Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller

ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."

Comments

Oh no, there goes Tokyo...

[kentyman]

Go Go Mozilla!

Re:Oh no, there goes Tokyo...

[Zakabog]

History shows again and again How open source points out The folly of closed, MOZILLA!

If you don't understand this joke go listen to some Blue Oyster Cult

Re:Oh no, there goes Tokyo...

[SphericalCrusher]

Amen! MoZilla (besides Safari) is the only browser that I use. Down with IE!

Oh, and what about that post forgot to mention it being 25% faster on the Mac OS X operating system? o_O

Re:Oh no, there goes Tokyo...

[gnalre]

Wrong, the success of windows has proved that you have to make software more complex, slower and take more resources to succeed.

By giving people pandering to the lowest common denominator you are only killing yourself in the long run. Please stop it Mozilla before it is to late!!!!

Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I got here first using 1.6. Looks like some people will need 1.7 to get here faster next time

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

could you please stop spamming /. with your polls?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[LBArrettAnderson]

i wouldn't consider it spamming... it's a lot easier to vote in a poll than to post a comment... i find it interesting to learn what everyone on /. (and other websites) think about certain issues, such as what browser they use. I've already learned something from this poll -- so far more people have voted mozilla than MSIE, which absolutely surprises me. I always thought it was just a vocal minority that used Mozilla, but I suppose i might be wrong. (then again maybe the ones who use mozilla got here faster than the ones who use IE)

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[bobthemonkey13]

It would be great if you could link it to Referer: headers to see how many people lie.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[kundor]

You realize that many alternate-browsers spoof IE headers so that they don't get rejected by MS-powered websites? Konqueror and Opera may even do it by default.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of poll sucks

Yes
No

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[kundor]

Dude, lynx is so dead. Links is the text browser of the FUTURE!

It'll be dominant within months, just wait.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Curtman]

But how many of those forge their useragent string so that pages render properly? Quite often I have to change mine from

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040308 Firefox/0.7"

to

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

To deal with browser detection on broken sites. More often than not I forget to change it back afterward.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[platipusrc]

On my version of Konqeror (3.2.1) ,

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; FreeBSD) (KHTML, like Gecko)

is the default ID string.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Anonymous Coward]

text-only links is trash. It attempts to recreate the layout of a page that is designed around graphics and mouse navigation, but does so ignoring the fact that keyboard and mouse navigation are COMPLETELY different, and graphics-based page layouts are useless when browsing in text mode. Even tables, links' big killer "feature," are ugly and almost useless in it.

I've never used the graphics-capable versions of links, so I won't comment about those.

But still, no doubt, the best text browser is Lynx. It formats text so that it is easy to READ and NAVIGATE. No stupid scrolling left and right garbage. Give me a Lynx window and the four directional keys, and I can make do (although I don't normally limit myself that way when I use Lynx). Try that in links and you'll find yourself screaming at your monitor.

IOW, links can shove it. Lynx is the supreme info browser, period.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Guspaz]

I voted for Mozilla, but I've got Firebird. No option for Firebird-only. Ah well, close enough.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Trejkaz]

Faster? You mean like the guy that beat you to the first post?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[tbuskey]

I used to change my user agent to say it was running IE on CP/M-86.....

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[MechaStreisand]

I always thought it was just a vocal minority that used Mozilla

Evidently you don't understand the meaning of the term "vocal minority". More people voting for Mozilla than for IE is exactly in line with what a vocal minority would do.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[jonadab]

> I used to change my user agent to say it was running IE on CP/M-86.....

I like to play fun games with my ua string, too. One of my favourite tricks
is to claim to be running my browser on an X11 GUI on PC-DOS 3.3, but claiming
MSIE on X11 is fun too (especially, MSIE on an X11 GUI on a Microsoft OS).
Other user-agent jokes I've seen include the following:
* Claim to be running a significantly future version, (e.g., claim MSIE 11.5
or Mozilla/7.0 or use a future Gecko build date, et cetera)
* Claim to be both MSIE and Gecko in the same user-agent string
* List Emacs as the operating system
* List Klingon, Quenya, or Sanskrit as the localization language
* Claim an utterly impossible browser/OS/hardware combo, like iCab on
OpenVMS on SPARC, or, even better, claim a combination that's not only
impossible but also ancient, like NCSA Mosaic on ITS on a PDP8.
* Claim a virtual machine architecture (e.g., the z-machine, glulx,
parrot, jvm, ... anything that's never been implemented in hardware)
as your hardware architecture.
* Make wrong and incompitible version claims (e.g., start with Mozilla/2.0
and then give a 2003 Gecko build date or claim to be MSIE 6.0)
* Claim to be running on Hurd, BeOS 6, or some other vaporware.
* "NoBrowserNeeded (My TCP/IP stack is connected directly to my brain.)"

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[The Snowman]

I've heard rumors of sites rejecting non-IE browsers, but I have yet to find one myself.

I am forced to change my browser header for one site on a regular basis. The site to pay one of my credit card bills barfs without IE, it says my browser (Mozilla) is uncompatible with the site. So I use the prefbar plugin to change the browser ID to IE and everything works well. Their tech support never got back to me when I told them this. Mozilla still will not work unless I change how it reports itself to their server.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[kundor]

I have Hurd installed on my computer. It's not vaporware.

You could make the valid contention that it's "nobodywantstouseitware," however.

Anyway, couldn't you list Emacs as the operating system, the browser, the gui, and the hardware architecture? (I'm sure that must be an extension.)

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[gabec]

As much as I hate to point out the obvious, it has nothing to do with "geekiness" that an arbitrary BS browser poll in the comments of a *mozilla* thread has *mozilla* winning.

Doesn't it stand to reason that Mozilla users are the ones that will be the most interested in reading the thread? Right-o...

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[GrumpySimon]

Yes, those of us using IE have to type in the http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/30/042824 2&mode=thread&tid=113&tid=126&tid=133&tid=172&tid= 186&tid=95 Damn URL's so it does take us a bit of time to get around...

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[HalfFlat]

but claiming MSIE on X11 is fun too

Are you aware that MS did make a version of IE for Solaris? It was astonishingly bad, but it did exist.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[LittleBigLui]

... IE for Solaris? It was astonishingly bad, but it did exist.

IE astonishingly bad? Is that like an astonishingly round circle?

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[haeger]

Here's one:
This is a Swedish bank that needs to fix their site. Feel free to send them a friendly mail if You're swedish. I really think they should wise up.
Also, it appears to be a domino powered website. :-)

.haeger

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[ChunderDownunder]

Perhaps it's just that most hits are from work where IE is the corporate policy.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[ultranova]

That makes me wonder, if when TV ads say 9 out of 10 doctors recommend X, did they only ask 10 doctors?

No, of course not. They asked however many doctors they needed to get those 9 recommendations, be it 90 or 900. Then they decided that their sample was those 9 doctors and 1 who didn't recommend the product.

Re:Mozilla 1.6

[Alzheimers]

My biggest problem with LYNX is how it formats headers and sidebars into long lists at the top of the pages. Almost every webpage these days has a list of links at the top of the screen and a newspaper column style sidebar. Both of which force a LYNX user to page down past all those links before getting to any useful content.

I haven't played with Links yet, but if it avoids this problem I'm all for it.

This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I stopped using Netscape: each version was much larger, much slower, and much less reliable.

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.

And in a crash-hole between them, the coyote.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Planesdragon]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Mozilla is a descendant, of sorts, of the Netscape 4 browser. OTOH, it doesn't have any real inherited code--and Netscape 6 and 7 were just repackaged Mozilla that did, AFAIK, get smaller and faster with each iternation, just like Moz did.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[vocaro]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.

Because it doesn't have the same kernel.

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch. By throwing out the cruft that had been building up since Netscape 1.0, the Mozilla team was able to build a better browser...eventually. (Check out this BBC article for a nice pre-history of Mozilla.)

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Joey Patterson]

How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way

Because Mozilla exists "to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet" and their browser isn't loaded with corporate crap.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[colinramsay]

I think Mozilla has reached the point where it can't really get much more advanced feature-wise until other issues are addressed - such as size and performance. There is so much crammed into the suite that reorganisation is going to take a while, and I think that influence from Firefox has made some people sit up and take notice.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Imperator]

On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.

And this should serve as a warning to anyone else who thinks about getting stoned and posting here.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[DataPath]

Cuh IE yotie

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1998, when Netscape released their code, the open-source community soon realized that they would have to throw much of it away and start from scratch.

Actually, that's a bit of myth. It was really Netscape's management who dictated the rewrite, in order to accomodate the Gecko rendering engine (which was still called NGLayout or Raptor back then). Most of the Netscape/Mozilla developers (less than six months into the project, there were not many non-Netscape contributors) at the time were against the change, not because they didn't like the idea of a smaller, faster and more standards-complaint rendering engine, but because they were given a ludicrous six-month timeframe to achieve parity with Netscape Communicator 4.5.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[uncleFester]

And in a crash-hole between them, the coyote.

.. but is it an Acme Portable Hole?

-fester

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[jovlinger]

Does anyone else see the same behavior I do; that while it starts out snappy, Mozilla gets slower and slower. This is most noticable when rendering tabs in the background; this goes from instantaneous to taking the better part of a minute.

The slowdown from snappy to slow takes a day or two of use, and requires a restart of the browser to fix.

This happens both in mozilla and fire-fox, so it must be some internal resource leak, I guessing.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[cmacb]

Yes, I have noticed this. It used to be MUCH worse though. As you mention you have to browse for a good long time for it to become an issue. Every new version of Mozilla seems to make the problem less severe too.

If the comparison you are making is with IE though, I don't find it any better, in fact rather than just getting slower, IE tends to just blow up at some point, especially if you have viewed a lot of pages that contain calls to plug-ins.

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[stienman]

It seems to me to only be a problem when I have a lot of data open at once, and leave it alone long enough for windows to swap it out to the drive.

For instance, I have a tab link that, when clicked, loads 63 comics pages at once. It significantly reduces my time spent reading comics (waiting for them to load, actually) but it's a TON of memory.

