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The nicest thing I can say about FF is that it opened the floodgates, before Firefox/Phoenix/Mozilla Suite you had crappy IE, broken NS, and adware Opera.

Today there is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (hates the new version, went back to using presto) and on the gecko side there is PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and the QT framework...quite nice actually and of course Safari if you are into Apple.

I was using FF before it was called Firefox, and the Suite before that and....yeah, its just not very nice now. The UI feels like a bad Chrome ripoff and it still has "senior moments" where the entire UI can just "hang" for several seconds, which when you have 8 fricking cores and 16GB of RAM? is just inexcusable. I don't know what went wrong with Moz, but for the past few years they seem to have gone out of their way to just ruin the browser, do they no longer care? Has the UI team been taken over by Google? All I know is If I wanted Chrome I'd use Chrome and the current FF feels like a really bad Chrome knockoff, its the "Hipad" that looks kinda sorta like the real thing but once you use it? Yeah its just a knock off.

Luckily this isn't the bad old days where it was just IE and netscape, today you DO have options! There is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (boy is he still pissed they quit using presto) and on the gecko side there is Firefox, PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and QT.

Luckily this isn't the bad old days where it was just IE and netscape, today you DO have options! There is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (boy is he still pissed they quit using presto) and on the gecko side there is Firefox, PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and the QT framework...quite nice actually and of course Safari if you are into Apple. There is one other....what was it? Oh yeah the big blue E thing. ;-)

So if you don't like the direction Google is going? Don't use their products. After they started getting nasty with the TOS and trying to ram G+ down our throats I dropped Google like a bad habit, I set up a throwaway Gmail I never use just for my Android phone (so they can't tie my desktop and mobile together) and use my main Gmail for a spam dump, switched to Bing for my search and Yahoo for my mail so no one company has access too all my online data and ya know what? couldn't be happier. What DOES really piss me off about Google is how they have become a drive by spammer, you have no idea how many Chrome "infections" I've had to clean off of customers PCs because some "freeware" had Chrome tied into it. We used to get seriously pissed at how McCrappee and Horton used to dump their stupid scanners onto us with freeware so why isn't everyone mad at how Google is spamming Chrome? An unwanted install that takes over defaults...hmmm...if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck?

Well the great thing about today is you don't HAVE to take Moz's shit, you DO have plenty of choices.

I use Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon, but if you don't like those there is Comodo IceDragon, Waterfox, SWIron, hell if you don't want to use anything Chromium or Gecko based there is QTWeb which is webkit and QT. Cross platform and works pretty nice IMHO, works great from a flash too. And if your machine is needing an ultra light browser or which will run on really old Windows versions there is always Kmeleon which by following their docs and adding a couple of files can run on Win98 if you need it to and which flies on anything newer.

So as you can see you DO have more choices, hell I left off plenty of others like Safari and Opera and Chrome but I figured it would be better to list some you may not have tried. Give 'em a go, I bet you'll find one you like. Oh and FYI but nearly all the above? MUCH more conservative when it comes to UI changes. I've been on Dragon since V4 (currently on V31) and the only UI change of note was moving the option button from the right edge to the left. Oh and the reason I use Pale Moon over ICeDragon? I like its UI better and the way its built with the browser targeted at newer CPU features. Nice thing about choice, I can go for the browser with the little things I like..

No prob on the formatting, and I'm glad that Linux works for you, made me want to pull my damned hair out. Since you are on Linux you might want to try QTWeb which is what I used when I was cross platform, built in adblock and privacy mode as well as Flash support, its nice.

As for Infinite it sounds like it'll be my cup o' tea, but first I have to pick up Borderlands II (waiting for them to get finished putting out DLC and lvl cap boosts) because that is the first time since Bioshock I've had the AI give me a really good fight. First time I ran into a large Skag nest and saw the small ones hitting my front and sides while the big guys ran off I thought "Where are they going? Nooo, you don't think?" and sure enough I turned around just in time to get a 3D up close view of a giant Skag mouth about to use my head like a giant Pez dispenser. My youngest HATES first person shooters but after watching me play it 5 minutes he was like "You know, that really looks like fun" and now he is hooked.

No splicers and Little Sisters kinda sucks though, those are just so iconic. BTW if you haven't heard Little Sister by Miracle of Sound check it out, why they don't hire this guy to write the themes for some of the games is beyond me. His songs for Borderlands and Left For Dead as especially catchy, I have caught my oldest singing them into his mike as we are playing MP, I warn you they are catchy and stick in your head!

That is like saying "You getting bad gas mileage in your truck isn't correct, because my bass boat gets GREAT mileage" as the Linux variant has VERY little in common with the Windows version, which considering that Windows still have over 85% of the market while Linux has 1.05%? NOT a good thing, not good at all.

But as I said see for yourself, take ANY version of Windows (I tried it on WinXP and 7) and place any of the free taskbar CPU meters in the system and watch. if its a system with a bunch of course simply set affinity to 1 core which will, while not giving you a perfect simulation, will get you closer to a low power system, which are still singles and duals, not hexas and octos.

I've tried this little experiment, in no particular order, simply listing what's in the shop I've tried it on, socket 754 Sempron and Athlon, Socket 775 P4 and Celeron, Brazos C50 and E350 APUs, and AMD Phenom I and Phenom II multicores and in every single one Firefox sucked MORE CPU than Chrome or Opera.

BTW friend if you are on Arch, mind a little advice? Try QTWeb which not only has nice features and frankly stomps FF when it comes to CPU usage but is also 100% cross platform, hell its even portable. Runs on all flavors of Windows, BSD, OSX, and Linux.

Well part of your problem is the browsers friend, safari bites, Chrome has too much phone home crap, and FF is a memory piggy. If you want to keep gecko I'd suggest replacing it with Pale Moon which is optimized for more current CPUs such as yours, Chrome should be replaced with Comodo Dragon and for webkit I'd go with QTWeb which has built in ABP, but on the first two first thing I'd do is install ABP, as i bet half your problem is those damned bloated ass web ads slowing you down.

Because I can tell you that with that ancient Sempron I can get up to 14 or 15 tabs in Dragon or QTWeb without any real dragging, around 9 for Pale Moon, whereas FF would start sucking at barely 6. On my home machine which i'm on now, which is an AMD Phenom II X6 with 8Gb of RAM frankly I can pile on the tabs for as long as i want in Dragon or QTWeb, again without any real stutter or jerking.

You just have to remember you can take the fastest machine on the planet and pile on those damned blinking flashing web ads and make it feel like a 486 running Win98, the code they use for those things are just bloated as hell. Not to mention I can tell you that infected ads are probably the number 2 source of infected PCs, just under the "ZOMFG U got teh viruz! Quick run this Security tool to clean it ZOMFG!" infections.

While this is true i think the larger point is that their "big innovations" are just "me too!" copies of other's work.

What pisses me off is its pretty damned obvious that like a lot of FOSS projects the developers at Mozilla frankly don't give a shit what the users think. I don't know if its because its free software, if they think that gives them the right to just crap on the users, if its just bad attitudes or what, but I have noticed a lot of projects adopting this "We are going THIS way, get on board or go fuck yourself" attitude and it stinks. I think the numbers speak for themselves, FF was growing until they became all about the bling bling and ignoring the users and its been dropping steadily since.

Of course the sad part is this isn't a new thing for the Moz devs, it just wasn't as bad as it is now. Anybody remember how they swore up and down the memory leaks were all in the users heads, right up until they put out the release that basically said "Oh and we fixed the memory issues!"...wait, what? the memory issues you told us didn't exist, THOSE memory issues? And anybody whose taken a look at their roadmap lately...ugh...its fricking metro UI candy and appstores, yep, that's what we need, more candy coating and fricking appstores.

That is why I suggest those that don't want to go where Moz is heading to try Pale Moon if you wish to keep your FF extensions, as they have forked it as of V12 so they won't be going for the glossy bling bling of future FF, or if you're not wedded to FF extensions maybe try QTWeb which has support for flash and ABP and runs on all the major OSes, Linux, BSD, OSX, and Windows.

Because as someone who was a long time FF user and advocate I just don't like where Mozilla is going anymore. they used to seem to care about just making the best FF they could, but then Chrome came out and they seem to have lost their damned minds. But luckily for us there is a wealth of choices now, not only those above but opera, Safari, Chromium,Comodo Dragon which is becoming more and more my go to browser, just so many choices. Maybe if enough people choose something else Mozilla will start listening to their users again. I know its a long shot but I can dream, can't I?

Thanks and I too don't use either FF or Chrome. For my customers I offer a choice of Pale Moon which has forked away from Firefox specifically because they did not want to go with the whole metro UI change or Comodo Dragon which is what i personally use as its based on Chromium but with some nice extra security features and no phoning home to Google. Finally for those that need cross platform I would highly recommend QTWeb which runs on Linux, Apple,BSD or Windows, is fully portable so you can just run it on a flash, and has Flash support and Adblock.

But I was a BIG supporter of Mozilla, both when FF was still in beta and the Moz Suite before that, but frankly their devs might as well change the opening screen to someone giving the finger as that seems to be their attitude as of late. You would think seeing how their numbers climbed right up through FF V4 and then started nosediving and never recovered they would get the hint that the users don't like the current direction, but frankly they don't seem to give a shit. This is sad as FF had ONE killer feature, the same one that caused some of my customers to go to Seamonkey or Pale Moon rather than give up the Gecko engine, and that is the awesome extension framework. if they would quit pissing on the users with the UI and do something about the CPU spiking I would go running back to FF in a heartbeat but its pretty obvious from their roadmap that the ONLY users they want are those on Windows 8 using appstores and that just ain't me. So long FF and thanks for all the fish.

Which is why I don't understand why anyone would care. Gecko is leaky and kinda buggy folks and it isn't like there aren't other nice browsers that are cross platform.

Here is one you may not of heard of but is quite nice and frankly i don't understand why more aren't using it...QTweb. Its sleek, elegant, FOSS, cross platform, has Adblock and plugin support, its even portable and runs great from a flash.

Frankly seeing some of the "Metro-ifed' mockups for the future roadmap doesn't give me much confidence in the future of Moz anyway. their numbers have been falling pretty consistently and its pretty obvious they aren't gonna listen to the users, so why care? let 'em go.

Obvious bullshit is obvious. I take it you've never actually TRIED dragon because there ain't jack shit "hard coded', not the DNS or anything else. not only can you simply uncheck a box at install (or if you are placing it as a standalone or thumbdrive install) but at ANY time turning off the DNS is as easy as options>under the hood> uncheck the little box. Rockmelt is just a Chromium ripoff of Flock which also bombed hard, its not like one needs a special browser to visit FB. Oh if you like that sort of thing there is the option to have a FB button in dragon but again like everything else its one checkbox away from going bye bye.

Now as for SWIron its okay but personally if i wanted a standalone and wasn't gonna use Comodo i'd use QTWeb as its Webkit engine seems to play nicer with thumbdrives and it has tons of privacy features which help to leave no traces or read/write to the stick a lot. Chrome just has too much phone home for my taste, if i want to let Google have my search that's one thing but they shouldn't get squat when i'm using Yahoo.

Personally though i frankly don't see why you're bitching, never before have we had so many GOOD browsers to choose from, we literally have a feast of choices for our browsing. We have Gecko, webkit, chromium, presto and trident, and variations galore to fit every little niche. I like Dragon, my mom likes Seamonkey, my oldest has been a die hard Opera user for years, my youngest was FF for ages but decided that he liked the speed of the Dragon better, on my netbook I have a Webkit based in expressgate and QTWeb and dragon, man having choices is good, having all these free browsers that run well is good. So instead of bitching why don't you actually try the ones on TFA? They're free and who knows, you might find yourself a new browser.

For those that would like a nice cross platform browser and don't mind going off the beaten path a bit, may i make a suggestion? try QTWeb which is just what you think it is, a browser made with the QT framework and Webkit rendering engine. It works in Windows, OSX, and Linux, runs quite well from a thumbstick and is pretty nice and zippy.

I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic. On the older AMD CPUs like my Sempron nettop FF slams the CPU to the point it is unsuitable for purpose yet both Dragon and QTWeb give the 1.8GHz Sempron new life and make it an excellent low power nettop. if I would have stayed with FF I'd have had to shitcan the box and built something more powerful which when we are talking about a fricking web browser is pretty crazy.

To the FF devs, what did you do when you switched from 3.0.x to later versions? Because whatever you did you need to undo it. 3.0.x was just fine on any AMD or Intel chip, the 3.5 and 3.6 branches were okay but not great with the spiking starting, and 4 and everything after was just shite on a crusty roll. The latest version is a little better but when you are talking about going from a 100% CPU spike for nearly 2 minutes to a 98% CPU spike for a minute that still isn't really good and makes the machine unusable until FF quits slamming the chip. Now when i can take the exact same system and under Dragon be using a good 40% less CPU, or get better performance from QTWeb when its on a thumbstick than I do from your browser when its natively installed? then to steal a line from an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I recommend Dragon and QTWeb and install both on new builds whereas I used to install FF before doing anything else. FF is just too power hungry and the performance simply isn't there which i think is a damned shame, it was truly a great browser before all this craziness.

For those that like QT, or just want a really cool browser that runs on a thumbstick, runs on Win98-Win 7, as well as Linux and Mac might I suggest QTWeb which is what you get when you combine QT and Webkit? I keep it on my thumbstick as my "go to" browser and its damned nice, QT makes excellent GUIs and of course Webkit is a damned fast engine.

As for TFA even though I'm primarily a Windows guy let me be the first to say thanks QT developers, your framework is one of the nicer ones out there and every program I've used based on QT has been a pleasant experience. You guys do top notch work and I for one am appreciative.

Of course if you'd like something off the beaten path that support Windows from 98-7 AND Linux AND OSX i'd suggest QTWeb which is completely portable and based on the QT framework and Webkit. Runs nice, plenty of nice features, sweet little browser and runs great from a thumbstick.

As for TFA? Couldn't happen to a more arrogant user unfriendly company. I used Firefox before it was even called Firefox and the Suite before that but after version 3.0.x things started slowing quickly and by version 4 I found it completely unsuitable for purpose. i have to support everything from Atom single core netbooks to older P4 office boxes to the latest multicore and frankly FF runs like ass on anything less than a P4 3GHz with HT and in my own exp anything less than a multicore it struggles. On the 1.8GHz Sempron i use as a nettop in the shop i can surf, download, watch SD video....in Dragon. In the latest Firefox SD video is a slideshow, launching a new tab will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute and if that tab contains SD video it'll hang the entire OS so long you might as well go make a sandwich because the machine won't be doing anything else. With Dragon I can have a half a dozen tabs open and launch an SD video in a new tab and she loads in under 10 seconds, never goes above 80% CPU, and the video plays just fine.

But Google won't kill funding unless they are VERY stupid, they'll just cut the hell out of it, but even that is iffy, why? Microsoft. MSFT wants in the search game B.A.D and by buying the default search engine from FF they could gain a nice boost, even with FF's lower numbers. Remember the thing they need the most is lots of searches so they can improve results and FF can give that to them. So i doubt Google will be dumb enough to walk away and give MSFT a free shot like that.

That is what I don't get, you see your numbers dropping like flies, your users tell you in no uncertain terms what you are doing is a big DO NOT WANT and yet what do you do? "We'll just do it twice as fast, that's the ticket"?

I have to support everything from netbooks and old office P4s to the latest quads and I had to switch myself and my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the Google phone home) simply because I found on a LARGE swath of the older machines and netbooks it was no longer suitable for purpose. it wasn't extensions either, just to ensure of that I ran tests with ONLY extensions that Dragon and FF had, namely ForecastFox and ABP. For test beds I chose 3 systems, an off lease P4 2.2GHz, 512Mb of RAM, my nettop which is a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1,5Gb of RAM, and my netbook which is one of the new E-350 Brazos EEE netbooks with 8Gb of RAM.

What did I find? The latest version, 8.01 I believe, is simply unusable on both the Sempron AND the P4, and is frankly barely functional on the E-350 while causing its temps to shoot up nearly 20 degrees from all the CPU slamming. I just tried to go to basic sites that I knew my customers would go to, YouTube, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, a couple of random websites, and in every single case while the max that Dragon hit was around 70% CPU and that only for a few seconds FF would literally GRIND on the CPU causing such hard 100% CPU spikes that the entire desktop became unresponsive.

I personally learned of this after the 4 series when all my customers started complaining about how Facebook was slow and their PCs became unresponsive so I traced it back and sure enough it was FF slamming their CPU. In fact the ONLY customer I haven't had any complaints from is a single one that bought an AMD triple core, maybe FF doesn't know how to slam an odd cored CPU? But I would suggest to those wanting another browser either Comodo Dragon which has excellent features like the option to use their secure DNS or if you want something portable you can use the also excellent QTWeb which is built using the QT framework. From what I've been told by a poster here QTWeb will run on anything going back to Windows 98. Oh and for you Mac and Linux users? QTWeb has the links for those OSes in their download section, enjoy!

That is why I have to love the little hacker that makes the "Tiny (insert Windows)" editions. I have plenty of Windows XP CALs around the shop and TinyXP runs on 64Mb of RAM quite nicely so you'd be surprised how well it'll run on one of the older machines. I usually give away the older boxes to charity, places that help abused women and the like, it gives me a warm fuzzy when they tell me about some girl with a face full of scars that is trying to start fresh but doesn't have anything that I'm able to hand a nice running 1GHz with all the trimmings. Of course I kept the sweet 1.8GHz Sempron with the card reader on it, makes a hell of a low power nettop. I have it sitting in the corner for web browsing and as a 24/7 downloader, can't even hear the thing its so quiet.

If you are looking for something a little more cutting edge and probably not one you have heard of there is QTWeb which is built with QT and Webkit. I don't have any Win9X boxes ATM (kinda up to my ass in 05-07 XP boxes I scored for free) so I can't tell you how well she'll fire, but its portable so it should be as easy as 'unzip and go". you might also want to look up the last version of KLite for Win9x (245 I believe) because that had an excellent low resource version of Media Player Classic that made for a great SD video player on even 400MHz boxes.

As for as DOS? For me its DOSBox FTW. Much more customizable than real DOS, I can even add a nice GUI if I want to load a box with old abandonware before handing it off to one of those abused women that have kids (I basically copied the entire Home Of The Underdogs onto a DVD when it was still up and running) and the rumor is it is about to have Voodoo support so it'll have DirectX acceleration with no fiddling. That will be great for me as those 16Mb - 64Mb early Nvidia cards are as common as dirt here. Hell I stuck a 32Mb Vanta in that Sempron so she'd support 1600x900 for my LCD, purrs like a kitten.

Finally before i get off here and take a nap before the big feast with the fam, if you like to refurb and play with older gear you really ought to try the Craigslist Free section and get on Freecycle. Hell I have a really nice B&W Apple G3 with Panther I got with a nice 19 inch CRT and wireless setup simply because a gal on freecycle got a netbook and didn't know what to do with the thing. sadly the Apple doesn't seem to accept USB to PS2 so I can't run it on my KVM, so I may after the silly season take one of these Pentium Ds or AM2+boards I have lying around and make a WinPC out of it. Give Steve credit, his designers did make some beautiful boxes. shame I can't get it to work with the KVM though, I would have liked playing with OSX on PPC.

That will only be useful IF and this are pretty big IFs 1.- They even know what an alternative OS is and want to run one, and 2.- You have some way to test that Ubuntu will have ALL of the drivers for the myriad of hardware these people have so it all "just works" OOTB.

Since he mentions things such as games it is most likely he is NOT talking about Linux users as they would just get such things from their repo so all they would do is stick in the disc and find a bunch of files they simply wouldn't know what to do with. oh and then you get the "fun" of explaining what a BIOS is, how to get into it, how to switch it from whatever the OEM had it to having a removable drive be first boot, calming them down when they think you are "gonna break it", wow,talk about the gift that keeps on giving!

So let us assume the most likely scenario which is that these are Windows users who don't desire to learn how to switch operating systems for Xmas and think of some truly HELPFUL suggestions. Since I have actually made many a similar device in disc format I believe I can give some good ideas to get the ball rolling. you start with the always useful and free portable apps launcher that gives you a nice base to work off of and gives them a nice single .exe they can "clicky clicky". Then assuming they are happy with their AV and antimalware (which if not I'd put in the launcher for Avast Free and MalwareBytes under a heading of "antivirus") we move on to categories.

First we have LibreOffice which frankly I wouldn't have, while its a nice suite I've found most never use more than Writer and it wastes space so I'd go with AbiWord. For Internet Firefox is too slow and Chrome calls home so I would use either Comodo Dragon which to make portable simply install onto a folder on the flash while checking the "portable' box or QT Web which is a nice portable browser based on QT naturally. Personally I'd give them both, they are light and why not give them choice? Thunderbird, don't bother as even those that think they are on email are actually on webmail nowadays so use that space for InstantBird instead. Oh and throw in a few graphics programs just for fun, like Fotografix and Cornice as they are light and pretty simple.

Moving on to games we have Armagetron for a little Tron goodness, we have Atomic Tanks for a little Worms style fun, i know many will say Wesnoth but that game is a little hardcore if you're not already heavily into TBS so I'd skip it and if I were to put a strategy I'd go with Warzone 2100, Brutal Chess for a little 3D chess fun along with the always popular Texas Hold 'Em along with one of the several shooters and a nice Puzzle collection just to round things out.

Because unless they actually WANT to learn alternative OSes, the inside of their BIOS, and a completely new way of doing everything then saying 'Just put linux on it" really isn't a very nice gift now is it? I hope everyone sees that this gives them a simple useful gift with tons of software they can use NOW without needing to spend an hour or more being walked through changing the BIOS, how to find out if hardware has been detected, what to do if the wireless isn't working, etc. That is about as "fun" a way to spend

Qtweb is a good lightweight choice for older computers.
http://www.qtweb.net/

See also other browser choices at:
http://alternativeto.net/software/qtweb/