mozilla hands down for speed (on my system atleast).
No. I am asking for the Gecko-based OTHER mozilla browsers, not for the Mozilla itself. The poll is about the “best Mozilla knock off”, not about Mozilla itself. The poll takes Mozilla for granted and asks your opinion on the other browsers based on Gecko.
galeon’s great…keep up the good work guys 😀
lightning fast
It hasn’t been released for BeOS yet, but apparently it compiles and runs now. It’s gonna be fun to see how it compares to Mozilla.
Read more at: http://www.bezilla.org.
I voted for Chimera, but that’s because it’s giving OS X a potentially great browser, where choice is more limited. But, I could have just as easily voted for Galeon and Phoenix is really rising (pun intended:-).
Personally, I voted for K-Meleon. I tried it last year, and it sucked. But I tried version 0.7 tonight and the thing is _really_ fast (unlike Chimera’s terrible scrolling, resizing and launching times ;-). I mean, I have Phoenix here, on the same OS, and Phoenix requires 9 whole seconds to load (I wrote this again a few weeks back, but newer version isn’t any faster for me)! K-Meleon loads in 2 seconds. I like that. It really feels lightweight.
1) it is only .4
2) the interface problems are due to Quartz…IE is even worse
3) K-Meleon blows…I hate the widgets :-p
I’ve been meaning to try K-Meleon since that recent update – now I have to if it loads in two seconds!!
How about Beonex Communicator ( http://www.beonex.com/communicator/ ) and Netscape 7? Or are they too similar to Mozilla?
These are just “Mozilla distributions”, not real, different, alternatives.
That’s all I have to say on Chimera
Anyone in their right mind is using OmniWeb on OS X
An interesting poll would be what would the most frequent responses to this statement be if it were allowed to stand alone. My guesses are:
1) OmniWeb isn’t standards compliant!
2) OmniWeb isn’t OPAN SAURCE which would make it inherently superior, right?
3) OmniWeb is too slow, just like OS X!
much nicer than vanilla mozy. and the pop-up blocking is more sophistocated….add to that that they maintain the menu structure of IE.
K-Meleon is fast because by default it preloads. I tried 0.7 and it’s not nearly as stable as Phoenix, which has only been around for a couple of months. I tried Phoenix back in the 0.1 days, and it was more stable than the current version of K-Meleon, which has been around for a lot longer.
The second BannerBlind or an equivalent shows up for either Galeon or Phoenix I’ll use it over Mozilla.
>K-Meleon is fast because by default it preloads.
This is not so. During installation you get to “check” if you want that feature or not, and I said “no” to it. I checked my processes too, there is nothing kmeleon-related in there. It just fast.
>I tried 0.7 and it’s not nearly as stable as Phoenix
It is incredibly stable for me, so far. Please file bug reports.
Phoenix is the fastest on my systems since it does not load up other libraries besides GTK+. Galeon always runs slowest when you don’t use GNOME as your environment.
BTW, what is exactly the point of the Salamander project, anyway? How is it different from the other guys?
one of the odd things and most inconsistent things about the browsers that I’ve used is the icon in the address bar showing up. IE use to…kinda 5.0- 5.5 and mozilla itself sometimes for a day will display an icon in bookmarks but with phoenix it shows up all over the place i.e. osnews.com’s icon represents Slashdot. And Slashdot com is http://www.norml.org/ at least on my machine and whole bunch of other sites. And they say A.I. can’t represent silly ironies
oh my knees my ironies
did I mention that I love Phoenix
marry it already why don’t ya
http://www.osnews.com/moderation.php?news_id=2054
dude that is the lamest atempt to get people to look at some damn pot site.
but its the truth
Konqueror + KMozilla. Easy to use if you should happen to find a page that doesnt render well with KHTML.
and this may be true of others; fast tabs in bookmarks. you’re able to open a folder all at once in a tabbed window!
short comings: some sites have long query stings and this seems to be limitation of mozilla.
>The second BannerBlind or an equivalent shows up
>for either Galeon or Phoenix I’ll use it over Mozilla.
Check out http://www.privoxy.org/“ Privoxy. It works great with any browser that allows use of proxies (both Galeon and Phoenix do). And if I’m understanding Bannerblind’s site correctly, Privoxy has an additional advantage – with BannerBlinds the banners are downloaded, then hidden, With Privoxy, you don’t download them in the first place, saving your bandwidth.
Russ
Sorry, I thought the link would display correctly. Here’s the plain old URL for Privoxy:
http://www.privoxy.org/
Russ
phoenix.
hands down the coolest mozilla rewrite with loads of potential.
kmeleon was a cool little “taste” but nothing worth writing home about.
i hope phoenix is a different story.
and when they come to their senses and offer debian packages it will get even better
Until recently I’ve just used Opera (paid for BTW). However in the last few months I’ve tried both Phoenix and the K-meleon betas.
I find Phoenix prettier but slower. It does have the advantage of being cross-platform. However I prefer the speed of K-meleon, the layers(aka tabbed browsing) and the fact that I can use my Opera hotlist. I therefore voted K-meleon.
I do feel it’s a slightly artificial vote though since each of these browsers is aiming at a slightly different niche and there’s room for all of them.
That’s right, it’s K-Meleon. So that’s not an option for many people around here. Phoenix is XUL-based, so obviously it takes longer to load, but it works relatively fast and has some neat features, plus it supports many of the cooler Mozilla extensions (gestures, type ahead etc). But I see no reason not to use Mozilla itself, the much criticized bloat (mail, chat etc.) doesn’t bother me because I don’t use it, and Mozilla will always be the most compatible with new extensions, and probably the most stable as well.
I tried Galeon, and it was too gimmicky for me. I would love Moz to have Konqueror-style location bar searches, though. Instead of having half a dozen different entryfields, you just type “gg:” or whatever before your search terms, plus you can get autocompletion for searches just like for URLs. When Konqi gets tabbed browsing I’ll consider switching. One thing that Moz also misses is image blocking by location, just blocking the server is not enough in many cases.
Oh, and contentEditable. That would be really neat for all those CMS users.
Although I find it loads a bit slowly, I do like Phoenix. One cool feature is that under Tools | Advanced | Javascript, you can select what Javascript is allowed to do. For example, you can allow cookies to be read but not created.
Does anyone know of any other browsers, Mozilla-based or not, that does this?
AFAIK AOL 8 uses IE, not Gecko.
I had performance problems with Phoenix that I did not have with IE.
Here in my office we live behind a firewall, and a proxy is required to reach the net.
The performance problem I had with Phoenix was that it took longer to connect to sites than with IE.
When I changed the proxy from its hostname to its ip-adress the performance went up to the same level as in IE.
I do not know why, in IE im using the proxys hostname.. perhaps Phoenix makes a dns lookup for the proxy more frequently than IE?
Konqueror now has tabbed browsing (in the latest release of KDE, not just CVS).
I like Galeon best out of all the Mozilla-based browsers I’ve used, but textareas and windows seem to lose focus far too often (and I was unable to set tab switchting to CTRL+TAB, which I like using in Opera, et al). Haven’t tried the Gnome 2.x version, however.
I am frequently using Galeon, Phoenix, K-meleon and Mozilla. My ratings would be:
1 & 2) Phoenix <–> Mozilla
3) Galeon
4) K-meleon
Ok, explanation:
I am using Phoenix and Mozilla in both Gentoo Linux and Win2000. The shared 1:st & 2:nd place is given because I use them both approximately as much of the time. They both work with Mouse gestures (a must) and renders pages as well (duh!). The thing that separates them is of course speed and stability. Phoenix is faster, but doesn’t feel quite as stable as Moz. Moz is on the other hand very stable (hasn’t crashed for me since 1.0.1), but not as fast. Both very good browsers.
Galeon is my third choise when running Linux. It is a very clever browser, and a pleasure to use, but it feels more instable than Phoenix. Speedwise, almost the same. I am really looking forward to a stable GTK2 version. If I now only could get mouse gestures working…
K-meleon is not too bad. 0.7 is fast, stable (so far) and feels very “responsive”. My mayor dislikes are the GUI and
options. It doesn’t feel like a “mozilla browser”, which of course might be a good thing for some people. Not me though. The other Mozilla projects is more configurable afai can tell. I have no success with installing gestures here either. (Not a XUL browser, right??)
Opera (NOT Mozilla based, though
is still my fav browser in windows. But it has to watch out. Phoenix is coming strong.
For the information of the pollsters, AOL 8 IS NOT gecko based but IE based. AOL posted an AOL 7+Gecko BETA during early summer but it was discontinued and never saw the light of the day.
Since you seem to be using mouse gestures a lot, how have you configured them? My problem is that if you use mouse gestures with the left mouse button, you can no longer properly select text. But if you use them with the right mouse button, the context menu pops up. Opera solves this by only showing the context menu when the button has been released, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to handle that properly.