If I let my laptop hibernate and bring it back up it takes nearly 30-60 seconds to render the tab that was on top when I hibernated. After I read the first few and close a few tabs it speeds back up to its normal speed. I suspect it's more an issue with mozilla using a huge amount of memory (possibly for holding rendered versions of web pages) that is swapped out.

Using it interactively, even after having it open for several days, it's about as fast for me as when I first started it.

-Adam

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[0x0d0a]

May I suggest netcomics and a dedicated image browser like gqview?

Re:This is why I dropped Netscape

[meringuoid]

.. but is it an Acme Portable Hole?

Knowing Wile E. Coyote, I hope not. The very first thing he'd do is try to lurk inside there while he takes his Acme Bloody Huge Roadrunner-Slaying Device out of its infinite-capacity Acme shipping crate. The consequences of this sort of thing, I'm reliably informed by D&D geeks, are bad.

Yes, it is smaller and better

[ericdano]

Yes, Mozilla is developing quite nicely. It's my browser and email of choice. No more IE for me on my Windows XP system. And, of course, Mozilla runs on other systems as well, such as Mac OS X.

When was the last time IE was updated????

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[lukewarmfusion]

When was the last time Mozilla had a 90%+ market share.

I use Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird too - they're my favorites. But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").

It's an uphill battle, I'm afraid. That said, I'll be downloading this new version ASAP.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[ericdano]

Sad, but true. However, once one tries Mozilla, IE looks old and lame in comparison. I mean, Tabbed browsing is the best. Plus, you don't have VB tied into Mozilla like it is with IE, so, the virus issue is limited somewhat...

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[walter_kovacs]

It's a never ending circle - designers who don't know anything about web standards and have only ever used IE make sites that only work in IE - people try a new browser like Mozilla, and see that their favourite sites are "broken" in the new browser (when really it's because the sites were built to work around the non-compliant IE) - so they go back to IE... That said I've found Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering most pages well.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[MikeFM]

I code to the standards first and then verify it looks right with both IE and Mozilla (and Opera, and Lynx, and Konquerer). If something doesn't work with both I either remove it, tweak it until it's right, or use something like XSLT to generate the proper HTML for the given browser. It's more effort but it generally results in better code all around. If it's just CSS that is the problem I just have the site choose the desired stylesheet based on the browser used or let the user choose their own stylesheet from a list.

IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases but it's still not on par with Mozilla's support. For most things though it seems good enough to just use standard HTML/CSS without any IEisms. IE still isn't very PNG friendly though which is an ongoing annoyance for me.

Overall though it's not really a problem to just code to the standard. Coding to IE is problematic because it's a standard that changes with each release.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, W3C sets the standard and their browser is the standard. You do not have to use superstandard methods like activeX to make a working webpage, so don't.
IE is not a standard, and won't be unless Microsoft buys it's way into being a standards organization.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[no longer myself]

the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard

Admittedly, I get most of my site's hits from Slashdot, but I find a rather pleasant mix of Gecko, Mozilla, Opera, Apple Webkit, and occasionally someone using IE. Actually, I think Google surfs my site more than anyone. (I did tell "Slurp" to take a flying leap.) Of course it does flop over to nearly 80% IE from time to time, but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...

Personally I'm hooked on using Firefox, but I design my pages to look good in any light. ;-)

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[phliar]

But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE.

Here's a revolutionary thought: build for standards, so everyone can see your pages.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[ljavelin]

But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").

Ya know, I find that a funny statement.

I manage a software development group, and we have to build for IE too. But we also have to make sure our software works with Mozilla. And for Opera, and Mac, and everything else. We support all "modern" browsers (basicly, verions >=5)

You see, we can't really dictate a browser, and we're not interested in getting locked into one vendor product. We want to remain flexible for the future, and we want to remain reliable when a new browser hits the market.

So we support all browsers.

Happily, this is a very minor expense. In fact, as project manager, I can say with confidence that it costs us well under 1/1000th of our development budget. The only difficulty is to get contractors and new employees to use web standards.

In the end, our maintenance costs are lower, and our user satisfaction is sky high. We never ever get complaints about browser compatibility.... not even once in over 4 years of high-volume operation.

Oh yeah, and our apps look and work damned good too.

So what's the deal? What is wrong with organizations that can't support regular browsers without undo expense and difficulty???

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[alphakappa]

I visited kavlon.org and lost my vision for a few minutes.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Tony Hoyle]

I actually doubt IE has a 90% market share any more.

I run a site that's for a windows app, so there's a majority of Windows users (I'd guess almost exclusively windows actually) visiting it... you'd expect a very high IE percentage there, but I've currently got (based on ~1.2 million hits):

IE6 60%
Mozilla 11%
IE5 6%
IE5.5 2.3%
Opera7.2 1.7%
Opera7.1 0.3%

The rest is made up of sundry bots and capture scripts.

Looking at those stats... why the $$% do people target IE5 over mozilla??? (I'd love to know why IE5 is 3 times more popular than 5.5, too...)

