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Linux: Browser Wars
Anderson Silva writes "LinuxToday has an article doing a pretty basic comparison on some of the major linux browsers. Although a nice article, and with a fair result, I still think Opera is the best browser available for Linux." I prefer knoqueror, although recent builds seem to have random hangs on images.google.com.
This proves once again, that there still isn't a good browser for Linux. So we have to decide on which one is less crappy, and not which one is better.
I don't understand why this is so. It sickens me that browsing on windows with IE is more stable then anything on the linux platform. Its just not right.
The Mozilla version shipping with Mandrake 8.0 is 0.8.7. While stability is pretty much unchanged since then, Mozilla has gotten noticably faster during the 0.9.x cycle. 0.9.1 is usable on a 350 Mhz Pentium II... sort of. 0.9.3, while still being slower than Navigator 4.77, isn't bad at all. It's finally fast enough that I can use it as my normal, day-to-day browser (I was using Nav 4.77, because while it was unstable as hell, at least I didn't have to wait 20 seconds for a page to load).
I imagine that simliar situations are true for at least one or two of the other browsers compared. Development on Mozilla, especially, is happening very fast and comparing something current 6 months ago is not, IMHO particularly meaningful.
A German magazine did a similar thing a while ago, only they included MSIE. It won hands on in every discipline from speed to adherence to standards.
A pity that it wasn't at least mentioned.
Censorship on Slashdot
I'm sorry, but aren't the versions of the browsers used somehow important to the story? Was it Mozilla 0.9, or 0.9.2? Netscape 4.08 or Netscape 4.7, or Netscape 6? Hard to tell what these tests mean, especially if not the latest versions of each browser are being used.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
why oh why where text only browsers not included ?
is this because their user base is small ?
I personally use it but I find that alot of people dont
because I find lynx the fall back GOD the page doent render in netscape or some fool has FSCK the HTML I just use lynx and away I go
really how much information (I am intrested in )is presented in pictures on the web
not much I am sure
lynx is my fallback king (-;
I use it when I telnet into places to check they can see stuff plus all I need is a telnet app which I can obtain for most OS's
what do you relie on to ALWAYS give you the web ?
(me its a telnet client and lynx)
regards
john jones
Hey, at least I didn't post a lame joke about the obvious misspelling. Get a life, people, willya?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Sorry, the amount of memory used by XFree86 isn't really all that much. What you're seeing when you see huge memory usage for X in top is because the X process has memory mapped your video card's graphics RAM into its memory space, several times over.
On my 32 meg GeForce2MX card, top shows X taking up 135megs of RAM. On a friend's system with an old school 2 meg VRAM card, X is only shown taking up 4-5 megs of RAM.
X is actually pretty damn memory efficient. Remember it was originally created when a workstation might have had one megabyte of memory, total. If you have a lot of windows open at high color depth, there will be some real RAM taken up to store those bitmaps, depending on whether you have 'save unders' enabled, but that's a function of all of the programs you have running, more than of X's inefficiency, even if the memory is counted against the X server process and not the X programs themselves.
FWIW.
I still think that the browser tests covered here are rather meaningless on a 32 meg machine. These days, browsers will take up close to a full 32 megs of RAM on a UNIX system, especially with the 'cache in RAM' option of Mozilla and Netscape. These days, when you can get 512 megs of PC133 RAM for less than fifty bucks, it just doesn't make sense to worry about 32 megs here or there, anymore.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
And what's up with testing on a ridiculously outdated machine? P166, no MMX, 32 MB RAM?
Sure, it's a bit old, but machines like that are still pervasive. School labs and libraries are full of computers like this. I'd rather not have my local library make a decision between providing usable web access and purchasing more books. It should be perfectly reasonable to browse the web on these old computers, saving money for other uses.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
The Winner [for "The Look"]: Mozilla, hands down. It's terrific that someone decided to take the route away from the greys.
Oh goody. I was tired of all my applications looking the same and behaving the same. I love guessing which color means disabled for each different application. I like having my system wide colors that I've carefully chosen to minimize eye strain thrown out the window.
System wide colors and looks are feature. If you're sick of living in grey land, change it globally. Gnome supports this. KDE supports this. Windows supports this.
Mozilla is a great browser, but their decision to roll their own user interface was a mistake. Fortunately Mozilla is modular, and as the core engine stabilizes I plan on moving to a more system friendly browser using that engine. Probably Galeon or Skipstone.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Unfortunately this outdated-browser analysis is worthless, for several reasons - all of which boil down to the small amout of actual testing done. A faster, more representative machine would have been useful as well. And I don't need an analysis of browsers way back when on a machine from way back when and then some :-).
:-(
But should you doubt me:
First off, I think the one most deciding factor in the choice of a browser if how well it displays pages - whether corrupt, IE5.5 optimized, javascript enabled, CSS2.0 or ancient, my browser first and foremost needs to WORK. This isn't even touched upon here! The stability of the browser, in my opinion a part of usability, needs to be tested.
A browser doesn't need to be all that fast either just "fast enough". And, not only is "fast enough" a subjective measure, it includes things such as responsiveness while loading, total page loading time, time to create a new window, time to "scetch" a first outline onscreen and more. Many pages can be very usable with only 10% loaded. By the time you're done reading the first paragraph the rest can be loaded. In addition, speed will vary depending on processor speed and type, memory availability, and network bandwidth. A fast browser which gains speed with bad incremental display could be worse than a slower version in which you can start reading immediately. Furthermore, the internet extends beyond slashdot... some HTML elements may render in varying speed depending on the browser used.
Speed is a hard thing to measure. This analysis isn't nearly complete enough to be at all useful.
Startup time is effected by things such as program size (if too much else is loaded, a 32meg machine might well be swapping skewing the image drastically), speed ratio between hard drive and processor, and VERY importantly, dependance on shared libraries. Konqueror for instance might seem much faster when running KDE already... and the same goes for the other browsers too though I don't immediately know which libraries they use. Notice how fast those "second instances" pop up...
Finally, this is a pretty lame attempt to harvest slashdot links by using a slashdot page in a linux browser test...
It is great to see that he used a fairly low end system to do his tests. There are so many Pentium 75 - 200 systems around that are still perfectly useful if people would just think a little harder while programming, and it is nice that somebody is realistically putting one to the test with more "modern" software...
Posted from the wireless couch.