Also, does IE have gestures? If not, I’d think this would be one of many advantages of Mozilla over IE, provided it is implemented properly.
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
Then you will have your “gg:” location bar searches in Mozilla/phoenix too. And more.
Yes, mouse gestures still work better in Opera than Mozilla (imho).
Using windows, right mouse gestures works pretty good in Moz too, the only problem is that it doesn’t work when waving gestures above text. (No context menu pops up here?)
In Linux (and Phoenix windows) I run all gestures with left mouse. There I have the same problem as you with the right button, context menus. No problem with selecting text though.
I could probably get Phoenix (windows) working with RMB too, only I won’t get a “prefernces” choise. I can’t configure it. It works well with LMB, so it’s ok I guess.
Thanks, that’s really neat! Too bad it doesn’t do autocomplete for the keywords like it does for URLs (this often helps me if I do the same search repeatedly). But perhaps there’s a hidden setting for that, too …
“Which of these browsers is not a cross-platform browser?
That’s right, it’s K-Meleon. So that’s not an option for many people around here.”
More of an option than Chimera or Galeon, neither of which are cross-platform either.
they are all nice but Phoenix wins for it’s install base.. they are really trying to cover all platforms. That is important
Galeon is not a stand-alone browser, therefore it doesn’t qualify.
I prefer Chimera. Then Phoenix on a Unix platform, of course. Windows doesn’t count because it is not a “stand-alone” OS. It depends too much on the stupidity of its users.
Galeon is available for FreeBSD, and I would be surprised if it isn’t portable to OS X as well. You see, if you’re dealing with open platforms like POSIX + open source toolkits, portability is almost inevitable. Windows, on the other hand, is a one way street: Witness the problems with porting existing large Windows apps to Linux. That’s how MS is protecting its monopoly. Chimera is for OS X, which is not a fully open platform.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/applications/aol/
OS X’s version is mozy based…for some damn reason, AOL is being a pussy on the windows platform.
I am a Linux nutcase according to the other techs here at the consulting firm I work for. I am always trying to convince them to try another browser whenever they have problems with IE, popups, etc. but they never seem to like the alternatives. When one of the techs was having a problem with IE I installed the Phoenix Xft build from ragweed.net for him and now everyone in the office is hooked on it. When this matures a little more I think it will be a browser of choice for most Linux users, and a potential IE killer on the Win32 platform.
Under Fink, that is, Darwin, I use Galeon, Phoenix, Moz, etc., as well as KDE 3.xxx and Gnome and WM, and Xfce and…., and…… Chimera, Omni, iCab, via XFree rootless. And all that on an iBook. The only Browser I dumped from OS X was IE, of course. If I really needed IE, I’d just have my brain removed. Then I’d also buy Office….., and a Winmodem…., and XP…… and a M$ fanclub membership.
What does our favorite browser have to do with Operating Systems, other than you must have an OS to run a browser?
Compared to more timely OS-related news, such as the fact that Europe’s spending like $250k (euros) to evaluate how to switch to Open Source OS’s like Linux, this seems much more like something I’d expect to see on Slashdot or Tucows.
For that matter, regardless of what we all vote for IE’s still holding around 98% of the browser market. So while there may be half a dozen 3rd party browsers based off the Mozilla engine, these browsers are still accounting for less than 2% of the market share. Probably more like less than 1% once you figure that Mozilla and Netscape themselves are accounting for the bulk of people who’ve chose to go with something other than IE.
If you’re going to go with a browser question, the better question might be “Which non-IE browser renders the most pages most accurately?” since there’s so many pages coded specifically for IE. Why there’s no “IE compatability” plugins or addons for these browsers is beyond me. It would certainly speed acceptance if you could have your 100% compliant browser utilise some code to make it “IE compatible” as an option.
My 2 bits…
Okay, am I the only one here that has assumed for, oh, ever (?) that K-Meleon was a native KDE app? I thought someone was playing a practical joke when reading the System Requirements on their webpage.
I’ve gotten used to the K*** and G*** from the KDE and Gnome camps when naming software. Has it gotten so bad though that windows developers are starting to attach random ‘K’s and ‘G’s to the front of their software titles as well?
Mr. Cancelled wrote:
> What does our favorite browser have to do with Operating
> Systems, other than you must have an OS to run a browser?
I think I heard about some big court case involving web browser/OS integration. Anyone know what happened with that?
> 1) OmniWeb isn’t standards compliant!