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[lukewarmfusion]

No, they don't agree. I enjoy a good looking site. Not only do such sites (as you describe) usually look boring, but they tend to lack rich functionality. I want a site that is usable, rich in content, functionality and looks good. You can do that and still support other browsers, but if it's a choice between supporting some random browser or having a great site - then screw the random browser.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[optikSmoke]

but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...

IIRC, those are boxes looking for an IIS hole in your system. Whoever wrote the exploits must have decided to use an IE user agent string. Hehe...

The "flip" over to 80% IE may just be a lull in traffic where the percent of requests from infected boxes is "amplified" by a smaller total number of requests.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[GregWebb]

For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.

Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.

I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me
* What form fields are around and what values they have
* What images the page contains
* What links the page contains

saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[bcrowell]

NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO!!!!!

Faster, smaller, and has fewer bugs!?

Will these people ever learn? Every version must either leave in the old bugs, or fix them but create more new ones. Bugs in this version are the reason people are going to pay for the next version, hoping they'll be fixed.

And of course performance improvements are a big mistake too. You want to make it slower and slower, so that people will buy new hardware, thereby driving sales of your OS, which is joined at the hip with your browser.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[hixie]

> IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases

What recent releases? WinIE hasn't changed for something like 3 years, and as I understand it Microsoft have said they won't do any more changes to their HTML/DOM/CSS support, ever (even in the IE release that will be in Longhorn). One hopes they are bluffing or will change their mind, but the fact remains that basically, as far as WinIE's rendering engine goes, nothing has changed in years and nothing will have for years to come (no non-security-related changes to be shipped in IE before Longhorn, have said Microsoft officials).

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[colinramsay]

That's fine. But I bet it looks like ass. The web - not the Internet as a while - the web - is a visual medium. Sites like www.mezzoblue.com or those featured at www.webstandardsawards.com are accessible and stylish. You can still view them if you want to disable images, CSS and JS, but for those of us in the modern, broadband enabled age, we can have an interesting visual experience and still be entertained by good content.

You're letting your visitors down by not making the effort.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Curtman]

I made the mistake of installing the ActiveX plugin with mozilla at a friends place once. What a great plugin, you can make Mozilla just as susceptible to popups and adware as IE. Sheesh.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[ManxStef]

Mod parent up, he speaks the truth :)

BTW Greg, the PNH toolbar might be of interest to you? I find it damn handy myself:
http://placenamehere.com/pnhtoolbar/

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Selecter]

Yes, it is really active X that makes IE such a magnet for bullshit and ad/spyware. That and the fect that most windows users dont know how to configure the browser via the security and privacy tabs in prefs to even set the thing up. I believe if you leave these settings alone out of the chute IE has no protection at all from anything, tho I could be wrong. If I am somebody correct me please.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Anonymous Coward]

The pop-ups BS has nothing to do with ActiveX. By default, IE asks you if you want to download and install an ActiveX plug-in and show you who digitally signed it. It will never install an ActiveX behind your back. The pop-ups are the result of standards-compliant ECMA script code (JavaScript or JScript in IE jargon).

ActiveX can be very useful in IE-based Intranets and in the right hands, such as dowloading a plug-in from a trusted site to scan your computer for viruses, or using the Windows Update service to patch your computer with the latest OI updates.

I've been using IE for six years and I've never had any spyware, spoofware, adware, worms, viruses, etc. These are all the results of ignorant users given too much power by IE. All of these malicious programs are installed by your own action, like willingly opening up an executable attachement, pressing "Yes" to a Gator ActiveX prompt, or opting in to file download services like Kazaa.

People are responsible for their choices. If you're clueless, no program on Earth will protect you.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[coats]

The only problems I have with them come from boneheaded websites that check the browser and then refuse to allow any none IE browser to access the site. How clueless is that.

Not as clueless as the ones that claim to do such a check, and then reject you for not having the very browser that in fact you are using. (They claimed to support IE and Mozilla, then rejected Mozilla 1.6 (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113)

I ran into one of those yesterday on a sporting goods sales site... wrote them a nastygram quoting their rejection-page back to them, together with my browser identity, then asking whether I should expect the same kind of bullshit from their merchandise that I find in their web site design.

idiot bastards!

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[hey!]

I have to say I agree.

But I also understand where MikeFM is comfing from.

The problem is everybody is laboring under the delusion that they're a fricken designer because they can recognize a nice site when they see one. Sometimes its the designer and sometimes its the client and often its both.

There's a huge gulf between being able to see that a site is good and bad and being able to produce a good site oneself. Unfortunately, once a non-pro gets his ego invested in something, he can't be objective anymore. A real pro can walk away from something he thought was great because, (a) he's there to accomplish somethign for the customer, no t just feeding his ego, (b) he knows there's plenty more where that came from and (c) he'll have a chance to try his brilliant design on the next customer.

MikeFM goes to far. There's a big differnce between realizing that most designs suck and thinking design itself sucks. Since I am not a graphic artist, when I have to design a web interface I follow three rules: (1) keep it simple (2)steal from clean designs I admire to the greatest degree compatible with [1] (3) Put as muc of the design into CSS as I can, consistent with my understandign of CSS. It pretty much guarantees acceptable mediocrity, which is pretty good for a non artist.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[SlimFastForYou]

Mozilla 1.6 renered that site like crap.

Strangely, Konqueror 3.2.0 rendered the site perfectly. And I thought they supposedly used the same rendering engine.

Ah well

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[cbiltcliffe]

By default, IE asks you if you want to download and install an ActiveX plug-in and show you who digitally signed it. It will never install an ActiveX behind your back.

Not true. I was visiting a site recently with IE, and it asked me if I wanted to install an ActiveX control. I clicked 'No'. It popped up a dialog that said I had to, which had only one 'OK' button that I clicked on.
Then it asked me again if I wanted to install the control. I clicked 'No' again. It popped up the same dialog that said I had to. I clicked 'OK', and it went ahead and started downloading the control by itself.

Not exactly hidden behind your back, but it still did it, even though I didn't give it permission to.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[cbiltcliffe]

Moz is the one that ends up looking lame when banking sites stop working, personal pages no longer render and etc.

If a bank site doesn't work properly in anything other than IE, I usually send them an email linking to articles about serious security holes in IE, usually including the SSL certificate one, and tell them they should tune their site to run in all browsers, as some of us are too knowledgeable to want to use something as crappy as IE for online banking.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[mabinogi]

You do realise that 15% of 1.2 million hits is still 180,000 hits?

15% non IE is obviously not a majority, but it's not insignificant either. Only dealing with IE would piss off 1 in every 7 visitors to your site.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[leshert]

Generally, stylesheets overall _reduce_ the bandwidth usage of a site, mostly through the elimination of redundant tags.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[POWRSURG]

I have found that Quirksmode's section on older browsers to be very useful, especially detailing how simple it is to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer. You really do see a jump in CSS and Javascript support as you progress from 3 -> 4 -> 5.01 -> 5.5SP2 -> 6SP1, though I feel this is to be expected.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must be off to try and figure out why the changes I made friday night to work around some invisible transparent layer that was killing all of my links in Mozilla has now created the exact problem in Opera....

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[archonit.net]

When was the last time IE was updated???? Hey that's a bad call. Microsoft updates IE almost every other week!!! What you meant was... "When was he last time IE was updated for reasons other than a security patch?"

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[krosk]

Unfortunately, IE still has a strangle hold on website designers, *especially* when it comes to javascript applications and web based email programs. My university uses a javascript based email program for it's students. The *only* browser (and trust me, i've tried them all) that works with this program is IE. The university is also very reluctant to release the POP and SMTP server addresses so you can use a outside email client (not outlook!!). Somebody stop Gates from changing the industry standard to his own personal preferences!!

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[antic]

Oh, so tough you are writing them a "nastygram" from afar!

Chances are that they didn't develop their site, and contracted developers did it for them. You'd be better off sending your nastygrams to their web contacts, or emailing the sporting company *politely*, outlining the situation, and have them either find new developers, or talk to those they're already using.

It's nicer and you'll probably get the result you were after (or a voucher!). ;)

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[0x0d0a]

The problem is that the "in theory Flash could be useful" argument is used to justify a huge range of websites that, frankly, are a pain in the ass to use, load slowly, are uncomfortable for users of older computers, and exclude the disabled and users of alternate browsers or people that disable plugins for security reasons.

In my entire life, I have seen *one* website that used Flash in what I could consider a significantly beneficial manner, and I have seen many, many websites in my life. The website was for an MP3 player, and one could try out the interface in an embedded Flash object. The rest of the site did not use Flash. There was no equally effective way to reproduce this functionality without Flash, the functionality was clearly important to the product (the product was partly being sold based on having a good interface), and a user without Flash still had the ability to work with the rest of the website.

On the whole, I have seen so little effective use of Flash, and taking into consideration the significant drawbacks of it, that if someone asked me whether to use Flash on their site, I would feel comfortable simply saying "no". The odds of it being a good idea are so phenomenally low that it's just not worth trying.

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[Curtman]

The Microsoft mantra:

Once <insert upcoming release here> comes out, malware will be a thing of the past!

Funny how it never gets any better though. Wasn't that the big promise about XP to begin with?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[RaymondRuptime]

Well, you kind of had me agreeing, up until that last line. See, that's the just the parochial viewpoint that makes many members of the general public loathe us geekfolk. When much of the world is still on NS 4 and IE 4 and still (yes, heaven help us) on Win9x, saying 'screw them' just reinforces their stereotypical view of us, and engenders little good will. And telling customers they have to buy a new computer to use your web site seems like a bad business plan.

[Rant on] I, for one, am sick of websites that vomit whenever I go there from my Linux or Solaris box because some lazy-ass coder felt that not enough people use those as their primary box to make it worth his lazy while to do his job. Some of them, especially the ones done by the MS/IE chauvinists, I just refuse to patronize--even when I'm on my Win box. [Rant off]

Some people are still stuck on old equipment for a wide variety of reasons. Some don't have a choice because they're not the IT manager. Some still actually use 33K modems to connect. Some are blind, and use adaptive equipment that is only rated for a given platform. All taken together, all these minorities (who don't deserve to be discriminated against) amount to a very large proportion of the would-be users of many sites. How about we all cut them some slack?

Re:Yes, it is smaller and better

[stor]

You can develop for both.. my point is that sometimes you come down to a choice between having something (IE only) or not (everything else). In those cases, I do what I can to make sure that the "everything else" will work and display. Then, the IE version (usually Windows only) gets the full functionality. It's not right - but it's reality.

No it's not: it's pathetic.

If you can't cope with targetting a wide range of browsers you should rethink whether your capable to play in this game. Sometimes the client does not have a choice of browser or platform. What do you tell these people? "Sorry but you must use Browser X with this site" ?

Even different versions of IE have different quirks and that's harder to test because you can't install any version of IE alongside IE6. So to test this you need multiple OS installations. It sucks. That's life. That's why you get paid.

I work for a webdev company, 95% Linux-based. We find that practically all of our stuff renders in Gecko flawlessly, but IE screws it up due to not complying with standards. We employ various techniques including vbscript hacks and "catering to the lowest common denominator for a specific thing", etc. It's annoying yes but that's our job.

Cheers
Stor

great

[mr_tommy]

I hear its got 20% more zilla too!

and 10% more

[ciroknight]

Statistics than you'll ever need...

Compared to IE....

[MarauderJr]

The next service pack of Internet Explorer plans to have longer load times, more crashes, and open a few more exploits into a Windows system.

Modzilla keeps getting better all the time.

Re:Who fucking cares

[MikeCapone]

Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!

True.

Intelligence also has a small marketshare...

noticeable?

[davids-world.com]

I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user. It's great that Mozilla is trying to catch up with fast browse-only alternatives like Safari, Konqueror and also the Gecko-based browsers, but you can't seriously speak of 'dramatic' improvements.

Re:noticeable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. A performace improvement of 10% is probably totally unnoticable to the user. The real point that the article fails to make is that Mozilla has been getting *consistently* smaller and faster since the 1.0 release. Subjectivley, it's pretty obvious if you use an older release that it's slower. But if that isn't good enough, there are graphs on tinderbox which show the measured codesize, pageload time, new window time and various other metrics (no link, because it would be irresponsible of me to launch an accidental ddos attack on tinderbox) - if you're interested the address is pretty easy to guess/find. Looking at the btek pageload time, I see that in June 2002 pageload was around 1210ms, now it's around 860ms and still decreasing. That's an improvment of around 30%, without cutting any features or degrading the standards support. That means that Mozilla is now competative with so called "lightweight" browsers such as Opera (I don't have comparisons avaliable because such things are hard to do).

Re:noticeable?

[juhaz]

I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user.

Maybe it isn't. But if few releases in a row could each make 10% improvements, the cumulative 50% improvement damn certainly is noticeable.

Re:noticeable?

[BobWeiner]

I just downloaded Mozilla 1.8 -- and speed improvements ARE dramatic -- it's FAST -- much moreso than Safari or even Firefox. Page rendering speeds are unbelieveably quick. Even the application loading time has significantly improved. I never would have considered using Mozilla as my primary browser -- but this version has me thinking otherwise. Download it, use it, and draw your own conclusions...

Bob

Re:noticeable?

[BobWeiner]

Oops. Should be 1.7b in my previous post.

Re:Firefox improved?

[yusufg]

yes, firefox is nothing without the underlying Gecko engine. Shortly firefox will branch on the Mozilla 1.7 branch, it is very likely that Mozilla 1.8-1.9 will have much faster page rendering that Firefox 1.0. See bugzilla for the bugs targetted for 1.8alpha

Not fair

[Anonymous Coward]

I got here so fast using konqueror that the server hadn't even recorded my post by the time I left.

In other news...

[cperciva]

When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Lynx is 99% faster at startup, 99% faster at window open time, has 50% faster pageloading times, and is 90% smaller in binary size.

In all seriousness, it's easy to improve figures like this just by removing features.

Re:In other news...

[Guppy06]

Let me guess: Your text editor of choice is ed, isn't it?

Re:In other news...

[fm6]

Yeah, I'm underwealmed by this announcement too. But your comparison is off-target, since this improvement in performance appears to have been done by improving the code, not by stripping out features. What's sad is that performance wasn't a priority from day one. Mozilla's bloated code base have pretty much destroyed its credibility outside its community of fanatical true-believers.

Ironically enough, I'm writing this using Firefox, 'cause my copy of IE is infested with some weird stealth popup engine that neither Ad-Aware nore Spybot can seem to corner. I'm very close to abandoning IE, going back to Mozilla permanently.

But I'm not quite there. Now might seem the right time to abandon IE, with its stupid security holes and lack of standards compliance. But Firefox still takes too long to download graphics and render complicated web pages. And the Mozilla version of the Google toolbar has a really stupid bug (actually more a case of overdesign) that makes search term buttons totally useless. I can't live without search term buttons!

Re:In other news...

[Ctrl-Z]

It is the standard text editor.

Dramatically faster??

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The fastest speed up is not even 10%. That's about an extra 0.01 tits/second. Want more speedup than that.

Re:Dramatically faster??

[B.D.Mills]

This is obviously some new use of the word "dramatically" that I am not familiar with.

When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

It might be just you and me, but single-digit percentage increases in performance isn't "dramatic". It's more like "scarcely noticeable".

Re:Dramatically faster??

[robbyjo]

but single-digit percentage increases in performance isn't "dramatic". It's more like "scarcely noticeable".

In that case, maybe... But if you follow some compiler conference papers, single digit percentage of improvement *is* a dramatic improvement.

More than that single digit, we need to either change the underlying algorithm, or do a more dramatic overhaul, or correct a resource hogging mistakes. Well, we all know that Mozilla coders aren't that sloppy, so I guess that single digit improvements are really good because they usually involve quite a lot of cutting corners squeezing out more improvements over the already tight code.

Thanks Moz Team.

[pararox]

I'm really impressed, and very much appreciative, of the amount of effort the Mozilla team has put forth over the years. I switched to Mozilla some 4 or 5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. The rapidity of development is truly astounding -- thanks girls and guys!

That having been said, I've been dissapointed with the latest iteration of the Mozilla browser. I've found 1.6 to be rather slow (autocomplete lags, for example), bug prone and (if I'm correct) java support is still on the fritz.

I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

Anyway, I look forward to this newest version; really, I just wanted to express, in this post, my thanks for the effort put forth by the whole Moz team.

Regards,

=pararox=

Re:Thanks Moz Team.

[petabyte]

I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.

Yeah, I have similar issues with epiphany. I like its layout and its Gnomeiness but there are certain options it blocks (even out of regular mozilla) that I would really like to have. Every time I download something and the damn download statusbar comes up I want to put my fist through the screen. You can't dare close it either as that will stop the download. Hopefully tomorrow when 2.6 launches I'll be able to play with Epiphany 1.2.0 and it'll have more options.

Re:Firefox improved?

[SimplexO]

Firefox will get the speed improvements, but since Firefox is already smaller and uses less, it won't be as significant (I think it is 3%?).

They basically rewrote the string implementation and it is "better faster stronger" than before.

So yeah, Firefox 0.9 will get a speed improvement too. (You can also grab a nightly. They have the improvements -- and more bugs.)

P.S. Also new in Mozilla 1.6 is the ability to block websites from hijacking your context menu (right click menu) in the browser. Yay!

Re:Firefox

[yusufg]

How can firefox render better, it has the same rendering engine as Mozilla, are you comparing the same Mozilla version as the one which firefox is based on
e.g, Mozilla 1.6-Firefox 0.8
Mozilla 1.5-Firefox 0.7

Remeber firefox will branch soon from the 1.7 release, so far a while, Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) will have rendering fixes/speedups and Firefox won't have it till it returns back to the trunk sometime after 1.0 is released

Re:5%?

[Nasarius]

You're looking at the README for the alpha. Try here instead.

Mozilla is good...

[Lakedemon]

I just love it and tab-browsing but there is still room for improvement:
A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...

Kerberos Support

[CNeb96]

It now support's SSO HTTP Authentication using GSSAPI Kerberos. Similiar MS's implementation of SPNEGO in IE. See bug 17578 in bugzilla for more information.

This is compatible with both IIS, and mod_authkerb for apache.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/modauthkerb/

Next the plan is to make kerberos support more general so it can be used for other protocol's like IMAP.

5% faster than 1.6, but..

[edxwelch]

How much faster in comparision to other releases? What I want to know is if Mozilla is progressively getting faster, or is this just to compensate for performance regressions when they went from 1.4 - 1.5, etc.

Re:5% faster than 1.6, but..

[afidel]

Roughly 33% faster than 1.0 for pageload according to Tinderbox. Code size is smaller so startup should be improved as well. This is while ADDING support for more standards.

5% 8% 9%??

[greppling]

Oh my god. An old rule of thumb is that the user experience is noticeably better if the performance doubles. That may be an overstatement, but how on earth should 7% faster startup make a difference for daily work?

Of course, it's nice to see they are going in the right direction, but I suppose it will take me a while until I have made up for the time following the link and downloading it (not to speak of the time it cost to post this comment :P) by the increased productivity...

No diffirent then the last release

[Jexx Dragon]

I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.

Mozilla Vs Firefox

[colinramsay]

Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.

And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....

Re:Mozilla Vs Firefox

[ezzzD55J]

slightly offtopic perhaps, but perhaps someone here knows, speaking of improvements.. what i'd really really like greatly is roaming profiles, allowing me to share bookmarks, cookies, history etc. with mozilla's on each of the systems i use.. It would be such a huge improvement to my browsing usage, at least; currently I don't bother with bookmarks, for instance.. I know this feature has been talked about endlessly, i haven't read the full bugzilla bugs about it because they were so large :) Anyone know what the status is of this?

A point each way.

[irokitt]

IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.

But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.

Re:A point each way.

[Utopia]

WinXP SP2 RC1 already has popup blocking.
Integrating MSN toolbar with IE is highly unlikely.

