Phoenix is a browser built on top of a large chunk of the Mozilla source code. Mozilla is the open source browser development project that Netscape v6.x and later (now at some v7.x rev) is made from. Mozilla without the Netcape/AOL "enhancements" is available for download. Mozilla is my own favorite browser and at the moment I'm using the 2002110610 nightly build.

If you want to download and install the newest release version of Mozilla then go here for Mozilla Release builds and choose the highest version number directory. Then choose what looks like it is for your operating system (win32 is for all of Win98, WinME, NT, Win2k, Win XP). At the moment as I type this the newest Mozilla is v1.2b. But v1.2 will be out any week now.

If you want to be more cutting edge and install the latest Mozilla nightly build then go here for Mozilla nightly builds and again choose what looks like it is for your operating system.

But this post is really about Phoenix. Phoenix is a project to build a better front-end on the Mozilla page rendering source code. To find out where to download it and how to install it read the Phoenix release notes at this page. It seems pretty stable to me after a couple of hours of beating on it with lots of page visits.

Phoenix has a nice facility for blocking pop-up ads. It lets you control by URL site which sites can do pop-ups.

For another browser built on top of the Mozilla source code you can also try K-Meleon which is also built using a lot of the Mozilla source code but with yet another different UI. I haven't tried K-Meleon yet but they just released their v0.7 rev and it is built on top of the Mozilla v1.2b source code base.

For Mac users there is a different project to use the Mozilla Gecko source code to build a better browser. You can download Chimera here.

Update: I've been running Phoenix v0.4 continuously for two days now with many pages visited without any crashes, It seems pretty solid. My complaints about it: It doesn't have the left side panel view of bookmarks (at least not that I can find) that IE, Mozilla, and Opera have. It just has the old Netscape v4.x pop-down style. Also, filing a bookmark when the whole bookmark folder tree becomes visible on the pop-down combo list is not easy. It does have a nice feature for controlling pop-up ads though.