Bingo. Worse yet, there is little progress and little hope there (even less than Windows IE, which is saying a good deal). This would not normally be a problem except that as the web moves away from browser-specific hacks to CSS and as OmniWeb CSS support falls further and further behind web sites will look more and more the same in Lynx and OmniWeb. Which is a personal decision, of course; some would view this as a bonus to OmniWeb.
Wow, K-Meleon is fast! Some complained of the interface. There is nothing striking about it (besides its simplicity), but it is an acceptable interface.
I just installed Phoenix and I noticed something strange. Whenever I have Phoenix open and I try to start Mozilla (this is in RH 8), a new Phoenix window opens instead. The button I’m using (to try to start Mozilla) is the actually executing (according to properties) htmlview %u. Mozilla opens normally if Phoenix is not running. Frankly this is quite annoying. How/Why is this happening?
The button I’m using (to try to start Mozilla) is the actually executing (according to properties) htmlview %u. Mozilla opens normally if Phoenix is not running. Frankly this is quite annoying. How/Why is this happening?
My best guess is that htmlview is some kind of standard app (MIME type?) for opening html. I guess Mozilla and phoenix shares the same “namespace” when running, which makes your OS go: “Hey! Mozilla (which in your case is Phoenix) is allready running, I’ll just open a new window!”.
Try changing “htmlview %u” to “mozilla” the path to your Mozilla bin. It might even work.
Hint:
bash> updatedb
bash> locate mozilla
I know its not mozilla, but I wonder how phoenix compares to crazybrowser.
Well Galeon 1.3 Alpha really blows goats. GRRRR >:-(
Sure it looks prettier but they killed half the options that were previously avaliable in Galeon 1.2.6 and it takes longer to load. A quick search through the Gnome 2 panel shows that they’re not there or are present in a gimpified form (hmmm I can only set a http proxy?). Perhaps I’m missing something? Will the options return in the final version on Galeon 2? Or is this a perminate dumbing down of the browser to make it complient for those that can’t handle more then a total of 10 options (kind of like what happened to Sawfish)?
What options are you actually missing in galeon2
Always save Session at exit, pretty much all the Bookmark and History options (Autocompletion, History Expiration, Tab Completion Control, etc), the tab control isn’t nearly as detailed, most of the Windowing and Dock controls, Toolbar Control has been completely removed, mouse control has been removed, download manager control has been removed (I liked this :-(), proxy control has been moved and gimpified, No apparent MIME control from within the browser itself (I assume this has been moved to the Gnome Control Center as well).
This is from memory – rebuilding backup system for glibc-2.2.5 at the moment
>>>Always save Session at exit,
And this is useful how?
>>>pretty much all the Bookmark and History options (Autocompletion, History Expiration, Tab Completion Control, etc),the tab control isn’t nearly as detailed, most of the Windowing and Dock controls,
Toolbar Control has been completely removed<<<<
edit->toolbar editor
>>>, mouse control has been removed, download manager control has been removed (I liked this :-(), proxy control has been moved and gimpified,
No apparent MIME control from within the browser itself (I assume this has been moved to the Gnome Control Center as well).<<<<
same place as it always was, in file types
>>>Always save Session at exit,
And this is useful how?
To continue browsing where I left off last time with several browsers. I do this all the time. I’ll have oh 3 browser ons 3 different desktops each doing different things in their tabs (oh my what an abuse of resources heh heh :-). Show Last Page in the new galeon definately does not work.
Just based on this I assume Galeon no longer has the option to restore sessions for when it crashes?
>>>edit->toolbar editor
Oh geez my bad. Yeah its there. Watered down tho.
Missing:
Bookmarks
Clear Location
Find
Find Entry
History
Links
New
Print
Text/Icon control has been removed. I assume if you want to remove your icons you have to it for all Gnome apps?
Same goes for themes?
>>same place as it always was, in file types
File Types? File Types and Programs in the Gnome Control Panel? No File Types provided by this version of Galeon (1.3).
This leaves:
Bookmark and History options (Autocompletion, History Expiration, Tab Completion Control, etc),the tab control (isn’t nearly as detailed), most of the Windowing and Dock controls, mouse control, download manager control, proxy control (ssl, ftp, socks).
This poll is really something in itself – can you imagine two years ago having a poll of which gecko based browsers you liked best? It’s amazing what has happened! A couple of years ago, Mozilla was slowly but surely trudging along in development and AOL was putting out pitiful previews of Netscape 6 out of desperation. Now look – we have Galeon, Phoenix, K-Meleon and Chimera all capable of becoming tremendous browsers. And Opera is re-writing from scratch. Computing is exciting again, there is so much good stuff happening!