Last Updated on April 14, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
I think I have a new most favoritest Web browser of all time for Windows. Or I will soon.
Phoenix is Mozilla on a diet. The idea is to cut out all the stuff not related strictly to Web browsing in order to make it as small and fast as possible.
Early releases were slightly faster than Mozilla. But the Mozilla feature I use most was missing: The ability to right-click on an image and select “Block images from this server.” It’s a good way to block objectionable content, be it an especially annoying ad (though most ads are tolerable if I keep animation turned off, I’ve found) or anything else I don’t want to look at.
Version 0.3 brought that feature back and nearly halved the memory consumption. It’s still not as slim and fast as Galeon on Linux, but it’s getting there. The last time I tried using a Mozilla theme to change its appearance (I like the TinyMozilla theme because it lets me use my screen space to display Web pages at the expense of big buttons–since I don’t need big buttons, that’s a good thing) I crashed it. But I can live without my fave theme for a while.
The nice thing is we’ve got a reasonable-sized Web browser that incorporates popup blocking without having to run additional programs. You can easily chew up 4, 8, 12 megs of RAM by keeping a popup blocker running. That’s the amount of memory a Web browser all by itself should be using.
Check it out. It’ll keep getting smaller, faster, better.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Ah, very nice. And some of the plugins (like mouse gestures!) work as well 🙂
I think the tab bar is a bit too big (height-wise), but that is my biggest gripe at this point. I can live with this, at least for now…