A lot of people seem to be missing the point of Phoenix, as evidenced by the responses on Mozilla News and MozillaZine. Let me emphasize something here: if you think Mozilla's current UI is acceptable, then you are clearly not the target audience for Phoenix.
Here is a quiz to test whether or not Phoenix is the right browser for you.
Why?
A layered approach scales better. You can then have a browser that can become as complex as you want to make it, but the choice is left in your hands. The geek features aren't inflicted on you by default.
Finally, remember that Phoenix's UI is not controlled by Netscape. This is an opportunity for some of the core Mozilla Navigator developers to build the browser that they have always wanted to build, without having to compromise the user interface to satisfy the various conflicting pressures exerted by factions within Netscape.
Bug 22056 has to do with enabling different toolbar modes. It's a pretty basic browser feature that has been missing from Navigator for years. Even simplified browsers like Chimera have this feature. Neil did some excellent work in 22056 and his code finally landed. It naturally spiked startup time and window time slightly, and so it ended up being backed out because of Mozilla's no tolerance policy for regressions.
While this "line in the sand" policy is in many ways a good one, I feel like it misses the point. There is a natural tendency when designing applications to add features in every new version of the software. Only rarely do you see features removed. With each passing version, you get more and more bloated, relying on faster machines and more memory to save the day. Who cares if the user interface is now full of 3000 menu items? You still support every last feature since version 1.0, so no customers can possibly be dissatisfied!
You can really only cram so many features into a product before its size requirements and performance requirements have to change. This is an obvious rule. It's like you start with an empty elevator that says "Capacity: 10 people." The elevator stops at the first floor (version 1.0) and a bunch of people (features) get on. Continuing on its journey, the elevator stops at the second floor, and still more people get on. The elevator is now full, and it continues to the third floor (version 3.0). Unfortunately the elevator is full, but there are a bunch of people waiting at the third floor to get on. Some of them squeeze in anyway, past the fat person from the first floor (the Mozilla sidebar feature) who is taking up enough space for 3 people. Everyone wishes he'd get off at the third floor or even the fourth floor, but he doesn't. Someone (the Mozilla wallet feature) from the second floor cuts one on the way to the third floor, so he's useless, and everyone wishes he'd get off too. He doesn't though. Nobody does. People keep piling in at floor after floor, until eventually the elevator support cable snaps and everybody dies.
We need to forcibly eject people from the elevator. Remove the features that nobody wants and replace them with the features that matter. Cull out the features that didn't work in Mozilla 1.0 and make sure they aren't there in Mozilla 2.0. Make more of the features optional plugins so that geeks who want some of the more obscure features (and that have powerhouse machines) can go download them on their own. Only if we actively fight the trend towards bloat will we finally produce an awesome Mozilla browser.
I just finished reading an article about Mozilla for Salon.com. This excerpt was rather amusing.
It is a good question, because in almost every way, Mozilla is a better browser than Navigator. For example, Netscape's best new feature, tabbed browsing -- which lets you have several Web pages open in the same browser window, and allows you to bookmark all the pages under one name -- was in Mozilla many months ago, and the Mozilla project that created it (called MultiZilla) already has an improved version available. When asked about this, Yecies, of Netscape, said, "That's true, but the engineer who's working on it [for Mozilla] is a Netscape employee. It was always done with the intention of fostering general browsing usability for Netscape."
Yes, ok, I suppose that's true if by "Netscape employee" you really meant "Apple employee." and by "always done with the intention of fostering general browsing usability for Netscape" you meant "was done in a weekend for Mozilla because I thought MultiZilla was cool."
Here's how the whole tabbed browsing thing happened. One night I finally downloaded an extension called MultiZilla (go check it out on mozdev.org. I was particularly impressed with a feature contained in MultiZilla called tabbed browsing. I started doing research and discovered NetCaptor, a tabbed browser that embedded WinIE.
MultiZilla was cool but at the time suffered from two fundamental flaws that prevented the code from being incorporated into the Mozilla tree. The first was a UI flaw, namely that at the time it had ripped off NetCaptor down to the last context menu item. The GUI was similar enough that there would have been definite concerns about so obviously copying some of NetCaptor's more obscure capabilities (like sticky names and tab locking). The second concern was that the tab behavior wasn't encapsulated cleanly into a widget.
I produced a simplified version of tabbed browsing on my own time (did it in a weekend) that removed some of the geekier NetCaptor features and that encapsulated the tab behavior so that the changes to other Navigator files would be minimal. Once I established that it didn't degrade performance in the single tab case, I checked it in as an experiment.
The response was overwhelming, as were the bugs that started being filed. So much so that at first I wanted to back tabbed browsing out of the tree. I was overruled by Mozilla, which turned out to be a good thing for all I think. :) Even with all the excitement and hoopla surrounding the advent of tabbed browsing on the engineering side (and in the Mozilla community), Netscape still didn't get it. Netscape marketing prioritized all sorts of useless work that nobody had even started above tabbed browsing in their marketing document. They continued to do so for months, simply not getting it. It was this odd curiosity that one of their engineers had checked in, and they didn't know what to make of it.
Only after the press raved about it did Netscape really jump on board. I'm sure Netscape is doing the same thing now with popup blocking. Can't you just see it now? We'll have a Popup Manager, and a Manager to manage the Popup Manager, and twenty-seven preferences for fine-grained control of all aspects of popups.
Can you believe how disfunctional Netscape is? When their engineers say "you should do this" or "you should do that", they get completely ignored (or blown off), but when CNet says "We didn't like this, or we didn't like that.", Netscape scurries to meet their demands. That is simply pathetic.
Blake blogs about how mpt wants Mozilla to look just like MSIE. I have to admit, the evidence is pretty compelling. I recall someone asking me, "Do you really agree with mpt's Top 10 list? He's quoted you at the top of the list!"
Do I agree that those ten items mpt mentions are the top ten problems? Of course not. No two people will have the same top ten problems. Also keep in mind that mpt and I can agree that something is a problem without necessarily agreeing on the solution to the problem. Maybe we have different ideas regarding how to solve a particular issue, but we at least both believe it is an issue that needs to be addressed. That's something.
To cover the list specifically: