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Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
rafa writes "Linuxworld has an informal comparison between Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera and Netscape 4.7 with focus on resource usage. It reflects what I've been experiencing with Mozilla." A lot of this is well known, but the article does a good job of bringing it all together.
Just a quick note:
Konqueor CVS supports the hover pseudo-tag.
-- Thrakkerzog
Wow. You're a smart one - So, what are the hoops a program has to jump through to win your approval? Should it be "morally correct", or perhaps you'd rather it was...
Ah, christ. This is like trying to explain circular reasoning to a christian fundamentalist. i don't even know why i bothered.
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if people weren't so goddamned stupid.
Perhaps you should check for yourself before you correct others; VC++6's 'Process Viewer Application' (haven't got a better one at the moment) lists 10 threads (in the 'Num. Threads' column) for NETSCAPE.EXE.
In fact, one of 'em appears to be running at 'Time Critical' priority...
-- Sig (120 chars) --
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Additional stats: You try and load all the newsgroups from your ISP. Not only that NS6 takes forever to load all the groups, the mem usage is +50 megs. I truly believe that Gecko is highly efficient. But why so much bloat around Gecko? Do we, as users, really need all those fancy features in Mozilla/Netscape? What's up with the sidebar? It's so annoying it's not funny. One last thing: Netscape, please try include less marketing stuff in the browser. Using NS6 is like staring at a permanently ever changing banner advertisements ...
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Even if that is the case, you have to provide me with an alternative to IE before I can reasonably be expected to switch. Netscape 4.x is not an alternative, because it crashes far too frequently - I tried to use it as my main browser for several months and finally got fed up and switched to IE. I'm certainly not going back. Both Mozilla nightlies and Netscape 6 are not alternatives for me either, because they load and run incredibly slowly on my Pentium II 266 with 96 MB RAM. I'm left with basically IE and Opera, both of which I use, but Opera doesn't render some of the more eyecandy-heavy pages (or will crash on them occasionally) so I'm forced to use IE for those. Unless Mozilla gets less bloated or I get a faster computer IE it'll stay I suppose.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Correct.
Processes are big, threads are small
Wrong. On Linux, the only difference is that threads share file descriptors and memory mappings, and processes do not.
If it's forking all the time, then it may be too bloaty anyway!
Very wrong. fork() copies a few kernel structures, but the entire user-space memory area is shared until the process overwrites it. Since a process overwrites only a small fraction of its dataspace and none of its code space, a pair of forked processes takes almost no extra memory compared to a single process. From a memory standpoint, forks are almost free.
Netscape is a pig. Period. It's not fork's fault or clone's fault. Netscape takes a ton of memory, takes a long time to swap in its 30+ shared libraries, takes more time to parse its XML user interface, and consistently leaks memory the entire time you use it.
Netscape is the worst browser for Linux, except for all of the others...
The thing that is always overlooked about Mozilla (and Netscape 6 even) that is it built to run on MODERN computers. These benchmarks are on an AMD K6-2, and to be honest, that is outdated hardware when it comes to new software.
People do not seriously complain about the next Quake not running well on their old computer, and people are just going to have to face the fact that Mozilla is not designed to run well on those old machines too.
Mozilla is a cutting edge piece of software that will also be the foundation for new, cutting-edge, cross-platform applications. Let me say that again: Mozilla is going to be a software platform! That is futuristic stuff, and if Moore's law holds up, Mozilla's "bloat" will not matter anymore real soon.
IE might have locked up today's P!!!s, but the next generation of PCs is all open, whether it comes to web browsers, or OSes.
EverCode
With HTTP 1.1 this whole process goes pretty quickly since it doesn't need to create a new TCP connection for each object.
Dear Coward,
You have measured incorrectly. The time to display a loaded page does not show until the page has *finished* loading. If you look at the throbber, it will run for ~3 minutes, during which time the 3.4MB simple html file is loading. The ~2 second time you see displayed, is the time required to display the *previous* page - which is probabaly www.mozilla.org - that is not the test I am measuring.
Just to make sure Mozilla didn't make any recent breakthoughs, I upgraded my 11/27 Mozilla to the 11/30 16:24 Mozilla and repeated the test. The results are even **more** disappointing.
The file now takes 178.581 seconds to load! That is almost 20X slower than NS4.x
You're right. "user" could mean "manager", "client", "boss", "spouse", or even "user" ;)
But I think I got my idea across.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Fullscreen browsing would be nice too... I can't express my disappointment that despite all the bloat, such a simple feature isn't there.
BTW, if you do a side-by-side comparison of the screen real-estate of NS4 with text-only menus to the graphical icons of NS6, 4.7 still takes up more space (including the shortcut bar).
Although the stupid double-thickness bar running along the bottom with no information in it (and no method to turn it off) brings NS 6 back into the lead of space wastage. You can turn off that stupid bar in 4.7 with CTRL-ALT-S.
I can't believe I'm defending Netscape 4. I hated it when it came out. It was a bloated peice of buggy crap. The only saving grace was that IE4 wsa so horrifically unstable and would shred the OS.
Now IE is quite stable, and comparitively lightweight. I still can't bring myself to use it, but it is certianly technically superior in almost every way.
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
Years ago the WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 was released. A WYSIWYG word processer that ran with 8 mb ram, and about 40 meg hard drive space. The fact is: there is no reason that WinME should take 550 Meg alone on my hard drive.
I'll grant you that features creep in, and users demand more and more and more features. But, newer programming classes fail to teach students some very basic important things. And what I speak of, is the often repeated line, that I've heard spoken in the classroom, and by a great many professional programmers, "RAM is cheap."
Coding is taking less and less effort, not more. Any fool with a copy of Visual Basic or Visual C++, can create a passible text editor. Compare this to the days of hand optimized assembly, where one must stretch the processor beyond its current capabilies, getting every ounce of RAM out as possible. Intelligent, well thought out designs, were the only way you could create a solution that would run well.
Now, Linux is one of the few enviroments where talented programmers have joined together to create something nice. In terms of requirements, the Linux world is moving at a much slower pace than most other industries. It is actually possible to runt the latest version of slack on a 486DX4-100 with 24 mb of ram, use an older version of netscape(or mozilla), and have things feel a bit slow, but the system be usable. This was the configuration of my Compaq laptop, which I used until I sold a week ago. :P
But their is much software where, the often repeated statement, "RAM is cheap", pops up. Even in Linux. I find the whole situation disgusting myself. One should not justify not thinking fully through a program with this qualification. Clever algorithems, thoughtfull code, and interesting tricks are no longer allowed. Coding has begun to become something for the braindead. And the sad thing is, that many corporations will hire these pimple faced teen VB programmers that have no knowledge of algorithem analysis, and have little to know experience writing anything else than yet another Visual Basic Calculator.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
Being the original poster of this meme, I quote:
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I couldn't find it in a two week old nightly of mozilla. But maybe the options for adding an ldap directory is hidden somewhere since it's still in development. I downloaded the binary on their website, not the source. Does anybody know where you can add these directories?
Dammit. I was actually trying to compile Mosaic 1.2 on my Linux-PPC (it's a tangerine) tonight (I got a nightly build and wanted to compare myself, this before even heading over to /.)...anyway, after downloading and installing lesstif, linking some system file that got lost during installation, it came back and said that there were no rules to make one of the libWWW files or something and it puked error 1 on me :(
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Maybe what he means is that "whoever produces these programs is lazy", and the thing he misses is that it's not programmers who produces them, but the organizations they work for. And those organizations, taken as a whole, have many faults.
this is for all you netscape 3.0ers out there!
Look for a copy of ICQ98a - the last version was 1.30. It's still compatible with all the new clients and has all the features you need (file transfer, chat, message) and not much else. Only a 1.5 meg download or so.
I actually find Licq a tad bit bloated, it uses about 11 megs of ram on my FreeBSD 4.2 system.
Yes, let's all go out and support shoddy products like Netscape that we admit are inferior. Just curious, but when people adopt your position, what exactly is Netscape's incentive to improve?
It's attitudes just like that which turned Netscape into such junk to begin with, playing the whole "But people will keep supporting us because they don't want Microsoft to win" game. They did the same thing with ISPs, arrogantly thinking that they could pull whatever crap they wanted with their customers and they wouldn't get abandoned because "Hey, we're Netscape, the Wall Street wunderkind who are taking on Microsoft!"
Another example? Just think back to how smug they were when telling us that they were such big shots that they don't need to run advertisements. Well lah-tee-dah. Probably aren't feeling so smug these days. And yet, if they could've managed to put out a decent browser compared to the competition, I'd be using it regularly. Oh well, maybe version 8 will be the one...
Cheers,
Sorry, I ment to say that it was based off a 1 month old version of mozilla, not a 2 month old version.
It is nice to have one ported framework you can write your cross-platform application for. However Netscape released a less than perfectly working framework with their browser. Not only is it still in the dev stage but it is needless overkill for a single application. The scope of their API is way too large for a single application, which is what spurned my gripe. I think a good component framework and layout engine that worked over multiple platforms would be cool (a la KDE and GNOME) but not for a single application. Its way too much overhead and the added complexity makes it harder to find problems in specific elements of the system. They've put a lot of effort into the GUI and whatnot but then Navigator is up to its old habits of sucking. They make a browser that barely browses.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Being open source, Mozilla will continually improve, and now that it is in the public domain and anyone can try and improve it and understand how it will affect the final product, it will improve quicker than if it were still being developed. I'm sure it has its flaws, but in a year or so, it will kick some serious microsoft ass once again
_nfsplash.init();
sleep(5);
_nfsplash.quit();
_loadprogram();
end();
Hammer of Truth
I'm more productive on linux because it's such a pain to surf the web using netscape.
The mozilla daily builds (with PSM and Java from netscape 6's FTP site) gives me all the function of Netscape 6 without all the Netscape kludge. I prefer the daily builds over the milestones due to my dislike with the current milestone (M18)
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
You do not know what you are talking about.
Spreadsheet updates have always been cutting edge benchmark phenomena. When you are recalculating a spreadsheet with several hundred thousand or million entries (yes, people do build those) and you have to recalculate it again and again and again and again and again as you refine your model, you quickly learn the difference between 30 seconds and 2 seconds.
C itself is very highly tuned to be easily converted into fast asm code by an entity as dumb as a compiler, but the only way it could ever compare to actual asm code would be on a CPU like the old 650X 8-bit series where there are no high-speed registers to speak of. While there are some pretty good optimizing compilers there are none that can juggle the decisions of when to use registers, the stack, and mem storage the way a human being can.
C is also a crappy language for beginning programmers and for application programming in general, because it achieves the performance it gets by abandoning all error checking, so that writing to the 11th element of a 10-element array crashes your program instead of giving a sensible error message. While there is a place for C it is overused both at low levels where asm is really needed and at high levels where speed is not critical and a richer programming UI would speed development and bugriddance.
And C++ is just the worst language ever developed, all the worst aspects of the lean fast no-error-checking environment combined with the worst aspects of a high-abstraction is my veriable alive now? environment. Commit one of the 2^32 possible scoping bugs and get a crash instead of an error message, sheesh, it's a wonder that any program written in C++ ever works at all.
There are many people writing software today who have never seen a line of asm, or even a line of a language like BASIC or Fortran that uses the processor model of an instruction per line and thus reminds you of what has to be done to convert your instructions into actual activity. They have no idea what is necessary to call up the routines you drop into an event-driven environment like VB, how utterly alien such an environment is at the CPU level and how much resources it eats up. This is a big problem which is only getting bigger, as so many people in the industry have never even used a computer that didn't have a mouse and a GUI.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
ok for some reason the less than sign got knocked out in between the parentheses
When I tried the first beta release of Netscape 6 I really had to surpress the gag reflex. I understand there is a big competition to revolutionize the interface, but come on. That is just insane. Maybe the enormous buttons should be defaulted to a feature related to "Accessability Options."
That is also to say that I use IE 5 at work simply because it loads faster and the sites involved in my research are "optimized" for the latest browser features. (i.e. won't look right in Netscape 4.7.)
This is seriously a major issue in my mind. I am actually finding Konquerer to be the browser I use when at home. Too bad it wasn't included in this.
Don't ask me, I don't know.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
This is not a troll, I'd genuinely like to know people's experiences. I have been comparing it to Galeon v0.8 and Konqueror 1.9.8 on Debian GNU/Linux on a 200 Mhz pentium with 32 MB ram.
If other people's experiences are anything like mine, I don't see how Opera 4 for Linux sells. (Ok, I wouldn't buy it anyway because it's non-free, I just wanted to know how it compared to Galeon and Konqueror; but I couldn't see any technical merit in it either).
Is there something which Opera is good at which I haven't noticed from the pages I read?
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> But their is much software where, the often repeated statement, "RAM is cheap", pops up. Even in Linux. I find the whole
> situation disgusting myself. One should not justify not thinking fully through a program with this qualification. Clever
> algorithems, thoughtfull code, and interesting tricks are no longer allowed.
You are somewhat wrong, but when it comes to the interesting tricks part I hope that is still is and will stay out of most code. Especially fro the desktop or server enviroment. Using this kond ofcoding usally makes it realy hard for the next programet to come in and work with the code. This leads to buggy software that does things one could not expect.
Then the next problem is that puting to much work into the details tend to cost more time, and time is almost always the critical componect in developing. A loot of the size also comed from the graphics needed, nice graphics takes a loot of space and are needed in most products of today.
After reading some of the stuff here, I download Mozilla. I like it even better. Seems a little faster.
I don't use IE 5.5. My experience with it seems to crash my Windows system more often than not.........
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I was close friends with a carpenter when I was younger, and he told me that he arrived at a new job site one day and found the following sign posted at the entrance:
This was back in my bad old days of being a college dropout, hungry with no idea what I was going to do for a career. I told him I thought that would be a terrible place to work, the boss would always be bugging you to work harder.But my friend thought it was great and said he wished more construction companies would hold such high standards. It happened that this friend took great pains to always learn new skills, and he spent a great deal of money on tools, and always did his best to always have, not just the right tool for the job, but the most obscure tools right on hand so there'd be no time wasted running to the hardware store or doing it a more difficult way.
And guess what? My friend was consistently among the highest paid carpenters for his level of experience. I haven't spoken to him in years but last I heard he's gone back to school because he wants to be a high-energy physicist. (This same fellow taught himself to program in x86 assembly after he bought a 486. I think it says something about his intellect and style that he chose to program in such a low-level language from the very start because it would be the fastest.)
I believe in having the best tools for the software job too, and by this I mean not the machine - a fast CPU is handy but doesn't help that much; what does help is my personal tools - the skills, experience and insight. To that end I work hard to study and sharpen my skills.
I spoke about that here just a couple days ago in Self-Training is Vitally Important as part of the discussion on What's the Best Way to Retain Trained Employees?
I also discuss it in my article Study Fundamentals Not APIs, OSes, or Tools. The gist of that article is that while you must study particular apis or tools to get work done, you shouldn't concentrate on or dive deeply into them but work to improve basic skills that will serve you well on any job.
Perhaps one of the problems these days is the overemphasis on APIs and the lack of emphasis on the basics, like good coding style and efficiency. Two people who know a given API equally well will get dramatically different results if one of them is well-grounded in algorithm analysis as well as having a good understanding of how computers actually work.
My comment about assembly code wasn't meant to say we should all start implementing our products in it. Rather, we should all learn and write some, and do some work with hand-tuning assembly code so that we have a good grasp of what the computer is doing when we write higher level code. Two books that discuss this pretty well are Gary Kacmarcik's Optimizing PowerPC Code and Michael L. Schmit's Pentium Processor Optimization Tools.
While they emphasize assembly code they should give you enough insight into the actual functioning of your computer that it should make your higher-level programming more efficient. And I do mean to say that your overall code will be more efficient on any processor, not that you should hand-tune it for one particular processor at the expense of another as someone here suggested would be the result.
A lot of people in this thread say the reason things have gotten so bad is because of pressure from marketing, management, clients or customers to add features and ship in a hurry. Yes, I acknowledge that such pressure exists and while they share responsibility you cannot blame them because that is their nature, much like the alligator who ate the frog after offering it a ride across the stream. (Frog? But frogs can swim)?
I've been in this business 13 years and there has always been marketing pressure but code quality has not always been so bad.
The quality and efficiency of your product is ultimately your responsibility as an architect and implementor. This is the case whether you're working in a well-funded dot-com or you're writing free software when you get the spare time.
At every step of the way in your software development process, you make choices. All too often we (and I do include myself) take the easy way out and write bad or inefficient code. It is a far better life to live if we strive for excellence in our products, and to do so we must strive for excellence with every choice we make in our software development.
I hope very much for the success of Linux and Free Software in general, but I think that it suffers overall from a severe quality problem. You may find this tolerable because you are a developer, but I'm a developer who has used lots of systems and personally I think Linux sucks as a development environment. It is no where near where it could be taken seriously as a desktop environment.
Now before you curse me for criticising, you should know that I run Linux on two Pentium III machines (Slackware) and I'm going to add LinuxPPC to my Mac soon. This is, in part, because I want to work to make it better. But part of the way I am going to work to make it better, isn't just fixing things directly but also advocating that everyone should take responsibility for their code and make it the very best that it can be.
My final word in this post is that if you want to get a good start on improving the quality of your work, read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems also available on the Usenet News as comp.risks
Risks is a very well-moderated list that is frequented by some very serious and experienced experts on computer reliability, safety, fault-tolerance and public policy. But it is also often funny as your just as likely to see the latest UI bug in Word next to a problem with the control system in some nuclear power plant. It will give you a great deal more respect for the problems with computer code but there is also a great deal of discussion as to what can be done about it.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
The web is not all about objectivity. It is a user experience. That's why pages are laid out the way they are, and why so many people get paid such huge amounts of money just to make nice, aesthetically pleasing websites. Because of this, the web browser is also not all about objectivity.
The article focuses on startup times and memory usage of the browsers. While this is a great measure for doing an objective comparison, it misses the point of the browser, which is really to deliver a full, W3C-compliant web experience.
Before people go ranting off on me, I just want to point out that I do understand the importance of these two measures, and the fact that they're objective makes them even more cool. The fact of the matter is, however, that reviewers of browsers need to keep in mind that it is the experience of the web that should come first and formost.
As such, I think some of the things that the reviewer missed in his review (which was good, by the way): how well do pages render, how quickly do pages render, do existing pages cause problems for the new browser. These are important for the average web surfer (I know, I cringed too, but if I put "browser" there, it would have confused the point).
My mom doesn't care how long it takes the web browser loads up (though admittedly, 15 seconds to 3 seconds is a very big deal). My mom doesn't care how much memory it takes up on her box. She's more concerned with whether she can see everything on the page. She's more concerned with "What the heck is this stupid little box that keeps popping up and asking me if I want to `debug'?" She's more concerned when "Why is this stupid page screwed up?"
Just my thoughts.
Of course, I'm sure if you're reading this, you're probably like me and really do care about these sorts of benchmarks. Not all of us are running '133t-455 boxes with lots of RAM that can handle running the Netscape 7 beast--a lot of us still prefer the text-browsers. ;)
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Netscape put a lot of developer time into building Mozilla and fixing bugs before branching Mozilla. (After branching, they mainly focused on stability bugs, and the trunk was somewhat untended for a while.) I'll grant that you can argue that Netscape should have put higher priority on performance than stability, or should have left out certain marketing features in the first release to keep ram usage down, or should have fixed bug 36283 before rtm. Please don't assume that Netscape didn't make any effort in these areas, though, or that marketing features are "useless" (they're a large part of how Netscape makes money from the browser product).
Netscape _was_ a "champion" of OSS and a leader in the anti-MS compaign.
I don't see why any of this makes Netscape any less a "'champion' of OSS". They're still contributing to Mozilla as much as they have in the past, and they're still showing the world that it's possible to create open-source software and generate revenue at the same time.
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The shareholder is always right.
Well, I am a developer and my experience is not that users scream for new features, but that marketers scream for them because they feel features are necessary in order to create a sense of difference between my and competing products; actual users don't generally use even 5% of most application functionality, wouldn't miss it if it wasn't there, and would be thrilled to see the speedup they would get if it magically disappeared.
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why not, give away another broswer to gain market share, wait a minute, they have the market share! Guess they could do it out of the kindness of their hearts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Load up IE, load up nutscrape:
Go to www.everything2.com in netscape, notice the pause when its finished downloading the page and when the N icon stops moving. Now try that with IE, the page loads almost instantaneously. No pause or waiting.
Find a site with a large text or html index file, press back and then forward in netscape, wait as the status meter goes from 0-100% in the lower left. Try it with IE, no wait. The page loads instantly.
Please explain how IE being loaded at boot makes it faster in rendering html. For all you win98/95 change your system.ini from shell=explorer.exe to shell=netscape.exe and see what happens.
MS has been throwing millions of $$$ into the development of IE, netscape started to suck during the 4.x series. Netscape 6 was using 25 meg of ram on win2k!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Coding has begun to become something for the braindead. And the sad thing is, that many corporations will hire these pimple faced teen VB programmers that have no knowledge of algorithem analysis, and have little to know experience writing anything else than yet another Visual Basic Calculator."
:)
Oh, that old gag.
C'mon, don't people ever get tired of blaming VB for all the world's problems? And where are all these corporations employing armies of teenage VB grinders? How many Northwind DB apps can a single company need?
I thought the issue was software bloat, specifically in light of Netscape 6? No one's using VB to write web browsers, operating systems, or most of the other crap that makes your WinME install take up 550MB of real estate.
VB app developers are cut and pasting If-Else blocks to script GUI widget events. They're not supposed to have to know about algorithm analysis. If they did, they wouldn't be VB coders, they'd be programmers.
Now, the folks who coded VB itself, it'd be nice if they knew how to code tight, efficient software...
Bush is a cylon.
You could probably say the same for most projects that use private bug systems, if you could look at their bug lists. So what? For both open and closed projects, plenty of "newer" bugs have been fixed, and new bugs can just as easily be severe or easy to fix as old bugs can.
Whining about that kind of thing discourages other companies from moving to open bug systems. It also discourages developers from documenting known bugs that they think they won't be able to fix in a given product cycle, which hampers outside source code contributors who want to find features and bugs that other programmers aren't working on. Whine about a severe bug if you want to, but please don't whine about an "old" bug.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Judging from the comments that have surfaced, I seem to be an oddity:
Okay, I have a pretty hefty machine (PIII/256M), but for me NS6 works perfectly: it is far more stable than NS4.7x, layouts pages faster, is able to handle fonts correctly - now I can actually SEE some pages, supports SSL without a hitch... I really only use NS4 to run some Java applets that seem to hang the NS6. As a browser, NS6 is FOR ME far better than NS4.
I might use Mozilla, but I am too busy to keep up with the nightly builds... I only use the Milestone builds, and NS6 offers more functionality than the M18.
One other thing which I like about NS6 is the fact that I can - if I want to - to run NS4 at the same time. Very nice!
I remember when it was a big thing that Netscape released their source code, but I really don't see Netscape or their owner champions of open source anymore.
---
Guillaume
give me all your garmonbozia
- Code to the lowest common denominator
- Make multiple versions of every page
- or make their sites accessible only to certain browsers
And yet, so manyAdditionally, the author of the article is incorrect when he states that NS 6 is less standards compliant than Opera. Test it for yourself. NS6/Moz is the most standards compliant browser out there.
--neutrino
History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion-i.e. none to speak of. - Lazarus Long
Coding is taking less and less effort, not more.
You're right. But schedules are more and more insane to keep up with the competition. Developers aren't lazier. We do far more with far smaller teams than anybody could have done 10 years ago. We can do this because we can use tools with large, prebuilt APIs like Java that aren't always the most efficient or the fastest.
Now, anyone who has ever done any development will tell you that you have to treat performance as a feature in any application. You can demand more performance optimization or design for performance, but it will cost you other features or it will cost you schedule or both. Please see any elementary book or course material on software engineering or tradeoffs in the software development process to help understand this.
The tools of today do allow for what you brand as "laziness". But I believe that developers just have more options these days to meet the absurd demands placed on them by people who have no clue about the technology (whether these are PHBs, clients, marketing morons or what have you) who demand more and more other features in shorter periods of time.
Anyway, I'm not trying to defend the Netscape engineers... they've pretty much fucked up in every way possible. And Microsoft is habitually responsible for massive code and feature bloat. But please don't generalize this to include all software developers.
I don't care; up until now I have hated Netscape. The new incarnation, be it Mozilla or whatever, is nice to look at, renders pages beautifully, and is fast. I don't have the problems others are getting? I'm running a Celeron 400, 96MB RAM, Win98SE, nothing special, and this has just replaced IE5.5 as my default browser. I'm sorry to stand up and be counted by the zealots, but this rocks. If it works well, I use it. And it does. Mike
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
By the way it doesn't bother me that netscape 6 is slower. It crashes less, and thats far more important to me.
i've been a hardcore netscape follower for years, but that's changing. just look at this crap they call 6.0:
- it's skinnable (probably makes it slower tho)
- they still believe in w3c standards
- it's literally caked with advertising and other bulk that i am never going to use (probably makes it slower)
- it's slow as hell. it acts like it's running on java or something, i really cannot believe how slowly it loads pages compared to msie on the same computer
netscape needs to seriously look at their product and make some decisions, or lose more and more users!
There are three states.
Eating, Sleeping, Neither
So two bools are almost sensible. Since the Eating&&Sleeping state is illegal, it would be better to represent it with an enum anyway - the lack of enums is one of Java's less debateable bad design decisions. [Yes, I know there workarounds to this ommision but they suck].
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
First of all, IE is built into Windows nowadays. It loads faster. Period. If you think I'm wrong, why can't you uninstall it? Why is Microsoft in court? Some of the DLLs are used by regular Explorer as well as IE, so it is loaded at boot, and it's in your system's memory...
With that in mind, opening the program is one thing, _*rendering*_ speed is another. As near as I can tell, they render differently, but loading a page seems close enough time-wise.
Netscape 6 is based on an earlier build of Mozilla. Basically if you want all the Netscape features, use Netscape 6 and have a nice day. If you like the browser but don't care about the extra features (or you just hate AOL), go use some of the nightly builds of Mozilla, or at least the Milestones (which are gone and we're now looking at version numbers like .6 instead of Milestones for the future).
Something else you might want to keep in mind is that Mozilla has that nice little Debug menu. It's got extra code, unless I'm mistaken, to help further development. Eventually the extra code will be removed, and at the same time things like memory footprint, load times, etc will be worked on making it *gasp* faster. Are we at v1 yet? No, we are not. Mozilla 1.0 won't be out 'til next year sometime. Which means it's lovely beta software. Beta software means bugs, beta software means slower than it could/should be. Netscape 6 is based pretty darn close to beta software.
And while I'm rambling on here, does anyone know of any commonly used program that gets a new version but takes up less resources? Or that is faster to load? The more things the program can do, chances are it will take more resources than the previous version. The point releases address things like speed, memory, and of course bugs...
Currently I use IE5.5 and some Mozilla nightlies at home. At work it's IE5 and Netscape 4.x. IIRC, Netscape 4.x still has some advantages over IE5.x: JavaScript. Are Netscape 4.x's strengths enough for me to use it regularly? No. Netscape 6? Not when I can use Mozilla... :)
Bottom line (not literally): Use what works for you.
That's enough ranting for one night. :)
R
I've got a dogslow Amiga (040/25 MHz) with a measly 18MB RAM.
With this inferior maschine I can run AmIRC (the original which XChat is a clone of), V3 (*fast* webbrowser), YAM (mail-client) and NewRog (usenet-reader) at the same time with hardly any penaltys. And of the 2 later, I haven't come across any product that could surpass them in features and ease of use. And all this with a nice GUI.
How is that possible? Because AmigaOS is a slim and speedingly fast OS and the programmers knows how to program for it.
I tried installing linux on the same machine, while it was fun it was dog-slow. Pure swaphell. Had to run BlackBox, hardly able to run any apps.
Tried Mac as well (through shapeshifter). Went better, was able to run OS7.1... and not much more.
Lesson: You don't *need* fast CPU and a lot of RAM if it wasn't for bad programming. My old Amiga still feels way faster an more responsive than my K6-III/400 MHz w. 196 MB RAM running Slackware and Blackbox from which I'm writing this.
Slashdotter might praise how great linux is and how low it's memoryfootprint is. Yeah.. compared to Windows and other bloatware OS'. But linux (including X/GTK/QT) is still awfully bloated compared to OS' like Amiga.
Now, I'd really like an efficient OS with efficient apps for my 400MHz machine, it feels sooo slow.
Bjarne
There are a buttload of LiveConnect bugs in buzilla, so it looks like it's going back in.
Have you ever thought about who Netscape was made for? Just like in every English class, you have to consider your audience, but user in this case. Let's say that you have a copy of Notepad and a copy of Arachnophilia or other better text HTML editor. Now, would you be giving Arachnophilia to a comp newbie who just learned that the CD-ROM is not a cupholder? Didn't think so. You'd give them Notepad or maybe something even easier, like a text editor with huge buttons that take up 1/4 of the screen with tooltips galore.
You have to know who you're developing/coding for. Evidently, Netscape was developed for an obviously less computer-literate audience. Mozilla was developed for /.-type people. Use the Milestones, and stay away from Netscape if you don't like it. Better yet, get the Moz source and tailor it to your tastes.
How can u judge a program on what its resource consumption is. I think we were all resigned to the fact that newer versions of anything whatsoever would consume many more resources while adding a little functionality-thats standard and accepted. So u cant really judge Netscape 6 on that. For example if this is ur yardstick, why use Word Perfect(mentioned in the article) at all. Why not Word Star which consumes just a fraction of the resources Word Perfect does? Why use Windows for that matter, and not Dos? The important thing to consider is what is the new functionality added. Hardware will soon develop so that the extra memory and time required becomes completely inconsequential.
Hello,
I am aware of the threading issue. If you read the article it does not actually add the memory from every thread. It only adds the the actual usage of the program plus the usage of the Java JVM.
If I were to add the entire memory set, it would falsely show Netscape 6 taking over 80 megs of RAM all buy itself. That would not include the JVM.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
If NS loses just a few more percent of the browser share (to IE or Mozilla or whatever) No Webdesigner will bother to make a special version for Netscape users. They will make pages, test them with IE and leave it at that.
NS/Mozilla/Opera/whatever-users will have three choises, accept being shut out from more and more sites, Get IE as a backup and start it up everytime a site doesn't display or surrender to the power of MSFT.
Soon only hard core geeks will use anything but IE. But as more and more services move exclusively to the web (and use IE only technology) even geeks will need IE.
Oops IE doesn't work with "alternative" systems. Too bad. Pehaps you'll better get a copy of Windows after all?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
"but why exactly did netscape make Java for M18 a separate module?"
Netscape used to include their own vm. Doing so, they practically killed the whole concept of an applet because their VM was so crappy it would invariably crash after a certain amount of time. On linux, all you have to do to crash netscape 4 is load a few applets.
Luckily netscape is no longer in the business of making java virtual machines. Instead they use an API that allows third parties to plug in their VM. Netscape 6 optionally installs jre 1.3.0 (from Sun), which is probably one of the best JVM's available. However, mozilla does not do so. To run Java anyway on mozilla you have to install it manually and *gasp* read some documentation that tells you how to do so. M18 and the mozilla nightlies are not intended for end users so I don't think that's a big problem.
If you want a shrinkwrapped product, don't use the development version, wait for a release or download netscape 6. I wouldn't recommend the latter since it was released way to early and contains many bugs (many of which have been fixed in the nightlies already).
That the development versions are usable and indeed much better than the released netscape 6, is nice. I think it is a sign of some good work being done by the mozilla developers. However, you shouldn't make the mistake of treating the development versions as release versions by expecting documentation and shrinkwrapped plugins and stuff like that.
As a mozilla enthousiast I regret it that netscape released 6.0. I think they should have waited. You could argue that they had to release at some point but on the other hand they pissed off a lot of users by releasing this crappy excuse for a browser.
Jilles
Reply I found IE is often the cause of netscape crashes. If you can install an original Win95 and apply service pack 1. This will not include IE. The run netscape 4.76 it should be very stable. After running that for a while install a new IE and watch netscape start crashing. You can not do this test on a new version of windows because they include IE. I think much of the stability problems with netscape on windows are IE. Under linux I have seen a different problems. Under linux netscape seems to do synchronous dns. So when a dns request locks up the whole app does. What I found fixed that and many other problems while making things run faster and use less memory is to use squid. I turn off the caches on all browsers I have netscape, konqueror, mozilla, netscape 6, and opera then set them to run through the squid cache. That gives me one big cache to share between all browers which is more efficient and it is very good at what it does. So in 12 megs of ram it does better at caching then netscape does in 16 or more. Also squid and reiserfs are very sweet together. There has been a lot of optimization between them. Thus browsers of any kind very rarely crash on my linux boxes and they run very fast.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Those aren't threads.. they are processes.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
What I do is set memory and disk cache to 0 on all browsers and use squid. That has worked a lot faster then any of the browsers caches every has. Since I have a raid I just made it a 400 meg cache. I have not ever seen a problem of loading old pages. It runs very fast. Also strangely enough netscape with no cache running through a proxy is more stable. One reason I think is that 4.x can't do async dns requests which squid will do for it.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
yes.. but it's KDE! I officially announce the competition: if you can deliver HTML/CSS2/Javascript/Cookies (and any of the "essentials" that I have left out) in a browser under 1.4 meg that uses less than 8 meg of memory (total) and doesn't crash every 15 minutes (read IE) I will give you a few million for it. Oh.. and if it starts up and renders web pages faster than IE, that would be nice too. If you say it's impossible then I will have truely lost faith in humanity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Most people do not have their browsers set to refetch cached pages every session -- they have them set to check whether to refetch cached pages every session. Big difference. You fire up netscape, it asks slashdot.org for the header for "/". www.slashdot.org says, "it was modified 20 minutes ago, it's this big,...". The browser says, "give me the whole thing". The page contains a reference to the header graphic, so the browser asks images.slashdot.org about /title.gif, images.slashdot.org says, "it was last modified January 3, 2000", your browser decides "I've seen it since then, don't bother sending it".
If you're hitting a big page, you'll only actually download it once, though the browser will in fact check with the server each session to make sure it's the correct version.
Mozilla is a good idea. Fat as hell, of course. (Just for fun I tried running M18 on a 486 with 12 meg running Win95B. 150 seconds to display a page off the hard disk ...)
The tipover point - the REAL beta test - will start the day Mozilla sucks less than Netscape 4. On that day, thousands of Unix users will switch over. Expect a THOROUGH beta-testing.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Regards,
Hoarycripple
--
What I have found out is IE is no where near as standards compliant as many think it is. I learned C++ and python far before I learned html. When I went to learn html I picked up the w3c html 4.01 and CSS2 specs and learned from those. Strangely enough netscape was displaying the pages with almost no problems and ie was broken as hell. However the pages validated as 100% compliant.
What I have found is paying lipservice to the spec which most html writers do tends to work better in ie then netscape. When you actually rely 100% on spec netscape does a better job then ie. Many of the CSS changes I would make showed up fine in netscape 4.7x but were broken badly in all versions of ie. To those of you who think IE 5 on the mac is 100% CSS1 compliant you are full of shit. My stylesheet and code have both qualified as 100% compliant and it had a very wrong rendering of it.
The more I write webpages the more I hate the thought of IE. Where I work all day on something it views fine in Konqueror, Mozilla nightly, Netscape 6 and Netscape 4.7x and breaks horribly in any version of IE. The closer I adhere to specs the more IE breaks. I hope MS gets nailed to the fscking wall during the court case.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
People don't use assembly language for everything for a reason: it offers a low level of abstraction. This means the programmer has to keep more in his or her head. People--even skilled, uber-programmers--are not perfect, and the more you make them keep in their head, the more likely they are to screw up. The increased cost of screwing up more has to be worth less than the gain of speeding up your app with assembly language in parts.
Cell computation in Excel is non-trivial, and implementing it in assembly would be tough. That doesn't mean Microsoft didn't do it, but it does mean that it isn't obvious that they did do it either.
Nice diatribe though.
Open a file named "COM1" for output, which you can do just like in DOS, and it will send the output to your serial port (assuming you've set the port up, probably with a batch file). Now, if you do this in DOS, your app will hang until the data is sent (uses the COM port handshake lines, no way to turn this behavior off because it's throught the BIOS) but your data gets sent and then your program continues operation.
In NT, nothing gets sent at all until you close the COM1 "file." And then, what gets sent, is the first 256 bytes of your data, repeated overandoverandoverandover until you have matched the byte count of your actual data output.
Ain't backward compatibility wunnerful?
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I completely agree - but did you mention that Netscape 6 is just plan buggy! I've run into web pages that don't display correctly (they worked just fine under 4.6/4.7) and printing a web page sometimes fails miserably. And all of that crappy advertising built into the browser - yuck! All-in-all AOL blew it with this "release". As far as I am concerned, Netscape 6 is still beta and I would not recommend it except maybe to test a few features not found in the earlier versions of Netscape. Increasingly I find myself using MS IE simply because it works more consistently than Netscape.
Both Mozilla nightlies and Netscape 6 are not alternatives for me either, because they load and run incredibly slowly on my Pentium II 266 with 96 MB RAM.
Slow load I'll grant. Slow run is bullshit. (Posted from a Celeron 300 with 96 MB RAM)
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Ok, I figured that with all these comments, I should make a clarification. I was referring to startup time, as the article was.
.jpg .gif and .html on my windows machine set to open in IE, because it runs faster. I have URLs set to open in Netscape, because Netscape doesn't crash. IE is nice and slick for simple straightforward stuff like help files, like the kind of thing Opera is fine for. I don't use Opera to avoid redundancy. When I want to browse real websites, I use Netscape because it's fully featured (unlike Opera) and it's stable (unlike IE).
I personally have
I suppose it's possible that Netscape is slower because it cleans up its mess. Whenever I close Netscape, I always have AT LEAST as much free memory as when I started, often more. IE doesn't seem to work that way.
I've heard that IE is nice and sweet on NT, but I have 98, and it's not nice and sweet there. Your mileage may vary.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
bahahaha.. now THAT is funny. A software company actually improving their product to get you to buy the upgrade? As if! That's not the way it is done in the industry baby. If you want people to buy the upgrade you shove in more features and more features and more features! Even if they don't use em they're gunna want em and that's the only way you can get em to shell out their cash! But don't take my word for it, just have a read of Microsoft's first brief to their appeal. It actually spells it out as a good reason why Jackson didn't know what he was talking about. Improve the product, heh, next thing you'll be asking for an operating system that doesn't crash.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Netscape, on all platforms, is "threaded."
In Linux, on the 4.x versions, threads are "faked" by the Netscape Portable Runtime, and thus there really only is one "real" process.
On WinX, threads are not "faked" (or rather, they are calls to Windows' threading system, which... well, could be called "fake").
Mozilla now uses Linux/Pthreads (whatever they're called... multiple processes via the clone() call) instead of creating "lightweight"/"fake" threads in NSPR.
Its a total joke, slow slow slow slow. I browse the web weird, I like to run with 8 browsers at once. Not gonna happen with 6. And I have a dual celeron 400 and 256 megs of ram. If I keep under 3 windows, its fine, but past that, yuck. My ex-girlfriend's computer, which is a 466 with 64 megs of ram, can't even handle one window fo the bitch. It sends her load average up to like 2.3+ with nothing but that, afterstep, gaim, and X running, and a very minimal number of daemons.
Did I also mention it doesn't want to let me see the edge of the ext window I am typing this in, and its handling of style sheets is so "random" that it is completely useless.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
no.. I think it is a perfectly valid term.. I often build hotels on the top right corner of my screen and whenever IE lands there it looses wads of cash and very often is knocked out of the game.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Last I heard it was in Mozilla, but Netscape decided to leave it out for what ever reason.
As the fella that reported that bug in the first place, let me clarify that point. It was a decision made many months ago at both Mozilla and Netscape to not invest time into LDAP. No point in just blaming big bad NS doing nasty things to the wonderful open source Moz.
Initially the plan was to include LDAP, and every other feature that was present in 4.x. It was after all supposed to be an 'UP'grade. Apparently later on as folks were attempting to reinvent everything that appeared round developer interest just wasn't there for it. Of course, nobody outside of Netscape or Mozilla got wind of this. No, not on the newsgroups, the web page, or even the application itself. It was only about a month ago that they actually removed "New Directory" from that Address Book menu.
I had first heard about LDAP not going in after reading an interview with some folks at NS following the first beta release of 6.0. At first I thought I must have read it wrong, so I got to posting on the mail-news newsgroup asking about this. Sure enough, complete no go.
There was, and still is, a single Moz developer working on LDAP now, but only as a browser component. Nobody has worked in the hooks between what he's doing and the Address Book, which is put together with what is apparently a completely undocumented db format called Mork.
Oh, and this is the really fun part. As I got to expressing my concern to the newsgroups and bugzilla it turns out that it's not being there is MY fault! Yes, apparently I needed to stop my life in it's tracks and learn to program in C, and how to interface with an undocumented db format. That, or try to convince my employer (who is not in the IT biz) to invest funds for an AOL project. All the while nobody at Mozilla was exactly advertising the fact that LDAP wasn't going in.
Yeah, I'm still steaming on this one. Unfortunately, darn near every argument I presented to folks at Moz has turned out to be true. NS 6.0 has hit the streets, and corporations have left it sitting on the curb. Worse still, home users have either not noticed, or have been highly negative of it. If it wasn't for AOL press releases, is there any good press out there for it?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I can confirm that... I don't know where the performance "breaking point" is exactly with respect to speed/memory but I've got a celeron 333 w/64mb ram here, using dec 30's nightly of mozilla.
It takes about the same amount of time to load as netscape 4 did (approx 10 seconds, probably spent loading all the XUL for the interface). Pages display as soon as they are received and the images just pop right in without delay as fast as my modem can download them.
Even with norton systemworks, IRC and jabber in the background soaking up my meager memory, I don't get HD thrash from mozilla unless I open up over a half dozen windows with image and plugin-heavy pages.
I have noticed that if you leave mozilla alone for a while, you'll get some HD thrash when coming back to one of its windows even if you haven't increased your memory usage through other apps enough to make the OS swap mozilla out. Mozilla seems to swap itself out on its own when it notices it's not being used.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
Agreed, Mozilla is open source and all that, but till they figure out how to make it useable and lean, if it ever will happen, I am sticking to Opera/NS4.xx. On both Linux and wind0ze I have never had much luck with NS6/Mozilla. On Linux, it would keep crashing, bookmarks wouldn't work, even URLs entered in the URL bar wouldn't fetch, etc. On d0ze, I could never get it to even install. It would hang halfway thru the install and freeze. It is so bloated that it even beats IE. If Netscape seriously thinks of shipping this as a product, they are going down the tubes.
Try a Mozilla nightly build. Seriously. It's not as unreliable as it sounds. I have only found a few nightlies recently that I wouldn't want to use, and in each case the next night's fixed the problems. Or if you're worried about the memory footprint, use Galeon.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
IE is fast because it's already loaded on boot.
It's not on NT 4.0, and definitely not when you specify IE to run in it's own memory space to avoid OS conflicts. Still pops up a heck of a lot fast than Mozilla nightly builds.
DISCLAIMER: on NT I'm still using NS 4.7x as my primary browser. Just to be clear, this isn't an opinion of an IE zealot. Oh, and posted with Konqeror on FreeBSD.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Am I the only one who hates the computer cliche "screen real-estate"? Do programs rent out parts of my monitor? Can I charge extra if they extend beyond the overscan of my monitor? As for your problem, go to x.themes.org and grab the Alfred skin. ----- Forever doomed to post at +1
bah.. IE is the standard, no matter what the UN wannabe's at W3C say. When you can't release a browser or publish a web page until it is W3C compliant, then you'll have something to hold onto, but until then we're stuck with Microsoft. And W3C sitting in their ivory towers essentially saying "if the web page is not compliant with this spec the browser should display an error and refuse to display the page" is not helping!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Whoops. That's supposed to read "nov 30", not "dec 30".
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
I've been using Netscape 6 since the PR2 days, running on Win2000, NT, Win98, and Linux (Red Hat, Mandrake). I was a programmer for 15 years, but these days I mostly design and deploy high-security high-availability global-scale systems.
Let me say that I agree with the points made by the article. Netscape 6 is a bloated program, and a memory pig. It would benefit from some streamlining. The article devoted 80%+ to mentioning those points.
But there are additional points worth mentioning.
Netscape's 4.x product is years old, and personally I welcome a new version. I like the fact that Netscape 6 outperforms both Netscape 4.x AND Internet Explorer on features, if not (yet) on efficiency. It is highly customizable (sidebar, bookmarks, shortcuts, themes/skins, cookie handling, searching, news) and is more mature (features, again) than its predecessor.
I am confident that the efficiency will improve. Some sacrifices have been made in order to get this product out. And yet it still crashes infrequently.
But finally, please, give these guys a break. Netscape, Inc. took a beating by Microsoft in a rapidly evolving space. It got bought by proprietary ISP, and had its culture torn apart. Staff turnover was high, and morale wasn't. I think they deserve kudos just for shipping this. I'll hold off the major congratulations until a few months pass and they get this program to run well on something less than a 128-MB 700Mhz+ machine.
David Allen
And you can turn it off in NS 6 by unchecking the "View|Toolbars|Taskbar" menu option. Not too tricky was it?
why don't you use Flash? At least that standard is controlled. You wont see anyone writing non-standard flash code, and why? Because it is generated from an editor. Oh wait, maybe it's because most people hate flash with a passion.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My point was not against Microsoft or Netscape, its a general trend that I see in the software industry that concerns me: the complete lack of disregard for good design. This doesn't necesarily mean performance. "Ram is cheap" - is only one particular, and well spread symptom of this. And your right, performance is a feature. But a good design, will include the consideration of performance. Many leave it to the hardware now.
A good design will save you much time, compared to the typical high school hax0r who feels he can do anything on the fly without any planning, and again any elementary book or engineering course material will tell you that. I'm refering to programmers who have no understanding of what happens behind the scenes and use the tools with a complete disregard for how it will really affect the entire system in stability, performance, features, you name it.
"Schedules are killing us" is no excuse for the disregard of engineering principles being shown in a great percentage of the software industry, if any thing, it should be more a reason for them.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
I concurr. They have stated that their focus now is slimming it down so it can fit on Set-Top boxes, and embedded devices. Obviously, PC's will benefit greatly from this effort.
witty sig goes here
Actually, if you move MS Framework, MS Internet Library and MS Font Embed to the IE Folder, you can safely remove all MS extensions from your extension folder. You can then drag and drop the folder to another computer and it'll run fine. Just make sure that if you have any other MS apps (why would you want that, I can't think), you do a similar thing to them. .app, which the UI shows as an application. These (AFAIK) can be drag-and-drop installed too.
MacOSX doesn't use extensions, it has packages, which means that an application is actually a folder full of stuff with the extension
Is it just me, or has Netscape's performance level gone down as the version numbers go up? I seem to remember Netscape 3.0 on my old Pentium 60 loading a helluva lot faster than Netscape 4.7 on a P2-266 or even my new 533Mhz (braces for laughter) Celeron. Haven't tried 6.0, tho... and don't intend to, until it gets out of testing. I may be insane, but I ain't crazy. (Or something.)
Nonexistent.
Nonexistent.
'I am not the lord of cherry pies.'
Hmm, perhaps it's not slow run in the usual hard-drive-thrashing swapping of memory sense, but it definitely "feels" slow. At the very least it's less responsive than most Windows programs are - moving your mouse around menus, clicking, dragging, etc., should feel like you're performing the actions instantly, not having them lag behind your mouse slightly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Actually, Mozilla/NS6 use floating point operations A LOT in the layout and rendering engine. Look at the source code if you don't believe me.
Konqueror (KDE2) is nice, but once you take the KDE bloat into account, using it just for the web browser is a bit much. And I've still had crashes from it.
Just for fun, load up BlackBox for a window manager. Mainly just cause it's pretty darn small and all. Keep an eye on top or ps and load up NS 4.7. Okay, now close it down and start up Konqueror with all it's KDE bloat.
On my FreeBSD box this takes up a wee bit more memory for Konq than NS. Not enough to really matter real world.
As for the crashes, I've had a couple of those as well. Thing is, this browser is showing one hell of a lot more promise than Mozilla ever did, in far less time.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Ironically enough, it usually takes a second or two for my start menu to come up when I click on it, but my bookmark dropdown in mozilla is instantaneous. :-P
I honestly can't see this sluggishness so many people are complaining about. My clicks, drags and dropdowns are immediate on my aging 333mhz celeron w/64mb ram. I have experienced sluggish response on drop-downs before, but that was back in M17.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
IE5 for mac is certainly the best browser on any platform at the moment, though once iCab goes v1, and supports CSS, ICMAscript and stuff, it' should take the crown, IMHO.
COnsidering that last stats from statmarket.com, Netscape only has 11.2% of the market share (IE has 88.5%)and is going down quickly... so I'd probably go out on a limb and say that most of the Netscape users are hard core geeks, or users of older systems which always had Netscape and they can't be bothered with upgrading yet... It's sad, but it's true ... IE won... and now with all the bad press Netscape 6 is getting, there's no chance in hell for NS to ever come back... Ah well, to be honest, it's not that big of a loss... *shrug* How many Linux users actually would use NS6 to Mozilla anyhow? eek...
I just thought I would take anonymous issue with your example of WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows, which was in fact a crappy, crashy, half-functional piece of shit that ended up costing WordPerfect about 70 points of marketshare and contributing to their end as an independant company.
Maybe you could point out Word 6, which has 95% of the features of Word 2000 (and how they got there demonstrates your point nicely) and ran fine on a 486/66 machine. But even back then the 386 users recoiled at the 'bloat' and tremendous 4MB memory requirements.
The place where your analysis fails is that in them medium term (1-2 years), RAM is cheap when it's expended on extendability, which is where Mozilla burns it. They are running an open project and they aren't going to lock themselves in with a pile of comprimises like they got into with the old code base. Whether this pays off is not certain yet, but seen the projects that are rolling out and the ramping up of user contributions, it seems to have been the right decision.
Mozilla is, in a way, a very succesful open source project, which attracted lots of really talented outside contributors. And indeed, a lot of attention is being paid to reducing bloat at the moment.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired
Ok, once and for all: If you want to fix all of the above AND have a wickedly fast, standards compliant
browser with a tiny memory footprint, smooth scrolling, etc, etc- ie, if you want IE for gnome - do the following:
(1) Download build 2000-11-27 (the best linux build so far) from http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/software/RH7/RP
(2) rpm -vvi what you downloaded in step (1)
(3) Goto http://galeon.sourceforge.net/ and download the latest galeon. Its a small download.
(4) rpm -vvi what you downloaded in (3)
(5) add the following to your
You now have 2 browsers: mozilla in
(Whatever you do, dont rewrite mutt as a gtk app that hooks into libgtkembedmoz.so to render html email. That's what microsoft does.)
--
--
Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway.
Uh, doesn't adding memory totals from top give an inaccurate picture of real memory usage because it counts shared pages multiple times?
E.g., if I fork() (which is pretty much the same as making a new thread in the Linux world), all the text pages that are shared will be listed under the memory total for both the parent and child process in top. If I sum the memory usages, then, I'm counting the shared pages twice.
Which can give an unfair appraisal of the memory hunger of a multithreaded program.
The Installer worked. And it is Standards compliant.
I think it is sucessful and only gonna get better. I am using RH7 on P360 with 80mb Ram. oh well. I will continue to use NS6 and the Nightly builds.
For I can not wait for ns4 to go away.
It's about time someone said that!
I've been using NS6 since it was released and even though I hadn't used Mozilla for more than 20 minutes before then, I've downloaded nightly builds at least twice a month since... well, since nightly builds started, I suppose.
other than what the author mentioned, 3 things bother me a lot:
1. the amount of time it takes for a new window to open up, be that a navigator, composer or "new message" window.
2. the fact you can't minimize the file download window, despite the fact this has been in bugzilla for more than a year
3. the window positioning. new windows don't get put into the right places in Linux, and in Windows a new window is never maximized.
Well, those are my complaints.
Flavio
"IE on mac os is pretty fast too though so it might not be entirely a IE Windows thing. but what do i know?"
Actually, it's true. But that's because MS does the same damn thing with MacOS. They add several extentions to your system to get IE to work.
You can take the installed folder of netscape and copy it to another mac and run it on the other mac WITHOUT INSTALLING IT! Try that with IE. ha!
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Quite honestly, I've recently decided that NCSA Mosaic is still the best browser out there. I've got an x86 box at work, so I downloaded the (statically linked, thank goodness) binary and messed around with it.
Whoa. Nostalgia trip.
Thing is, though, it's got so many things that newer browsers don't even bother with. Like making clicked links dashed instead of solid underlined. (Kinda relevant for those color-blind users mentioned a while back.) And allowing you to select fonts for each heading level (don't think it's in that version, but I remember doing that in Mosaic on Solaris). And letting you quickly flip between a fontset for the whole document.
Oh yeah, and Mosaic is fast. Maybe that's because it focuses all its resources toward actually displaying HTML, and not trying to turn itself into some kind of sick Turing machine/security hole.
A few updates would be nice... Cookies, SSL, maybe style sheets. But overall, I just wish people would bother to consider all the "accessability features" and "performance enhancements" that always existed, but were simply forgotten.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The article points out that Mozilla loads faster, and is more memory efficient than Netscape 6, despite the fact it's still a development release.
I run the Mozilla nightlies myself, and have found it to be by far the best Linux browser. I also use the Mozilla nightlies in Windows as well, because I personally prefer it to IE. I always DID like Netscape better than IE, but the horribly buggy 4.x series crashed so often (usually when you went to a page with Java) that I ended up changing to IE in Windows.
I think Mozilla is now well past Netscape, getting better, and in a few months will be EXACTLY what we want.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Konqueror has won a place in my heart by rendering pages wonderfully fast, being fairly intuitive to use and by using KCookiejar to allow a nice degree of control over cookies. I just hope stability is a priority for subsequent releases, as it crashes more than any other browser I've used.
I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
> * No right-click menu's on forms / the URL bar
> this just happens to be very handy for copying /
> pasting data and URLs.
Fixed in the latest Mozilla nightly builds.
> I was hoping to be able to give NS6 the URL for
> a RSS file, and have the news channel displayed
> in that oh-so-fancy side bar.
There's a Web site that automatically creates a Sidebar panel from an RSS file. I can't remember the URL offhand. However, since you can do a lot more in a sidebar panel than you can with RSS (better layout, active controls), you're usually better off using one of the 700+ Sidebar panels or building your own.
I know plenty of people who have SSL working in Linux.
> * Tons of advertisements / plugs / commercial
> junk. Even in the FILE menu!
Not in Mozilla.
> * Poor handling of DHTML / Javascript.
Mozilla's support for DOM1 and DOM2 *standards* (not Microsoft's "extensions") blows away all other browsers, including IE5.5. There's a pointer to an independent test site in a recent Mozillazine article.
unstable it isn't unstable under Windows unless your Windows box or netscape profile is screwed up. Although I would agree that it's unstable under linux. On Linux, mozilla is much better and stable.
weak interface What does a weak interface mean? If you mean that it doesn't look like a Windows program, you're right. But why does that make the UI weak? Netscape runs on many different platforms including windows, mac, and unix and so a universal interface that looks exactly the same on any platform has some significant advantages. Lets say Netscape 4.76 had a proprietary MFC toolbar, html help file, and some other M$ specific widgets. How is this going to port well to other systems?
bloated netscape 4.7 isn't bloated either. you have to remember that it's more than a browser. netscape 4.76 includes composer, messenger, an address book, and a browser. All of this loads when you start netscape. After netscape is loaded, all of these components listed above load instantly.
weak security the only major security problem netscape has had recently (AFAIK) has been the java hole. I don't know very much about IE, but if I remember correctly it has problems with both java and activeX scripts.
slow again, it's not slow. netscape would load a lot faster if it was just a browser, but it's actually a suite of communication programs bundled together. As for rendering speed, they seem to be about equal to me.
I disagree here. There's a piece of code where I work that has many repetitive code blocks and very poorly designed algorithms. One of the better programmers is currently completely cleaning it up. Each change he makes increases the readability of the code while reducing its size and memory requirements.
The kind of programmers who write horribly obfuscated, but supposedly very tight code are usually ignoring better algorithms, the compiler's optimizer, or both. I, personally, would not let one of them be a part of an organization where I had some control who was working there.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm typing this from my workstation at my client's office, a web application company (I've clocked out). I'm using whatever Netscape came from the Debian site when I updated my software on Monday when I started.
Read about my laptop which was my main development machine for most of the last year. It boots NT, Slackware and BeOS.
You can read my resume - note the long list of products I've shipped, and keep in mind I haven't been keeping that list up to date. See the long list of projects I've done in the two and a half years I've been a consultant.
Note that among the jobs I've held was Senior Engineer at A Big Fruit Company where I held the role of "Debug Meister" - I did low-level debugging and in fact performance tuning of the Mac operating system.
When a tester found that an application would crash under a new system build and they didn't understand what component was at fault, it came to my team (Traditional OS Integration, formerly known as the Blue Meanies). We would track down the bug and assign it to the right engineer or fix it ourselves.
Note that sometimes, probably half the time, the bug was due to a third-party app bug, and we determined this purely by running MacsBug, an assembly level debugger, inside the app and system software. We had the entire Mac OS source code at our disposal but this wasn't usually readily available when you were visiting a crashed Mac at a tester's cube so you just had to know your MacBug.
I use and contribute to open source. My latest effort was aiding the author of the ZooLib cross-platform application framework in releasing his library under the MIT License; I worked with Andy Green for a year to test his code by developing a product with it and led a beta test of developers who also developed products with it.
I found ZooLib to be an incredibly enlightening example of well-architected, efficient and compact code for what it does. Just using it and reading the source code increased my own abilities as a programmer and architect tremendously.
You can read some of my thoughts on the business and technique of programming at GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tips
Linux is better than most as far as efficiency is concerned, but don't get me started about reliability and ease of use.
As for what I think is a well engineered OS, try the BeOS but you don't want to get involved with the company.
Read why I think developers need to take back control of their lives from operating systems vendors and how I think they ought to do it. If you really want the full-bore opinion, read The Cross-Platform Manifesto
So yes, I am in fact a developer, thank you. It's just that I maintain high standards and I like to encourage others to do so as well.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Ha ha! I know a few that would rather not have cookies at all (And no, they're not paranoid or comp. techs.). I get your point. It just made me remember a discussion with them about how to really disable cookies.
I agree with some of your post, but you are making it seem like using RAM is evil. When you come down to a true time-space trade-off, I think it's fair to say "RAM is cheap" and go in favour of more space instead of more time.
Granted, I wonder how many programmers actually know when true time-space trade-offs should occur. When I write something, I always think about how I could do it by streaming the data (if applicable). I tend to go from there.
You should answer the "RAM is cheap" excuse with "RAM may be cheap, but it's also slow". Face it, with processor speeds up in the GHz and RAM bus speeds at best around 200-400 MHz (effective, not actual!), you should convince yourself of the hit going to memory is going to cost in the execution of your program unless you have decent caching. Of course, there will be many times that this a) does not matter all that much, b) cannot really be optimized.
Woz
I don't understand these conservate people who lament about the "good old days", as if it was a golden age. It wasn't. I was programming back in the days when an XT with two floppy drives was "high end", and a good assembler coder could squeeze a VGA animation, some music, and an ANSI BBS logo into a 4kb COM executable. However, I gladly gave up my trusty turbo assembler in favor of DirectX 8 and VIsual C++. Sure, the SDK is a 120MB download not counting the 2-3GB of compilers, documents, samples, tools, and media, but frankly, I don't care. I have the bandwidth to download it, the disk space to store it, and the memory to load it into. Why should I waste my time saving bytes that don't need to be saved instead of adding features?
What non-programmers don't understand is that modern applications are huge exactly because they use superior algorithms. It's possible to write an editor in a few minutes these days only because of powerful new libraries like the SGI STL's rope class, which is designed to replace the old C strings. Unlike C strings which are just simple 32bit pointers, ropes are trees of nodes allocated on the heap. This seems like a waste, but a rope can insert a character into a multi-megabyte string in microseconds, and the same code that can efficiently manipulate 10 character strings can manipulate 10 GB strings without a performance hit. I'm quite willing to pay the once-off 100kb overhead for that kind of power.
The point is that if even a moron can produce a useable editor with tools like that at his disposal, image what a seasoned programmer could do!
Admittedly, I haven't tried the latest Netscape 6 Release, howevr from when I tried their beta, the interface seemed a lot like NeoPlanet. It could be one big coincidence, or that they wanted to try to re-design their interface without spending the effort to be creative. Anyways, until Netscape comes out with some outstanding feature which makes it worth the time to download and install, I'll stay away from it.
I used to think this when I ran Doom on my 386. In reality I was just bitter because I was a broke student and couldn't afford a new 486.
Actually seeing this now kind of bugs me. I see so much work that has to be done, especially in the free software area. For example, I would love to see X run faster. But that isn't going to happen if a million people all bitch about it while only a handful actually work on it.
I think we could all benefit from learning and writing some assembly
Great! We have a volunteer!
Ozwald
I have to say that the one feature I really miss the most from 4.7x is support for LDAP directories. I don't really know that much about mozilla, but I thought I heard that this hadn't made it in yet. Any word on when it will be available?
He isn't adding memory totals. There's no way he could get two listings in top that add to only 25 megs for netscape. If you have only one window open, mozilla (M18, I think) shows up as one or more identical entries in top. Even opening other windows, I can't get mozilla to show non-identical sizes in top. Threads don't create a new process space, and no way is NS6 using less that 18 megs, so the reviewer is *not* adding entries in top. What I'm saying is that there isn't going to be somethign that says "mozilla: 10 megs; mozilla: 25 megs" and someone adds them. It's going to say, "mozilla: 35megs; mozilla: 35megs", and you say, "mozilla is using 35 megs".
Mozilla is multithreaded, but it doesn't seem to create child processes, except for Java, and almost certainly for plugins. The 20 megs he reports for the Java component probably overlaps a little with the main executable, but I doubt more than a meg or two.
Mozilla may be a memory and resource hog but it's still 6 months away from the 1.0 release. As I understood it, from now on the developers are going to be focusing on stability and performance. I can't imagine that 6 months of focus on this area won't improve things immesurably.
I've recently switched to using Moz because I had so many problems running Netscape 4.7x. It's more stable than Netscape and doesn't freeze up for no reason. I'm running Squid and pdnsd on my local box so there's no reason for Netscape to freeze up waiting for the network to respond... but it still does.
The only reason I keep Netscape is (a) Java and (b) SSL through my proxy (my download of M18 doesn't appear to know to tunnel the SSL connection through the cache).
I haven't bothered with Netscape 6 after trying PR1 - it looked like Mozilla M14 with a few GUI pretty bits which I can do without.
The other reason to use Mozilla is the splash screen... very cute.
Netscape6 is just Mozilla with a few doodads. Thus, most of its source IS open. Also, since 90% of Mozilla development is done by the Netscape engineers, it's not fair to bash AOL-the-company and praise Mozilla in the same breath.
Use Mozilla, be happy, but don't put the boot into Netscape. If AOL cut them off then Mozilla would be in dire straits.
Be one with the thread. Grok the threadedness - so that you can understand what is wrong and what is right _without_ having to count every comma in a standards draft that is 473 pages long.
Translation: "words are hard."
I'm very impressed that Linux sees what a comittee of professionals with vast experience, training and input from assorted parties failed to see.
He is truly as our god. I shall buy his book.
Slow run affirmed. (posted from a p200 with 64Mb of RAM)
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
Try Konqueror for KDE 2.0. When the bugs in that browswer are worked out, this browser will be the best out there
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
I've had a lot of trouble with Netscape 6. It seems to me that it's quite unstable, and it's hard to get plugins and launchers to work right on RedHat 7. Anyone else had similar trouble?
tried opera?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't understand why slashdot readers insist on use and bash Netscape, a closed source browser full of AOL crap... may be it's related with the fact that the majority of slashdot readers use Windows and IE...
Just forget Netscape, we have Mozilla, we don't need Netscape anymore.
And for those people that pretend that IE is better than Mozilla:
- I want a browser that is standards compliant. If you don't care about standards you are like Mico$oft... standards make the developer life easier, products with broken standards support make the developer life a nightmare.
- I can't run IE in my Linux and BSD boxes.
- I want many Mozilla features that IE and NS don't have(ie banner blocking.)
- I don't trust the security of Micro$oft products. If I can't have the source, I don't trust it.
- I love Free Software, and I love the Mozilla people.
IMHO there is no reason to use NS[4.x|6] instead of Mozilla. If your computer have limited resources use moz-embed, only 2Mb download and only gets 11Mb of
RAM(even less than the part of IE that isn't loaded with Windows).
Best regards
Uriel
- - - - - -
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
Is it possible that pages being stored in memory (as suggested by the memory use going up as more pages are browsed) happened because the memory was available? Might it do something sensible on a memory starved system (like tossing the cached pages out of memory)?
Of course, even if this is the case it is still not good - disk caching would be far better.
Or better yet, stick with a less bloated browser.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
A friend of mine works for a company that makes software for anasthesiologists (take note, Taco-- I can spell!) that RUNS UNDER NT! Same guy who scorched me with the "Unix is dead; NT is better than sex" hellfire. And I thought surgury was barbaric in the days of leeches and exorcisms!
-- You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
IE's autocomplete rules.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Lets put it this way: not only has the barrier to entry of programming lowered, allowing those who don't know enough to care about the quality of their code to get jobs, accountability for software companies has also dropped. And will keep dropping if the UCITA becomes more widespread. So not only do you wind up with bloated, cruddy software, but (in some cases) its bloated cruddy software that could do serious damage (maybe even kill someone) without accountability.
-RickHunter
If you want a quality word-processing package that had a minimal footprint, but still provided great WYSIWYG display and printing: CHI-Writer! I would kill for a copy that would run on Linux. I would even run DOSEMU for it - awesome formatting capabilities, and it ran on my XT off of floppies!!!!
But again, all development is comprised of the 3 Things: The Right, The Good, and The Cool. There is a degenerate case of The Stupid, but that only seems to be used by M$... First do The Right Thing, then if money permits, do The Good Thing, and if you have time, push for The Cool, but always stick with The Right Thing and you can never go wrong!
Far too many times I have seen people mix up the order when developing a system, and they wind up really screwing up.
Going for The Cool Thing always means you have to go back to the Good Thing, and actually implement The Right Thing.
Going for The Good Thing has slightly better success than initial reaching for The Cool Thing.
Going for The Right Thing always seems to work.
"RAM is cheap" statements frighten me almost as much as "next year the processors will be faster so we won't bother with changing the algorithms..." It's this mentality that causes animations of papers flying from a folder to another folder while copying files. Clearly The Stupid Thing way of thinking.
Perhaps Theodore K. was right - perhaps it's not the technology that's a bad thing, but how it has been crafted, and the motivations behind its creation.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
While I love top to death, isn't it a pretty crappy way to measure memory usage? I mean, top is just a quick-and-dirty tool, not one for serious analysis. Of course, the article writer claims that his tests are 'in no way scientific', and yet has no problem concluding his article by recommending against the use of Netscape 6.
From my experiences with Netscape/Mozilla in the Windows world, the results (aka Netscape 6 being huge and getting bigger and bigger and bigger) are consistant with what it does in Windows. After an hour of browsing, I can run a report on a 300k record database in Access 2000, chart something from a remote odbc source in Excel 2000, and be typing this very message in Opera (or IE5, I have a lot of ram leeway right now), and still use less ram then Netscape 6 takes to show the slashdot frontpage (and doing nothing else).
It really is quite pathetic, Netscape must be in bed with a Ram maker.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
... for browsing www.gnu.org, but have you tried Slashdot? ;p
So, I think that if Netscape/Mozilla is going to succeed, the developers need to start concentrating on efficiency rather than feature bloat. Don't get me wrong, the skins are way cool, but what is it costing us?
Now that Opera has a linux beta out, I may have to go back to it even though I don't like the user interface. At least it loads when I want it to instead of when it feels like getting around to it.
MSHTML DLL 2,359,568 03-18-99 12:00a MSHTML.DLL
I rest my case.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The thing I find most interesting is that the
Mozilla nightlies are significantly better than
Netscape 6. Even the ones from around the release date.
NS4.75 is faster and smaller, but (for me) much
less stable and it can't render pages at all well.
I don't care how quick it is when it still crashes several times a day. (Under Win98 and Mandrake7.2)
NS6 is pretty but sooo slow. I find it quite useable under Windows, but the Linux version just crawls.
However, I'm finding the Mozilla nightlies quite wonderful - haven't had a crash for months, and although the startup time is terrible, once it's loaded it's quite useable.
I still think there's room for a lightweight standards compliant browser *only* though. Galeon seems promising for that. Maybe a Galeon based on M19 will be what I want.
Konqueror (KDE2) is nice, but once you take the KDE bloat into account, using it just for the web browser is a bit much. And I've still had crashes from it.
- Muggins the Mad
the biggest problem i have with the browser, is the speed of the drop downs, and overall UI...
its very slow compared to every other app on my system (gnome or kde)... i realize the UI rendering system is nice and scriptable and all... BUT... at least Galeon makes it quite usable...
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
As I followed the Mozilla Milestones upward I was truly hopeful that when Netscape 6 final came around, it would be a good product. Sadly, as is the case far too often with software today, it should still be in its beta stages. I mean lets be serious. This thing is an attrocious resource hog. It has many VERY annoying bugs. (Locks up a lot on the least bit challenging pages, like the ones at netscape.com(!!!), shows phantom new messages in the inbox, etc.) I truly like the format of the software, the mail and news interface is nice, but the bugs are more than I can handle. My main gripe is just the fact that they consider this a major release. Come on, you've waited this long since the last version, why distribute this now?
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
You will have a 2.0.1 in three four days, and KDE 2.1 beta before Christmas.
Lotzi
I start the apps that I need, and don't have to restart them for months.
All I care about is stability. I hate to have an app crash.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
So far, Netscape4.75 looks like shit on on Solaris 2.7, and we can't get IE 4 or 5 to run on this platform at all.
any suggestions?
I've been running the nightlies, submitting bugs etc for 5 months and it's great to see the progress of the mozilla project.
Today's build is purring nicely. I don't mind the slow startup issue. I have it opening on startup and I leave it open.
And the sidebar... I originally thought it had no use and just took up webpage viewing area but that's all changed today. I added the slashdot sidebar!!
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with your basic premise. The focus of software development has changed radically in the last decade, and with good reason.
Within reason, I don't waste my time (and I really did mean to say "waste") with hand-optimizing blocks of code in the applications I'm writing. Why? Because my employeer needs my code yesterday, and they couldn't care less about the relative beauty as long as it will do its job without eating the system.
You see, my coworkers and I write the software that makes the company run. If a database query is sub-optimal but working, then it will still allow the business to make money. I'm not saying that this is something to brag about, but that's the reality of the New Economy, as far as I can tell. Time-to-market can make or break an entire corporation, so I guarantee you that my boss would rather have something that gets the job done then a shining paragon of hand-rolled assembler.
Now, this isn't to say that we don't optimize later. In fact, every release of our major internal-use product is much faster, memory efficient, and CPU-friendly than its predecessor. Once our projects have hit the "it works!" milestone, we usually have the opportunity to go back and fix stuff that we knew was kludgey even as we wrote it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Oh, please. There is an extremely simple somution to your problem. If you want your computing experience to fully benefit from the latest and greatest hardware upgrades, the answer is painfully simple.
Run older software on newer hardware.
There is no law or mandate anywhere that says you can't run an older, stable OS on your blazing new Thunderbird system. You'll be absolutely blown away by the performance, I assure you. You can read e-mail, surf the web, serve web pages and write and compile code on a wide variety of older, rock-solid systems. If you want a fast, virtually bulletproof web graphical web browser, use Netscape 3; even better, stick to Lynx, if you don't mind seeing the Web in all ASCII. There's nothing that says you must use the latest C compiler; there's no real reason to upgrade beyond Pine for reading one's mail, as attachments can be saved and viewed externally. It is perfectly sensible to run older software on newer hardware, and I have seen it done quite a number of times.
I'll say it again: run older software on newer hardware.
Now, if for some reason, you want to take advantage of some of the extra features that more modern operating systems and programs provide, I advise you swallow your rhetoric and buy a modern computer for the job. Just as there is no reason for you not to run older systems on newer hardware, there is absolutely no reason for software developers to not take advantage of the power available to them. If, for some reason, you feel compelled to use a newer program because it provides functionality above and beyond what you can achieve with older counterparts, you can bet that program uses some section of the "thick layers of software bureaucracy" you pan. (Fire BAD! bureacracy BAD!)
And finally a lot of people just don't know how to architect or code. I think we could all benefit from learning and writing some assembly, so we could really understand what our software is doing.
New features should not come at the expense of performance
Do you ever actually read what you write? that's like saying education should not come at the expense of time! I challenge you--I bet you five hundred dollars--that you cannot write a new feature into any program that doesn't come at the expense of performance. How can somebody who purportedly codes in assembly spout such utter nonsense? Do you have any understanding whatsoever of the necessity behind the complexity of modern systems? Do you really believe that, if you just sat down and worked at it long enough, you could redesign the latest version of WordPerfect to be as computationally efficient as vi? Good freakin' luck.
Why does this happen? One thing is because programmers are lazy, and if their code runs slow they assume the user will just get a faster machine.
Programmers are lazy, and write slow, lousy code because of it? Well, who the hell wrote your fast, stable Slackware distribution? Wandering minstrels? Yes, there are more bad programmers in the world today; the demand for programmers is so great that even if ten times as many "skilled programmers" existed today, we still couldn't come close to filling the need. Does that mean, as you so blithely put it, that programmers are lazy? No. Some programmers are lazy, just as some Slashdot posters are trolls. There do exist a good many highly talented and educated computer programmers in the world developing very advanced, modern systems and applications; they understand the need for the complexity and abstraction of modern systems in relation to real-world concerns.
If the needs of the computing world were performance and performance alone, your post would strike a resounding chord. As it stands, though, performance is but one factor amongst a sea of others, including things such as code readability, portability, robustness, maintainability, modularity, production time and production cost. If all you need out of your computer is performance, performance, and more performance, stick to older software and the hottest hardware. You can run a system at god-like speeds if you do this. Just remember, though, that the only reason you ever have to run that processor-sucking, machine killing modern system is if you want to use any of the wonderfully time and energy saving conveniences these disgustingly bloated travesties put at your fingertips. If you're unwilling to accept the fact that code becomes larger and slower in the name of ease of use and abstraction of complexity, though, well, you're out of luck.
Do tell me, though, when you finish that port of WordPerfect.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
<LAYER> no longer works, sliently dies
you can't reference elements the same way
but that's ok, I need more work to do anyways. Hey, maybe I can convince our Web designers that JavaScript is of the devil.
And then I wake up
NS6 fucks up the conversion of old mail folders by not indexing them properly or at all (I have 500 messages in that folder, not 3 you MORON!) Aside from that, you apparently can't tell it where your mail folders are. Heaven forbid that you put them elsewhere besides something like
~user/.mozilla/user/ykk73yz5.slt/c8p9sior.slt
What the HELL IS THAT ALL ABOUT? WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!
This is unforgivable in my book.
I went back to NS4, and I couldn't be happier. Well, I could, but this "release" is making me lose faith in the Mozilla project.
Oh, I've coded toooo much,
I haven't coded enough.
That's me on the keyboard,
that's me in the spot light,
losing my religion
> yes... but it's KDE!
and?
I suggest you take a look here
Although it is not ready for prime time - it shows good signs of progress, and I expect the next release to have IMAP support.
Hetz (Heunique)
Is Mozilla now the only thing standing between IE and total world domination!?
Well, maybe not quite, but it's looking more and more that way. I would rather not use a Microsoft product, but I'm not rabbidly opposed to it. What I am opposed to is a browser monopoly.
If Microsoft is allowed to hold on to a near monopoly on web browsers, they will hold too much influence on the future course of the web - influence that no single company should have. The Mozilla project is more important than ever, not to screw over Microsoft, but to keep competition on the web, forcing company's to turn to standards bodies and not simply do as they please.
Please please please mod me up! I'm serious! Pathetic, but serious!
I don't follow you here. Why would a switch from using a thousand separate C functions to a hundred C++ classes make things harder to read and understand? Or is it just that you haven't learned how to properly use OO code?
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
This is exactly the type of thing I'm refering to. Good programmers who know what they are doing, versus the hax0r type from the local highschool or college(although there are some REALLY good highschool and college programmers out there), that have know what they are doing. As I said earlier: good engineering principles have left the world of software in many programmer's minds. And I don't mean to insult the rest of the programmer's out there on slashdot, I'm simply stating that the industry is on a downward slide.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
The only saving grace of N6 is the improved CSS 2 support. Though nothing to write home about (compared to the superior IE5.5), at least it finally does onMouseOver's. Woohoo!
Performance-wise, on my Win2k dev machine at work, N6 seems to load faster than 4.75. Mebbe I'm just hallucinating but 4.75 takes forever at that splash screen.
"Ask me about Loom"
just firing a shot over the fence :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
I suspect it has something to do with silly linuxthreads which, of course, Linus will never change because he wrote them and they are therefore ...
Exactly, and I remember this thread in l-k 2 months ago where he showed what a prick he can be in those circumstances...
Here's an excerpt that after which I wondered if Linus isn't going a little insane at times:
"Personal opinion, and it has nothing to do with "15 years ago" vs "today":
The pthreads approach never got to a real framework for threads as real entities. To pthreads, a thread is a braindamaged stepchild of a process, and cannot do anything on its own. It's this drooling messy thing that has no life without the parent process that wipes up after it. It has no spine.
In short, threads are not proper citizens. They are guest workers. Expendable. Worthless. They don't have a life of their own.
Now, the notion of rfork/clone/sproc "variable-weight processes" is not new per se. But it's an important _notion_. It basically says that threads are _not_ the ugly drooling stepson that you really wouldn't want to see at family re-unions.
Suddenly, with rfork/clone/sproc, a thread is not just something that you can prod in the right direction with the cattle prod of a random collection of POSIX routines. A thread is an Idea. A Notion. Something worthy of a capital letter. Something you can discuss in mixed company.
It's the difference between being useful and being Right.
It's hard to explain. If you have a bent toward physics, it's the difference between a practical experiment and the Unified Teory of Everything. It's the difference between Galileo saying "everything falls at the same speed" and Newton's "F = mMG/r?".
If you're religious, it's the difference between "It was a dark and stormy night.." vs "Let there be Light!".
If you're into computers, it's the difference between Windows ("sure, it works much of the time, and it looks pretty") and Unix ("everything is a process or a file").
It's like an idea: there are mundane ideas ("hey, let's go out for pizza and a beer") and there are big ideas ("I have a dream..").
The difference? The big idea leads to something larger than itself. It makes people think about what the meaning of life is. It gives a _direction_ for where things are supposed to go.
In contrast, a small idea leads to other small ideas (fifteen beers later: "I know, let's drive past the police station and moon every cop in the city!").
Ok. I'm overdoing it. But think of rfork/clone/sproc as a way to try to come to grips with what it really means to be a thread. Be one with the thread. Grok the threadedness - so that you can understand what is wrong and what is right _without_ having to count every comma in a standards draft that is 473 pages long.
In short, "pthreads" is a rough approximation of the theory of magnetism. While rfork/clone/sproc is Maxwell's equations. One can tell you how much force a magnet excerts on a charged particle in motion. The other one tries to explain how the universe works. "
(Emphasis mine)
He's trolling, right?
Heh, just in case anyone wants to experience the nostalgia.../
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Unix/binaries/2.7b
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
Netscape 6 AND Mozilla have fundamental problems above and beyond just resource consumption, although those are also important issues. I like a webbrowser that works fast, where there's no LAG between clicking a button and the button function starting. Mozilla/NS6 are just SLOW. They're slow on the P450 I use at work. They're painfully slow on my Linux P166 machine. And I haven't been able to check them out on my home PIII-667 Windows 2000 machine because it's only on a dialup modem and i'm not thrashing 20-30 megs over the phoneline when other Win2000 users I've spoken to tell me NS6 crashes during install!
But like I said the problems go deeper than this:
* No "Upload" option in the file menu anymore. You can browse FTP sites in the browser but you can no-longer upload.
* No right-click menu's on forms / the URL bar - this just happens to be very handy for copying / pasting data and URLs.
* Depite the alleged XML usefulness of the browser, it doesn't do much for the common man. I was hoping to be able to give NS6 the URL for a RSS file, and have the news channel displayed in that oh-so-fancy side bar. No such luck. Point NS6 at a RSS file and it says "hey what?"
* Some people posting on this article claim SSL works great. I've heard reports from other people saying that SSL works not at ALL in Linux.
* Did I mention it is slow as fuck?
* Poor plug-in integration.
* Tons of advertisements / plugs / commercial junk. Even in the FILE menu!
* Poor handling of DHTML / Javascript.
Sorry, but Netscape 6 is dreadful. It has LESS features that it's predecessor, it's bigger, bulkier and slower, the install process is a nightmare on any platform, and it is way over-commercialised. It certainly doesn't match up to IE, or, for that matter, Opera. Opera is the way people. It's in beta stage for Linux, or so I hear. It's small, fast, compliant, USEABLE! I'm much happier paying for Opera with money, than paying for Netscape 6 with my sanity.
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
You're sure bit fields would make it faster? I agree of course it would take less memory than two booleans, but I think it would be slower. Booleans can be retrieved from memory in one step, while a bit field can only be interpreted by XOR'ing and AND'ing against a mask, which takes extra time.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
That could be worse ; I've seen a fresh engineer from a school which shall remain unnamed (okay, it's the ENSIMAG in Grenoble, France), who did implement (seriously !) bitfield operations.... using STRINGS !
Yes ; that guy was converting an int into a string consisting of '1' and '0', then did things like
if (a[i]='1') and not (b[i]='1') then
r[i] = '1' else r[i] = '0';
The worst part was that this guy applied something he said he had learned in school (okay, he had a much, much more competent colleague from the same place), and didn't see anything wrong there.
Oh, yeah, that was a couple years ago, the language was Delphi.
Needless to say, that guy was fired at once.
It is time for us to put to bed the famous "my Word Perfect 5.1 shipped on a handful of disks", once and for all.
Word Perfect 5.1 did not have a WSYWIG editor. You had a blue TEXT screen with coloured control characters and you had a graphic preview. The modern notion of "fonts" is something that was alien to Word Perfect, whose model was more printer centric than screen centric.
The document you prepared on screen bore little resemblance to that which printed. A modern word processor will effectively ask the printer for the sizes of fonts and such, and then use that information to accurately space the letters.
Support for graphics in Word Perfect 5.1 was aweful, and I never liked its cut and paste. Speaking of which, you could only open a handful of concurrent documents in Word Perfect 5.1, and certainly today's mindlessly easy cut / paste between them didn't exist.
Even opening a document was a pain in the neck.
Application interoperability was non-existent. This was because the platform, DOS, only really allowed one app to run at any given time, and because there were no standards for data exchange between running apps. If your favorite other application happened to be Lotus 1-2-3, and you wanted to take some of that stuff and put it into Word Perfect 5.1, then you were S.O.L.
I don't miss Word Perfect, and I don't miss Lotus 1-2-3.
This is my sig.
LiveConnect is a Good Thing. It's not only communication with plugins, but with Java as well.
It works with Netscape on all platforms and even with MSIE (but only on the Windows platform).
It's a pity to drop it.
I don't think that he's talking about the Taskbar, but insteasd about the little bar that left after you turn the taskbar off. The one that only includes the padlock and plug symbols.
--
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Remember, though, Win98's "walign.exe" program. Win98 keeps track of your app usage and what sectors are needed in what order when the app is loaded. Walign, run optionally when you do a defrag, moves sectors around on the disk to optimize app loading speed. It works best if you've been running the app on the o/s for several weeks, so it has a good sample to work with. So if your wife has been running WP2000 for a while on her machine, and has done a defrag, then it's going to be optimized for fast loading. If you install Netscape 6 and load it, it will still be unoptimized and won't be able to compete.
Try loading Netscape 6 on her machine once a day for 3 or 4 weeks, then do a defrag, and check the timing again. It might cut the load time in half, as has been the case with some other apps.
Well, M$IE is just downwards shitty, insecure, bloated & slow, not to mention it's unethical to use it at all.
Netscape 4.7x is just as obsolete and shitty as M$IE (both are based on NCSA Mosaic, one of the very-very first HTML browsers, remember?)
Mozilla's good, but it's beta.
That leaves out one thing: Opera. I'm using Opera 4.02 on a demoronised (that is, without any Microshit Internet Exploder or any other filth) NT4 WS, and version 3.62/BeOS on BeOS 5.
Opera's currently THE best browser. Fast, with an excellent interface, and conforming with W3C standards. Uses the standard Sun JRE. Take a look at
http://www.operasoftware.com
I'm feeling good, I feel oh so fine - Until tomorrow, but that's just some other time.
heh.. they took out 6k of security bugs ;)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Another sub-optimal thing about Mozilla under the X Windows system is that Mozilla seems to set the backing store setting on all windows to NotUseful. This forces Mozilla to re-render any window that has had an Expose event (i.e. resorting the window stacking order, which means if you are a "open many windows and click around" type of guy like me you do a lot of re-rendering). If I weren't so damn busy at work, I'd pull down the sources and see if changing the settings would make Mozilla better or worse.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Years ago the WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 was released. A WYSIWYG word processer that ran with 8 mb ram, and about 40 meg hard drive space. The fact is: there is no reason that WinME should take 550 Meg alone on my hard drive.
WordPerfect for Windows 5.1 isn't a particularly good example of full features in a small footprint. One of the things that really bugged me about that particular release was that, although I could create documents with pages oriented in both landscape and portrait, I couldn't use TrueType fonts in those documents, only BitStream or other "jaggy" fonts. That was really annoying, particularly when working with WordPerfect's excellent long document management features.
WordPerfect eventually squashed this bug (in version 5.2), but IIRC, later versions had much larger footprints.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
Yup, you're exactly on target. I couldn't agree more. That's why I separate the stuff I produce at work and the stuff I produce on my own time. I _try_ to do things the right way at work, but it's hard when you get screamed at almost every day (I'm in management in addition to being a techie, so I not only write code but also manage those who do, so I get bitched out by basically everybody all the time at my company). So feel sympathy. It is a fucking cruel world. I only wish what customers really cared about was the quality of the software they receive. But they don't. Why? Because they have fucking mediocre project managers who don't _want_ the project to work, they just want somebody to point a finger at when it doesn't work. Fuck em all, I'm gonna make my money and hopefully work on more enjoyable projects on my own time.
[NS6 is crap] - Well, you should use the Mozilla daily builds, they don't have that commercial stuff.
[Mozilla is crap] - Well, what do you expect from unreleased daily builds?
Well answer me this: Which is more expensive nowadays... an experienced programmers time and a quicker time to market or RAM and CPU? It's not that "thoughtful code, and interesting tricks are no longer allowed" it's more "is it necessary to squeeze every bit of performance out of a piece of hardware anymore?" and "how much more will it cost to get a 5% increase in performance?". Back then when performance optimization and "tricks" were used more often, i'm sure programmers were REQUIRED to squeeze the performance out of the hardware because hardware cost so much. Now? How much money does it cost per meg or ram or HD space? How much power can u get for a $200 CPU?
Performance optimization to a certain extent is necessary, but as another poster said "good performance is treated as a feature" and it's a feature that is (unfortunately) pretty low on the list in todays world.
How is this a bad thing? I mean really, doesn't having more programmers around allow more opportunities for really good programmers to come about? The barrier of entry for programming has lowered, but to be really good at your job (and to get paid accordingly) you still have to be very good at what you do.
CeresSurely the instructor was trying to teach the
principles of programming not (extremely low
level) optimization.
6 searches on bugzilla and I still can't find the bug report you must have submitted. Either I can't use bugzilla or then you haven't filed a report.
If you haven't, go do it right away.
Oh, Mozilla's GUI is slow on Linux. I hope it catches up soon. Mozilla on WinNT is fast and already my primary browser. Didn't test that libc.html on it, though.
I called the first test the
Startup Test: it times how long it takes a particular program to start and display its
first page. I timed each program on its second startup so there would be no delay
from copying initial preferences and such.
Except that, the second time something starts in linux, unless you do something to interfere, it will load straight from RAM, especially on a 256MB box, thanks to linux's extremely aggressive buffer/cache setup.
Leading the partnership for a Slashdot-Free Slashdot, Son of Dog
That's bullshit.
Set IE to startup in a new process. It is still faster.
Any "preloading" can only account for load up speed. IE is much much faster than netscape in everything else after loading.
Anyhow, we delivered something that kept us afloat, and the whore that was put as a VP, for the two months that she was there managed to ruin it all for us and the company in the end (a year later). Why? Because my boss was black, I and the others were taking a liking to him and his knowledge and ideas.... They could not see past his race/color. They hated the ground he walked on. Why? Beats me.. the USA has a racist premise? I dont know, we delivered but it didnt matter... Now I'm delivering for the creators of CDMA, they like me 10 times here for a lot less effort than before in the hick redneck company...
So whats the bottom line? Anywhere you go, you will encounter prejudice, mediocrity, especially amongst people who are without technical knowledge (I'm talking about the IT industry now), biggots who hate anything but what they know to be "the true light"... Should you kill these dumb fuckers? (alas, the bumper sticker saying " Dumb people should not breed ") Probably you should. But you'd have to erase any motive before you do so, and plus you'd have to be a sadistical type to do this perfectly without a trace, some time later after all is forgotten and you're long gone from that shit company...
Yeah, you'd probably do the company a favor (unless they've managed to force all the talent out of it like they did with our former co.), if you eliminated the dumb prejudiced nigger-hating, foreign-hating, knowledge-hating everything hating fuckers... But then you might also get in a lot of trouble..
So if not that, then what else is left? Like our Harvard friend said (and he truly is genuine in his wit, it shows) - START your OWN fucking business. Deliver on a narrow vertical market product - but make sure you do it better than the medicore fuckers. Yes, you'll have problems in the beginning.. You may have to skew your free time to nothing at the beginning.. Find a friend who worked with you who knows matches your expectations and wit and knowledge in the area... Sacrifice part of your incomes to build a damn garage (if not a nice office), where you can bring up a few bsd, linux servers with the money you'd have saved.... all of them come with compilers tools and everything you need...
All you need is either an original idea, not revolutionary necessarily, but something different, that solves a particular problem better than the competition.. And if you are truly elite at heart, you will have found such a domain where you can apply your and your friends' knowledge... Do the programming at night if you have to.. Forget you wife if you have to for a while.. Maybe that'll be the part of the sacrifice... Maybe she'll leave you if she's the bitch you didn't know, on your way to fame...
Then the rest, once you have a solid minimal demo at hand, should be easy... Show it to a company that's been displeased with another company's product they're using... Hook them onto it... Give them an incentive to use it... make one up... Be nice, beg if you have to, in order to get a contract signed... Then the cash starts flowing in..
Depending on your idea, you may or may not grow to ala M$ size or at least 1/10th of what they are... But you will impress upon the people in your company, your spirit.. not a mediocre or stale one.. You'll enforce your better rules than the mediocre fuckers all over the United States which are like a fucking PLAGUE to the software industry - starting with Microsoft....
Then you try to find more people like you.. .Then you can join them... Take the mediocre fucks down, in spite of their lawyers/moneyflows/anything.. Why? Because as slow as evolution is, it is inevitable.. People (at least here in the US) will slowly but surely start to see the light of day if you give them something more than just fucking hopefull that works 100 out of a 100 times... Is it impossible? My ass... It's not impossible, it's just that most people like to ride on auto-pilot when they get into some job...
Everything is possible.. If it was possible for a dumb fucker like Gates to make MS DOS in spite of the circumstances back then, since you're so much better than he is - you can achieve at least a big fraction of what he's done if you're more clever than he is....
Nothing is impossible.. well ok, maybe not nothing, like passing through an event horizon :).. but making money in a reign of mediocrity? Shit, you have got to be dumber than most people to not be able to bank on America....
C'est la vie.
M.
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
I don't think Michael was suggesting that all apps should be coded in assembler, but a programmer who has coded in assembler is a better programmer than he would be had he not. Knowing what's going on under that curly-bracketed veneer is very useful.
Nope-- I meant "those who aggravate the public eye", anti-aesthetes... who would therefore mangle the spelling of "anaesthetic" in an exercise of ideological resistance-- c.f. "womyn", "d00d", etc. Ironic that the NT hordes are such iconoclasts...
-- You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Hey folks, I am wondering what NS6 is using for DOM. Are they following MSIE's or is it something
new?
What sucks for web designers is always trying keep
up with the latest browser offerings. So another
question for the NON Winblows users is is NS-6 worth developing for?
hope ya'll reply
C itself is very highly tuned to be easily converted into fast asm code by an entity as dumb as a compiler, but the only way it could ever compare to actual asm code would be on a CPU like the old 650X 8-bit series where there are no high-speed registers to speak of. While there are some pretty good optimizing compilers there are none that can juggle the decisions of when to use registers, the stack, and mem storage the way a human being can.
Actually, RISC designs (at least SPARC -- that's the only one I've actually had a class in) are fairly straightforward, as well. When you make a procedure call, you've got 8 registers that are exclusively used for parameter passing. Each procedure also has 8 registers for local variables that it can use without having to worry about saving what was there before. There's really not much that a person writing assembler by hand could do to improve on a good compiler.
In addition to that, the compiler is going to be better about keeping dependant instructions as far apart as possible than a person could be. That means that compiler-generated code (at least from a low-level language like C or C++) is going to have fewer pipeline stalls and, thus, be faster.
It's mainly x86 that has to be heavily tweaked to get the best performance out of it. There were probably older architectures that had similar complexities (VAX? PDP? 68xxx?), but everything but x86 has pretty much died out.
However, important details like who owns a blob of memory take a more than disproportionate amount of time in understanding the Mozilla code. Feel free to take this particular comment as a gripe about either C++ or Mozilla.
My most important gripe about C++ is not the language itself, it's its support on UNIX. GDB just plain sucks when debugging C++ code, where it does an acceptable job on debugging C.
I sincerely doubt the "reduction" of several thousand C calls to a hundred C++ classes makes the thing easier to debug. Remember the "seven, plus or minus two" rule from cognitive psychology. C++ is supposed to make this issue better, by reducing the amount of bookkeeping to enable the developer to focus on functionality. Guess what? Most C routines I've debugged in the old code base required fewer things to jot down than the C++ classes in the new code base have -- precisely because the combination of data hiding and the ability to corrupt memory easily co-exist in the same language.
In an ideal world, memory corruption (beyond algorithmical corruption) would not exist, and debugging would be easier with an OO language. C++ doesn't offer this, and as a result, debugging it is more complicated than debugging C. I'm not talking about simple, algorithmical bugs -- those are easy to track down in C++, but those are not showstoppers either. It's the hard bugs, the one that take down the app, which are much harder to debug in C++ than in C.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
The fact is: there is no reason that WinME should take 550 Meg alone on my hard drive.
I honestly think MS trys to make there distro big so it's harder to download off usenet, or hotline.
I remember trying to get "The Sims" off hotline once, it took me all night to download the 150megs, i could pull 80k/sec off my DSL, but the hotline server could only provide 10k/sec. so there you go.
If MS really wanted to they could probably get WinME down to 40megs or so, it's just a guess, but the actualy OS code (even including IE) really isn't that big. it's all the other junk they have like "Free offers with AOL and MSN", windows media player, wallpapers, etc...
look at the download for Gnome, it's a hell of a lot bigger then the linux kernal. GUI's and pretty looking shit take up space!
-Jon
this is my sig.
Interessting read. Sad it hasn't been moderated up more and noone commented it.
:-/
I'm not a programmer, but as a user I really like the idea of running the app of my choice on the OS of my choice.
As it stands now I've got to run multiple OS's (dual boot, emulators, different HW, whatever) to be able to run all my prefered apps.
And OS independent API really sounds cool.
But this is Slashdot... there is only GNU/linux/Gnome API, all else sucks, so why use time on an "inferior" API? Guess that's why your fine post is ignored.
Bjarne
I cannot imagine what you could be talking about, Live Picture being slow. Compared to the competition, it is blazingly fast. You could work with much larger files on much slower machines with less memory than has ever been possible with Photoshop or GIMP. Yes, in part it gains this speed by rendering only at screen resolution and deferring all time consuming processes until all the edits are done and you build to a final tiff file.
But this required incredible sophistication in the program.
I probably should clarify it in my resume as you really can't see what I actually did on Live Picture, but I didn't write the thing - almost all the work I did on it was debugging with a little bit of performance tuning. In particular, I fixed bugs towards the end of the 2.6 release and then I did all the engineering in the 2.6.1 release pretty much by myself, entirely debugging a codebase of 70 MB of C++ source code. Yes, 70 megabytes.
If you think intel hasn't done anything amazing I suggest you compare a Xeon to a 4004. Mistakes do happen, the fact is even for all of Intels mistakes the errors in hardware are much rarer than errors in software.
Why was it that Intel got all the heat for the bugs in their chips but Microsoft doesn't? Why should software be held to lower standards than harware?
While Live Picture was a very sophisticated product, I feel the company was poorly managed. Please see my resignation from Live Picture.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
anaesthesiologist (ns-thz-l-jst)
n.
Variant of anesthesiologist.
You missed.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Ethics are so passe. IE has the technical requirements of either running a Windows OS, or selling one's soul to the devil to have it ported. If Microsoft didn't use its marketshare to destroy competing companies and promote bug riddled insecure technology, then I would have no qualms about contributing to their share.
Netscape on the other hand runs on just about everything.
Explaining this stuff is like trying to explain standards to somebody who has never done web development. Better the lowest common denominator of broken and mismatched standards than closed proprietary ones from a company known to abuse power.
There are three states.
Eating, Sleeping, Neither
So two bools are almost sensible. Since the Eating&&Sleeping state is illegal, it would be better to represent it with an enum anyway
It could be argued that the pet may have more states in further versions. So booleans are more extensible. You wouldn't have to track all your code for NOT_EATING_AND_NOT_SLEEPING to substitute it for NOT_EATING_AND_NOT_SLEEPING_AND_BARKING.
Or make it a class.
Don't you think so?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
or ns6 for that matter, wile it has improved over the past few months. the product has this wierd cheap port feal to it, almost like its running its own OS under windows/linux (almost a java feeling). Im guessing that its supposed to be that way so its ported easyer to other platforms. but even then it apears the only 2 os's that work well with it are Windows/Linux. the BeOS version has to be rewritten from scratch almost becouse of memory problems(from what I understand)and I dont know whatever happend to the QNX port. but I would much rather have a native app or even a ported app made native (like ns4.x or opera) hopefully the KDE browser will get better in time, Im assuming it will (but we all know how long it takes for a kde relese ;)
Konqueror 2.0 can't even do HTTPS through a proxy or deal with an image inside of a form button.
Opera can't even stay running for two minutes (Sure, it's supposedly 'beta', but I wouldn't even count it as beta quality, something that crashes that quickly should be kept in the development area longer than "Wow, we got it to compile, lets release it as a beta")
With NS6 I can finally have a browser on Linux that I can use for pretty much anything.Maybe once Konqueror 2.0 is actually finished I'll actually use that, but for now I'm sticking with NS6, so what if it drinks memory, I've got enough to handle it.
Users want features. They don't mind buying RAM. The people who complain about always having to upgrade their systems are invariably the people who get the least out of them. And if you're not planning to use more features, why would you upgrade your software? And if you don't upgrade your software, what difference does it make to you that the newest systems out there have more bus bandwidth or higher clock speeds?
Now, excepting for that handful of software products that force you into an upgrade because everyone else already has and you need compatibility (no reason to name names), the degree to which your software does or does not do what you need it to do, is determined when you bring it home from the store or download it off the local FTP site. If it does everything you need it to do, you don't need a faster computer, you don't need upgrades, and you don't need to worry about programmers making everything slower. However, for the vast majority of users, there's always something they can think that their computer ought to be doing and isn't. If they want it, they'd better expect to cough up a little extra for it, because free software or not, the WORLD isn't free.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This leads to the ridiculous situation that an old computer runs slower and slower as new software is loaded on it, until you finally have to buy a new one just to run at all.
It's not just that you have the perception that your computer of old is running slower than the new computers because it was less zippy when you bought it, but because the regressive performance dehancements of operating systems and bloated applications really do make your computers run slower.
Note that I used to run SlackWare and Apache on a 100 MHz 486, serving up web pages (admittedly with a light load) while I used X at its console - and it worked fine. But when I loaded Windows 95 on it it was dog slow. There's no question of running Windows 98.
I had a 233 MHz Pentium II with 32 MB of Ram that I ran BeOS 3 for Pentium on. It worked great - I shipped Spellswell for BeOS Intel with this. But when BeOS 4 came out and they switched to Elf format, I had to upgrade to 96 MB because I couldn't run a compile and read my email at the same time.
Later I installed a near-final beta of Windows 2000 server on this machine. I intended to use it to develop a Java GUI app under CodeWarrior for Windows. To get the machine to run at all - not even running CodeWarrior - I had to add another 128 MB of RAM for a total of 224 MB. The machine was dog slow even after the memory upgrade.
There is no excuse for this. New features should not come at the expense of performance, and each new release of both operating systems and applications should be both faster and take up less space, not more. If substantial new features have been added then there may be cause for a little more code size but certainly not what we see in practice, such as what was listed in the Netscape 6 review.
Why does this happen?
One thing is because programmers are lazy, and if their code runs slow they assume the user will just get a faster machine. But friends, the user wants to buy fast hardware so they can actually run fast, not just so they can run at all.
Pressure to ship a commercial product makes managers fail to support efforts to do substantial performance tuning, especially tuning that is not localized but would require substantial rearchitecture.
And finally a lot of people just don't know how to architect or code. I think we could all benefit from learning and writing some assembly, so we could really understand what our software is doing.
Maybe then we could strip out some of the thick layers of software bureaucracy that lies between the user and his cpu.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Considering the register's called AH, I'd guess he's writing x86 assembly.
In Intel assembly, MOV's destination parameter is on the left. This is switched compared to most of the Unix world. And the 68k world.
When programs become big due to feature creep, then the number of accidental bugs increases as well. As a badly architectured program grows in size a programmer spends more time trying to debug than actually improve the program.
The other thing that happens in program development is that as features are added to an architecture that was not designed for them, then they are added in the form of a hack because of time constraints placed on them both by marketing and customers. If you end up adding several layers of 'new' features then your program becomes one big hack that is impossible to maintain - when I say impossible I am mean you could maintain it with tonnes of time and money. If programmers were given the necessary time to add the new features then you would see a lot more stable programs.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Netscape would have been better served by enhancing the Mozilla preject in the key areas it is lacking (speed, bugs) rather than adding tons of useless marketing features.
Netscape _was_ a "champion" of OSS and a leader in the anti-MS compaign. Their key followers held their torch because of these things. Too bad they spend their effort alienating their strongest supporters.
netscape 4.7 was a dream compared to netscape 6. I work at tech support for @home in illinois and after the launch of netscape 6 everyone called us with their trouble. what the customers dont understand is that the problem is not on their end. when they call asking for help we just ask. "can you connect to the internet by other means such as internet explorer? If they say yes than we give um the boot
drug law enforcement is modern day witch hunting.
Ok come on, what kind of a review is that, I got to the bottom of the page expecting about 4 more pages of tests, but no he hit conclusion straight away.
Firstly the fact that NS6 takes a few seconds more to load. What like people are constantly closing and reopening netscape? When I boot into Linux I load netscape 6 and unless it crashes it stays loaded until I next boot to Windows for some Counter Strike.
As for 70meg for the HD space. Well I think that's wrong, but can't be sure, but what I can be sure is that most of it is down to the JAVA VM that is supplied. This is the reason that my mozilla nightlies when installed only take 25meg. And anyway what if it is 70 meg for the full install? Hell you can buy a very nice 41gig IBM HD in the UK for 112quid (about 160 bucks, and probably cheaper in the US). I currently have over 46 gig of HD space, by today's standards 70 meg is just a drop in the ocean.
Also the way he calculated the memory usage of the browsers is just wrong, perhaps someone should point the reviewer to a web page that explains the concept of threaded applications.
As to recommend using NS4.7x, are you insane? On old netscape I would get crashes very very often, where as now I am very surprised if i get a crash in netscape 6. Hell even the nightlies of mozilla that I test out are more stable than netscape 4.7x. To recommend NS4.7x seems a very stupid idea, I've been using mozilla since M12, and since NS6 came out with JAVA support I haven't used NS4.7x once and never looked back. Perhaps if the reviewer had actually used the browsers for a length of time rather than to time how quickly they load, see how much mem they use, and run "du" on the directories they might actually have been able to write a useful review.
Yes netscape released NS6 far to early, but it is not a bad browser, the functionality is all pretty much there, all that is required is for them to fix the bugs. As far as i see the browser works fine apart from a few bugs, it's the mail and news that has most of the bugs.
As for the review, very unhelpful, and very irresponsible, this can be very damaging to mozilla and NS6. Mainly because there is a large portion of users out there that think that if someone can string some words together and have it labelled as an article then they must be right.
Anyway, enough of that.
Cheers,
Alex
Many graphicly and computationly intencive apps do use floating point ops. Thsts why so many people had problems with the original P1's FP bugs. Guess what, it was not just people who were running thing such as MathCAD, gamers and people who did spreadsheet and graphics work had problems too. BTW the K6/2 FP isn't defective, it's just slow, and that was (and still is) a major compliant about it. The pages he was using are graphicly intencive (he even says so in the review), so I can see how the K6/2's slow FP could've affected his results.
Unless you consider the fact that the kernel is the central part of the OS, and flaws in the kernel can easily cause problems elseware. Doesn't sound like an independent variable to me.
I still don't understand why he used an old version of a beta kernel in his tests. You want the system that you're testing software on to be as stable and as solid as possible, since you want to be sure that any problems you experance are caused by the software you're testing, and not by something else.
NS6 was based on a 6 week old version of mozilla, as another poster pointed out. It was based off of an older devolpment version of Mozilla, I would be supprised if it didn't have bugs, considering that Mozilla is still in beta.
On that, I agree with you, but, realisticly, NS may not have had a choice. They were facing pressure from the up and comming release of MSIE6, they allready missed one boat, missing this one for the sake of "waiting untill it's ready" could've proved disastorus for them.
Somewhat off-topic, but this is a good forum to vent... :-)
I downloaded the final release of NS 6 as soon as it (officially) came out. I had been sick of having to load IE just to view pages that won't load in NS 4.x, and I was on the vergoe of moving to IE altogether. The only reason I haven't made the switch is because of my innate hatred for Microsoft, and the fact that, since I've been using Netscape since Mosaic, it has some sentimental value.
I am very disappointed with the new Netscape. The themes are nice, and the interface is an improvement, but it has wayyy too many problems. It takes forever to launch- so much so that, if I launch it by opening a local .htm or .jpg file, Windows times out with "cannot find the file specified" before NSCP launches. The browser is buggy, clunky, and feels like a beta. Unlike its predecessor, it only writes to the history file upon exit, so when (not if) it crashes, I can't get back to the page via the history. I have been a staunch supporter of Netscape for years, but I just can't do it anymore.
My point is that GUI apps should have these sorts of features. I spend a lot of time in shells, and they are a valid computing environment, but if I'm going to go through the trouble of running a GUI, I want it to work like a well-integrated system.
I want the Gnome and KDE projects to agree on some interoperability standards not because of some warm-hearted wish to have everybody get along, but because using Gnome apps under KDE is often painful -- at least, compared to using similar, QT-based apps. This is especially true of some Gnome apps which trigger the launch of a number of other Gnome applications which I don't want to use. I'm sure I'd feel the same way about KDE apps running under the Gnome desktop.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired (to Mozilla's defense, both Microsoft and Apple have gone down the tubes in this area as well, for example, I'm abhorred by Windows 2000's "browser like" clicking, where a single click will open a file rather than selecting it, and it isn't particularly obvious when it behaves the old way or the new).
Anyway, to be able to fix something in Mozilla requires a significant investment of time on the part of the contributor. In the first Mozilla releases, which were based on the 4.x user interface, I could usually locate something I want to fix in an acceptable amount of time. Now, with the overhaul and the complete switch to C++, I spend hours grovelling through the thing, usually without coming up with an answer.
So, open source or not, Mozilla's improvement still hinges in great part on the full time developers, who live and breath that code base. For me, and I think for a lot of other contributors, it has just become too complex.
I have high hopes for its evolution over time, but it won't be soon that it will be as fast as 4.x. It will be interesting to see how spinoffs like Galeon will handle leveraging functionality from Mozilla. Time will tell whether XUL will become a boon to browser extension development, or remain a drag on the UI performance...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
-p4
(c) All Rights Released.
The delay is because Netscape is significantly worse at handling pages with big tables than IE.
Netscape 4.7 is better than Netscape 3 at it but it's still worse than IE.
And Netscape 6 should theoretically be better but the developers ensured there was enough bloat to make it worse.
Cheerio,
Link.
Maybe at the moment, but there are two linked efforts underway to improve support for OS X (an OS that isn't even out yet). Firstly, it's being Carbonized and secondly, there is work to make a hybrid browser - use Quartz for the rendering and Unix for the TCP/IP. Full info is here. In other words, Mozilla is coming to OS X. This is a minor miracle considering how Apple have done their very best to ignore Mozilla.
Bwah ha hahaha
Thats what happens with open source. Crap, bloat and sloth. To many cooks spoil the soup (or something like that). Not to mention rogue whiny brat "programmers" who just HAVE to add yet another a useless, yet COOL feature.
Open Source is dead. Long Live capitalistic software development.
Go ahead, lower the score to -1 googolplex. you know I'm right but just can't face it.
What people often realize is that mozilla isn't slow.
If you run just the rendering core, its *very* fast.
However, it doesn't have all the "nice" features like history, etc... but this shows that
where they really need to speed up is in a relativly minor area, which is why it will be done in 2 Milestones, while its take 18 to get here.
(M20 is the first "release" for people that don't know..)
-- What doesn't kill you hasn't tried hard enough.
I want to apologize, I wrote quickly and when I said "programmers are lazy" that came out saying "all programmers are lazy". I more meant to say that the programmers who write bloatware are lazy.
That's not the only reason for bloatware. You can have hardworking programmers who are hamstrung by management. But I think the reason is important in practice.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
It's not clear to me what that even means, but it suggests a point that's lost on a lot of users, including journalists who really should know better.
KDE and Gnome offer desktops as well as a collection of apps -- but you can use the apps with either desktop. I keep reading comments like "I used to use Gnome because of gimp, but then I switched to KDE for Konqueror. When Evolution comes out, I'll probably switch back to Gnome." It's not like you're choosing a religion! Kmail, xchat, grip, Konqueror, Nautilus -- use what you like. There's no need to choose one or the other. For crying out loud, that's why each desktop puts the other guys' apps in the desktop menu!
I couldn't agree more about the need to know fundementals in a mid to (especially) high level software position. I think this is the main concrete advantage that one gains from a college degree, the ad nauesaeum repetition of fundemental skills. Once you realize that most programming languages are expressing the same ideas at their core then getting up to speed with new languages, APIs, and OSs becomes extremely natural. My job requires me to work with new technologies constantly, sometimes jumping between projects as a firefighter for only a few days or weeks. But knowledge of the fundementals makes all problems tractable.
Knowing 'what' your code does also aids greatly in designing it right to begin with, so you can be proud of your work even looking back at it in the future. The programs I wrote before college did some neat and tricky things, but looking back at them now I'm tempted to lose my lunch. Even my early professional code, before my coworkers set me in line, is mildly embarrassing to think about. I'm concerned that the Internet gold-rush of the mid to late 90s created a 'fsck education' attitude that will hurt the field for a long time.
Am I the only one who HATES the button size in NS6? I mean, in 4.7x, you could opt to do away with the icon part of the Back,Forward,Home, etc. buttons, but I can't find a way to do so with 6. I have valuable screen real-estate taken up by pretty pictures that I don't want.
Damn, I'm making myself blind with resolution so tiny I'm lucky to see what I'm typing for the extra few pixels, and they pull this crap?
tend to agree with Jamie Zawinski's analysis of threads in Netscape: if you write a single-COE state machine.
Do you have a reference for this? This sounds interesting; I'd like to read more.
cpeterso
Okay, I've read your comments twice and I see where you're coming from. Sometimes software is slow because developers have coded or designed it poorly because they were lazy or incompetant.
However, that's almost never the case where I'm working (where I'd rather not mention). I work with some absolutely gifted technical peers who are sometimes forced to release crap because of deadlines. I also work with guys who have become drones who pump out crappy software that does it's job because they are only measured on (1) did you hit your deadline (2) did it meet the functional spec.
