Phoenix vs Opera

Posted: September 3rd, 2003 | Author: telcor | Filed under: Software |

The last few months I’ve used Phoenix as my main browser at work. Originally I used Mozilla, but made the switch because I wanted something ‘light-weight’. However, what I found was rather surprising. Before continuing, keep in mind that my work computer is an older Dell PIII-900 Mhz w/ 384 MB RAM running Windows 98 SE. Mozilla is great, especially the tools it has for web developers (DOM Viewer, Javascript console, Javascript Debugger, etc).

The last few months I’ve used Phoenix as my main browser at work. Originally I used Mozilla, but made the switch because I wanted something ‘light-weight’. However, what I found was rather surprising. Before continuing, keep in mind that my work computer is an older Dell PIII-900 Mhz w/ 384 MB RAM running Windows 98 SE. Mozilla is great, especially the tools it has for web developers (DOM Viewer, Javascript console, Javascript Debugger, etc).

My typical browsing pattern is to have at least 5 tabs open in my browser. This would cause Windows Resources to plummet dramatically. A typical work day is as follows:

  • Start computer, login to Domain
  • Start Putty
  • Start jEdit
  • Start Mozilla
  • Open 5 tabs in Mozilla
  • Work for 10 hours
  • Shut everything down

After everything is open, Windows System Resources will be around 65%. By the end of the day it would drop to ~10% or even lower, I’ve seen as low as 1%. Not fun. Programs stop responding. No new programs can run. Icons disappear. Printing capabilities die. The problems seem endless, and very irritating. Thus, I set forth to figure out what caused this. After serveral days of testing, using different programs, different tasks, I found one thing: Mozilla leaks resources like a bowl without a bottom!

Try Phoenix I thought. Perhaps Mozilla’s problems are due to its inclusion of everything. After 3 months solid use of Phoenix (including releases and nightly builds) the conclusion is Phoenix does the same thing. This makes both Mozilla and Phoenix unusable as my web browser. It also means I cannot and will not recommend it to anyone that still uses 98,95 and Millenium versions of Windows. On 2000 and XP they do not exhibit this behavior.

Where does Opera fit into this? It runs just fine on my Windows 98 machine, with more features than either Mozilla or Phoenix and quicker. The only disadvantage is it’s not quite up to par standards-wise. But it is quickly gaining ground there.

The conclusion then: Opera is now my main (development) browser on Windows 9x/ME

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