What's New

A few of the features new to this release include:

* Improvements to pop-up blocking

It is now easier to add sites to the pop-up whitelist and some bugs in the 0.3 whitelisting display have been fixed. You can add sites to the whitelist by clicking on the "i" icon in the lower left of the browser window for sites with blocked pop-ups or you can add sites in the pop-up preferences panel.
* Improvements to toolbar customization

It is now possible to customize the menubar in addition to the navigation and bookmark toolbars. This makes it possible to add all of your items to a single toolbar freeing up valuable web page real estate.
* Improvements to tabbed browsing and shortcut keys

Phoenix developers have been working to improve basic user tasks like opening links and loading addresses. A few things that you will find new and improved in 0.4 are: ctrl+[1-0] will switch between your first 10 tabs. ctrl+click opens a link in a new background tab (you can set that in preferences to default to a foreground tab) and ctrl+shift+click will toggle the forground/background preference. shift+click opens a link in a new window and alt+click saves link.
* Type ahead find returns

Type ahead find allows a user to start typing to navigate directly to a link containing that text. To find text that is not linked just preface your typing with a / character.
* Addressbar gets smarter

alt+d now focuses the address field. Typing a search term (or terms) in the addressbar and hitting enter will now take you directly to the top hit on Google rather than the Google search results page and ctrl+enter in the address field adds a www. and .com to your address.
* Bug fixes

Some people seem concerned that Phoenix developers are just adding feature after feature without fixing bugs. While it's true that through 0.4 they've been doing a lot of heavy lifting, redesign and feature work, the developers are also wrapping up that big feature push and moving into more of a cleanup and bugfix mode.
* Themes!

Thanks to several theme authors and chris neale at mozdev.org you can now get themes for Phoenix. As with any 3rd party add-ons, please don't report bugs with themes to Phoenix. Report your problems (and your praise) to the theme developers or the Phoenix Skins forum. Themes available at the time of the 0.4 release include Bluestreak, Luna, Orbit 3+1, Pinball, and Qute.

And don't forget, too, that as Phoenix progresses, bug fixing continues on SeaMonkey (the Mozilla browser application suite) -- and we're picking up most of those fixes. For example, 0.4 contains fixes for bug 12274 (prefetch LINK tag documents), bug 173354 (margins are not computed correctly when they are set to % values), and many others.

And there's more to come. The Phoenix team is already working on 0.5, targeted for November, in which they plan to continue with lots of bug fixing and polish.
10,186 views 13 replies
Reply #1 Top
Hurray hurray hurray! Phoenix is rapidly becoming my favourite browser. It's still missing some thing in the UI that Mozilla does have (and I need), but it's shaping up great.
Reply #3 Top
And the install notes have 'DRAFT' written all over them

Guess its close, but not ready for download this second
Reply #4 Top
A couple of the better skins for Phoenix at mozdev

Orbit 3+1 http://themes.mozdev.org/themes/orbit.html

Pinball http://themes.mozdev.org/themes/pinball.html
Reply #6 Top
I think he meant mozilla lite in the sense that it uses gecko and doesn't have all the additional stuff (mail, news, etc.). I think calling it Mozilla lite is a good way to let people know it's something based off of Mozilla. I posted about Mozilla 0.3 being released and a couple of comments were left wondering what it was. If I saw 'Mozilla lite' next to the phoenix name it would make a little more sense for me if I hadn't heard of it before. There's a good chance that people have heard of Mozilla in the last 3 years, but they may not have heard of Phoenix in the last 2 months.

Can't wait for this to be released ...
Reply #7 Top
three_4me explained my exact reasons for calling it Mozilla lite.

As for the 0.4, I posted the news before I noticed that for some odd reason the page was up but the download wasn't.
Reply #8 Top
PS I didn't know about the "DRAFT" background on the page as I have background images disabled.
Reply #9 Top
The downloadable file is now up
Windows: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/releases/0.4/phoenix-0.4-win32.zip
Linux: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/releases/0.4/phoenix-0.4-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Reply #10 Top
thanks for keeping on top of this Jobeleca, running it now as I type this, excellent stuff.
Reply #11 Top
How much better is it from the previous version? I last used .2 and it had too many rough spots for me to use regularly.
Reply #12 Top
I would download tonight, but my connection can't seem to make up it's mind whether to be on or of.