It's not lazy coders (usually). It's a misguided reward system built by managers that don't know the first thing about software development. They fail to grasp that maintaining this terrible software will cost a fortune in the future.
So before you blame the programmer for being lazy, consider what he's working against.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I hate to harp, but Konquerer would have blown away all the browsers in this test had they bothered to include it. Galleon and other Mozilla-based browsers wouldn't have been bad either. If load time and memory footprint is what you're interested in, Netscape and Mozilla are definitely NOT the right browser for you.
Though nothing to write home about (compared to the superior IE5.5)
Superior? This is good, considering that IE 5.5 trashes the networking DLLs on Windows 95 (because, say M$, Windows 95 is no longer supported <conspiracy tone=evil>...so... why does it install on '95 at all? Scumbags!</conspiracy>) and 5.5sp1 occasionally knackers the name services on at least Windows 2000. Umm... security? Let's not go there.
Mozilla is still slow, although you can do some amazing things with it using XUL and friends. NS6, however, is even slower and buggier. So much for ``flagship'' status. Konqueror, although still obviously beta, absolutely hammers NS6. Even ``testbed'' browsers like Amaya are comparable, which is pretty disgraceful. I use Konqueror for most things, and occasionally Mozilla (M18). Both are useable (although I wish Mozilla didn't look so much like NS), both have taken a definitely encouraging direction, both are improving faster than IE. So: the future's so bright I've gotta adjust my gamma.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One of the main reasons NS4 is so poor is that Netscape has had to make sure that different huge codebases did the same thing on several platforms. Now they have just a cross-platform framework that allows them to write one browser codebase that runs on many platforms and moving to a new platform needs to just have the framework ported not the whole huge Communicator package. I agree about theming though, it seems a bit unnecessary although the reasoning is that corporations can now have their own browser theme for their employees. What the hell, at least it's here now and real competition can resume, especially when AOL uses NS instead of IE (God that's bad, needing AOL to save the browser market).
But anyway, when someone uses any kind of plugin, esp shockwave or one for MIDI "music", NS6 just sucks. It keeps popping up little boxes asking if you want to auto-download the plugin (which of course isn't available). But the stupid part? THE GUI FREEZES UNTIL YOU CLICK OK OR CANCEL. And sometimes more than one box pops up at the same time and you have to figure out which one to click first.
If you don't believe me, try:
http://www.tuneinn.com/
and wait a few.
Or WORSE, try
http://www.bluemountain.com/
Try to send a card with midi music on it. It pops up that damn box EVERYTIME you enter a new character in one of the text boxes.
I mean it's just plain ridiculous. I won't even go into the ugly UI or slowness issues here. Sad to see that IE is *truly* the faster and superior browser.
James
Netscape 6 is currently in its initial release. They are getting more users than ever, and more feedback. They are getting automated crash reports. They are getting reviews.
All this is useful feedback for the development team to know where to put their resources. I mean - win95 underwent improvements after its initial release. OSR 2 was IMHO a pretty stable release, and still fairly efficient. This was right before they integrated the browser. Then, it took them a while to get that right.
Look at the big picture. We have a very promising product, finally implementing standards across platforms. We have access to the source code. If we don't like the memory footprint, we should work on that, not bitch about. Rejoice!
(BTW - I really wish it would be faster on my p166 w/64 megs of RAM.. )
Stop the brainwash
btw, you should use MSVCRT's _beginthread() instead of Win32's CreateThread(). _beginthread() initializes thread-local storage for threads that call MSVCRT functions.
Also (from MSDN\CreateThread): A thread that uses functions from the C run-time libraries should use the beginthread and endthread C run-time functions for thread management rather than CreateThread and ExitThread. Failure to do so results in small memory leaks when ExitThread is called.
cpeterso
Take out java support. I never use it and it only slows me down.
Just delete the java libraries and use navigator ("lite"), I think. I'm running 4.75 on about 7 Megs of RAM, good for someone stuck on 32.
The reviewer didn't mention this in his review (probably because it's a manual hack) but it really makes a contrast between Netscape 6 without java and Netscape 4 without java.
One thing I would like to see though is for netscape to open-source version 4. Then I can trimm it down even more to get rid of extra features I never use. Unlike most people (apparently), I DO care about buying more RAM; I have better hardware to buy, like a bigger monitor or faster video card that has a native framebuffer driver in the kernel.
# debian/rules
Netscape 4.7 Netscape 6
Unstable Unstable
Weak interface Weak interface
Bloated Bloated
Weak security Weak security
Slow Slow
Need I go on? Netscape is a joke. AOL keeps the name going as it makes marketing iPlanet easier, but is afraid to make Netscape too good. Make Netscape too, good, AOL users will want it integrated into AOL. Take Netscape out of AOL, Microsoft leaves AOL out of Windows.
The worst part is the dedication of the Mozilla programmers. Those people keep sinking tons of time and effort into Mozilla, hoping to improve Netscape. Imagine what we might get if all of that talent were dedicated to producing something totally new.
MY GOD! A new program requires MORE system resources than its two-year old predecessor??? what is the world coming to???
Seriously, if those guys at MSFT didn't hate Linux, they'd just crank out a (slower, less capable) version of IE for Linux, and stomp all over Netscape.
/. hate MSFT, but not all Linux users hate MSFT, it's just an OS to them.
Yeah, I know, many
Will in Seattle
Netscape's browser has gone downhill since they started calling it Communicator. It theoretically allowed you to communicate but only if you could do so in the 20 minute time span between it launching and crashing. I loved Netscape 3 although it supported the fucking blink tag. When Compared to IE3 Netscape whomped all ass in a pretty hands down sort of way. Both companies splooged out a 4.0 release of their respective products and use folks in userland were left looking for a good browser. Communicator took the decent backbone of Navigator and stuck way too much barely-out-of-beta shit onto it which horribly reduced its stability. Then along comes Mozilla, Netscape had already decided not to use system APIs for their browser because they were just too damn cool. Then Mozilla tries to come up with an entirely new component framework? It is fairly cool from a technical aspect, separating the display almost entirely from the application's real work. This however should NOT be the component system used in a production level product which Netscape has done with their 6.0 release. Wow, I can rescript the interface entirely displaying neat pictures and putting the buttons in different places. Thats just genital mutilation when the underlying code of the system can't render HTML properly and when it does takes up 4+ GB of RAM. NS6 loads up an entire component framework and layout engine just to run. That is fucking overkill for a signle application. Netscape should have put some arrogance aside and just used native APIs. Loading a whole new API to run a single app is like making your dialog boxes system modal.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Thank god they didn't release a 5.0.
Got friends?
I use ns6 on my 2000 box at work, and mozilla at home. Being a (sort of) web guy, I keep ns4 and ie (at work, no 'doze at home) around just to test pages with.
/home/spauldo/.netscape/lock' because of this.
I read a lot of comics, and with ns4, the browser dies all the freakin' time because of the stupid doubleclick and other banner ad companies' trackers. It's rediculous. I've got a button on my gnome bar set to 'killall -9 netscape ; rm
Mozilla and ns6 both have no problems with this. I could set up junkbuster, but it's just easier this way.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
About a month ago I switched from Netscape 4.72 to IE5.5,b/c people told me it's faster on DSL.I miss those bookmarks real bad. It is faster on DSL.Why?
The unfortunate thing here is... you're wrong. IE is currently the model browser.
Nothing beats it.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
The startup time for Netscape 6 is ridiculously more than that of the Mozilla nightly he used. This doesn't suprise me because Netscape 6 uses the Java plugin. This plugin is loaded at startup and would probably add 10 seconds (yes, it's that substantial) to the startup time on that test machine.
Mozilla nightlies don't include the Java plugin.
1994 - "Mosaic's cool."
1995 - "Wow, Netscape fixed most of Mozilla's problems and has Mail and News."
1996 - "Netscape is bigger. They should think of splitting up the exe into browser, mail and news."
1997 - "Netscape is bigger. They should think of splitting up the exe into browser, mail and news."
1998 - "Netscape is bigger. They should think of splitting up the exe into browser, mail and news."
1998 - Netscape source released as Mozilla.
"Cool, now they will split netscape up into separate packages."
Minutes later, the Trolls release QtScape which had a KDE consistent interface.
1998 - Mozilla gets new themable, portable front end which looks as pretty as xedit.
1998 - "Mozilla is ugly and bigger. I don't need themes. They should split up the exe into browser, mail and news."
1999 - "Mozilla is ugly and bigger. I don't need themes. They should split up the exe into browser, mail and news."
2000 - "Mozilla is ugly and bigger. I don't need themes. They should split up the exe into browser, mail and news."
2000 - "Ok, Mozilla looks ok, but it's bigger, and I still don't need themes. They should split up the exe into browser, mail and news"
Granted there are a lot of bad programmers out there. Too many developers don't have the education required (reading Learn C++ in 21 days does not count) to really be programmers. They are often better prepared for QA, Tech. Writing or technical support. This is not to say they are not as smart or good; many good developers would not do well in these other areas. I really think that degrees in computer science (for people young enough to have gone to a school with a CS department) are a prerequisite to becoming a good programmer. I learned a ton in college about developing high quality software. Yes, every programmer should know a little assembly. This what all code gets down to eventually and it is important to understand the tool you are using, the computer. Assembly teaches you that. It also enforces commenting and structed programming techniques because without them you will fail to write even the most modest of programs.
Even with this issue I still feel that the major problem with software out there is bad managment. Managers rarely are able to stand up for engineering princibles. This is one reason why computer science is often not taken seriously by many in the world. What other engineering science would produce such a horrible group of products? What if car and sky scrapper engineers produced products at our level? Even in companies that sell software, the head of engineering almost never has enough power to say, "Hey I know that marketing wants it yesterday but to do it right we need more time!" All too often they are forced to just push the developers to the max. If they don't another manager is found. The battle between engineering and marketing/sales is slanted heavily towards the sales guys. In many companies' minds, sales people make money while developers cost money. They want to minimize costs and maximize revenues. "Bugs? Isn't that what we have a Tech. Support for? Why don't we charge for that? Heck, why don't we make the thing so hard to use that our users will have to pay us to learn how to use it!" It goes on and on.
Somewhere in the 90's companies like MS managed to prove that you could make a lot of money by focusing on features that sort of worked rather than a high quality product. Most people are so cynical about software you hear things like "Never try x.0" and "wait for at least the 3rd service pack." They expect things not to work. If you claim that your software is bug free they will just not believe it. Then they will buy the one with more features figuring your software probably had as many bugs in it. This kind of attitude makes it very hard to focus on software quality. Most software companies may have a QA/Testing department but often these groups are more focused on CYA (cover your ass) activity than real quality. Sadly, in most areas, it is not profitable to make high quality software. At least it is not believed to be.
Two of the areas left where quality really matters are open source software and enterprise software. I have worked on device drivers for network and fibre channel cards where a 24/7 server is the target. This things have to be fast and reliable. We had to make (sorry Ford) quality job #1. This is one case where software quality is neccessary for profitability. Of course, in open source the developers are judged only on the quality of their code. Then again, many developers could give a flying fig about what others think about the quality of their code without some incentive (fix this or you are fired).
I really wish the computer scientists, software engineers, programmers, developers, or whatever we are to be called would have a real professional orgranization, like lawyers and doctors have. This org could help with quality control like other orgs do with their professions. There are many cs orgs but none with any real power in the public eye. You wouldn't use a lawyer who was not bar certified but what about a programmer? What about a supposedly technical manager?
-- soldack
okay, i'm an unabashed netscape supporter. i'm also a developer (not for netscape).
the installer did not work on my debian box, so i bought the CD. it got here in a couple days; about $6 total.
The product is a little rough. Seems slow to do things sometimes. This looks ugly in my process table:
000 S 1000 261 255 0 60 0 - 37251 unix_d ? 00:00:04 java_vm
040 S 1000 262 261 0 60 0 - 37251 poll ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 263 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 264 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 265 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 266 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 267 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 268 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 269 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 270 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 271 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 272 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 273 262 0 60 0 - 37251 poll ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 274 262 0 60 0 - 37251 nanosl ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 275 262 0 60 0 - 37251 rt_sig ? 00:00:00 java_vm
040 S 1000 276 262 0 60 0 - 37251 tcp_re ? 00:00:00 java_vm
...but, overall, it has become my main browser and mail agent, win, lose or draw.
What the heck, if I have to suffer for a bit while a company fine tunes their product, I don't mind. Freedom is never free.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Don't click the link; a bunch of windows with Furbies start, and I am not making this up, hopping around your screen. As well, two respawn for every one killed. The reason the link is a troll is simple: it *is* a troll.
On the flip side, if killing furbies give you a thrill, click. Otherwise, leave it alone.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
The really depressing thing is that, as far as resource usage is concerned, Mozilla is probably as good as it's going to get (Minus the leaks, or course)
I say this, because I think that Gecko does a far better job of managing resources than IE with respect to complex dynamic HTML, scripting, and emulating atandard user interface.
The memory usage of the Mozilla broswer (not mail) is pretty consistent now, although there still are some leaks. It will kick an at about 8-10MB and perhaps creap up to 16-20MB by the end of the day.
IE will typically use 4-5 MB for normal browsing, which is good (Same as embedded Gecko). However, IE turns into an absolute pig once it starts to render dynamic content, and emulate normal user interfaces, like what Gecko has to do all of the time. Blox is a good example, and a very neat site (some of it even works with Nav4.7) Take IE here and watch it ballon to 20-40 MB.
Comparing how Gecko and IE handle dynamic content, I would say Gecko does a damn fine job of it, and I doubt it could get any better
And that sucks, because a 30MB process makes for a real lousy mail reader. Actually, that really sucks, because I love the new mail reader in Mozilla, but I can't use it.
I've got 256MB of RAM, so you might think that 30MB Isn't such a bad thing. The problem is that if Mozilla get swapped out of memory(most likely because I've just run a build) It takes literally 10-15 seconds for Mozilla to swap back in (on NT), just so I can check my mail! Nav4.7, which I do use as my mail reader and primary browser, takes up about 8 MB, and takes about 2 seconds to swap back in.
I think that the only way Mozilla will be able to curb it's resource usage, WRT swapping, is to allow Mozilla run multiple isolated processes for mail, composer, etc. That way, you're dealing with perhaps a few 8MB processes instead of one giant 30+ MB process. And, you wouldn't have to worry about a crash taking down your entire session.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
He's using the 2.4.0-test4 kernel, which is a prerealase kerrnel, and his version is rather old. He's also using a K6/2 processor, which has been known to have certian issuses and deficenties with floating point operations.
Even though his hardware should be ok (as long as it's meeting his needs), he should try his review agian with a newer 2.4.0-test kernel, or a recent 2.2.x kernel. The kernel he's using is a older bata version, and bugs in the kernel may have influnced his test results.
I tried NS6, but I'm going to wait untill NS6.1 is out before passing judgement, and I recommend you do the same. Considering that it was based off a 2 month old version of mozilla, and mozilla is still bata quilaty, the fact that it's buggy isn't that suprising.
Netscape 6 was the first go. It was a scramble to get all the features in and an acceptable level of stability. I think they achieved that.
Now the mozilla team is concentrating on the next release, and the *TOP* priorities are memory footprint, speed and bug fixes of course. In addition, a lot of effort is being put towards getting the gecko component small and usable, for projects like nautilus and galeon.
So just wait for 6.1 -- most of the problems raised in the article should be fixed.
Mozilla/NS6 are slow. I keep reading about it being fast... but I don't get it. At least on my PII 400 running Debian/Woody.
............ lagged - Bring up preferences, browsing menus, opening a new browser window.... EVERYTHING.
First off. Everything is
Secondly. Rendering speed: I Do Not See It. Here is a quantitative test:
Try to load a simple html file from the hard drive (/usr/doc/glibc-doc/libc.html in debian/woody) that is 3.4MB. It takes over 145 seconds (current Mozilla and NS6 same results)!!! On 4.76, the same file loads in under 9 seconds.
Searches for text within a loaded file are also rediculously slow in Mozilla/NS6. On a long file, the closer you get to the bottom of the document, the longer the searches take! It can take many seconds for a search to advance just one line of text in a big document.
I left Netscape 6 running for a few days. Every 12 hrs it had grown another meg or two of memory, whether or not I'd touched it. This is using the taskmgr in Win2K.