Re:A point each way.

[minus_273]

actually, IE will see a major revision when MS relaeases SP2 for XP in a few months. You can do a quick search and see screenshots of it. It uses a new brusged metal theme and has popup blocking and a download manager built in. In addition, it is supposed to incoporate a lot of the corrections made since MS's security audit (this is a rumor BTW).
Overall, eventhough it looks liks a knock off of Safari,I am interested in seeing what changes MS made

All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[WoTG]

Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[MyHair]

I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage.

If you're comparing to IE, then it's not a fair comparison since IE hides some of its memory footprint in explorer and other places and still takes up 12-25 MB for iexplore.exe.

If you're comparing to Konqueror or another KHTML or Gecko browser, then nevermind.

On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?

I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but if you're using Moz under Windows then the disadvantage is that Moz plays fair. IE, MS Office, Sun Java and Adobe Acrobat Reader I've noticed hang around in RAM a long, long time after you quit using them. I suspect they have settings to stay in memory an extra long time, where I suspect Mozilla plays nice and sets itself to normal and therefore gets squeezed out by the others.

If you're talking about an X / POSIX platform, then nevermind.

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[Tribbin]

Mozilla for windows has a very good keep-in-memory option.

It will then start about as fast as IE every next time you open it.

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[mysticalreaper]

Heh. Sorry to break it to you, but Moz is not at fault here, it's XP. Now, investingating why it gets swapped out is still an interesting question, but XP does the swapping, not Moz. Which is demonstrates yet another reason i use linux. MUCH better memory management. The only time i remember Moz getting swapped out was when i left my computer compiling for 24 hours, and came back to it. Took about 2 seconds to pull it back. On a p3-700 with 512 MB RAM. just my two cents.

Re:All those stats... yet no memory useage counts?

[CTachyon]

It's not a secret API. It's MSHTML.DLL, which EXPLORER.EXE (since Win95+IE4 or Win98) and IEXPLORE.EXE both use. It probably uses (documented, non-secret) APIs to create shared r/w data pages for an interprocess in-memory cache. (And, to be fair, if you were writing an embeddable shared-object web browser control meant to be part of 20 apps at once, all owned by the same user, why wouldn't you?)

Mozilla in the wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.

Re:5%?

[Jexx Dragon]

A Megabyte (MB) is now set at 1000 Kilobytes (KB) which is, in turn 1000 bytes. However, most of use still use MB = 1024 KB = 1024 bytes, which is now (officialy?) a Mibibyte (MiB), and Kibibyte (KiB). Confuses me too.

improvement is good, but NOT dramatic

[dh003i]

No-one is going to notice a 10% improvement. It is a non-factor. You need to double performance to make a noticeable difference. Granted, if they keep on improving by 10% each release, it will eventually be really good, but don't call a 10% improvement "dramatic" (or whatever the original author called it).

Personally, I like Galeon and Firefox. I just need a web-browser.

Re:improvement is good, but NOT dramatic

[saynte]

I don't think it's fair to say that a 10% improvement isn't significant. For a reasonably mature project such as mozilla to be able to still get 10% more performance is pretty damn good, and either a sign of poor programming to begin with, or very good programming now. Basically, just because the improvement isn't noticeable perceptable while you use it doesn't mean it's not significant.

Galeon

[AnonymousCowheart]

The latest Galeon is out too. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.

Re:Help me out

[Anonymous Coward]

Each firefox release is based on Mozilla. Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 will be based on Mozilla 1.7.

Mozilla will then make Firefox it's primary browser after 1.0, and Thunderbird it's primary mail reader after 1.0. The Mozilla browser you know will still exist as "Mozilla Suite".

Re:Help me out

[spacecowboy420]

On a similiar note - I thought Mozilla was going away in lieu of FireFox and Thunderbird. I stopped using Mozilla long ago for this reason - when are they going to focus on just FireFox and Thunderbird - or are they really? It seems that Most linux distros use Mozilla instead of the seperate clients. This bugs me when I have to install firefox/thunderbird and always makes me ask - "If Mozilla is going away, why do we still use it? Why is it included in the distros?" And ultimately "Why Bother". I know mozilla is a good product, but maintaining a "to be discontinued" product is like cpr on dead people - what's the point? Please enlighten me.

Unlisted Speed Change

[jmt9581]

When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

After the news is released on Slashdot, it's now 40% slower to download. :D

Re:Who fucking cares

[koody]

Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!

Feeding the troll:
You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.

I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).

Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.

I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.

Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:

The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)

Best standards support

Getting faster by every release

Getting less resource hungry by every release

The most extendable browser around.

IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.

All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE.
Long Live (the current version of) IE

Re:Why...

[BobWeiner]

Mozilla has a built-in email program - if that's important to you, then that's one reason to use Moz instead of FireFox. Me? I toggle between using Safari and FireFox. FireFox was indeed faster than Safari 1.0, but with Safari 1.2, I'd say both browsers feel about the same, speedwise. Anyone have benchmarks?

Bob

Thunderbird... buggiest thing on earth

[caitsith01]

I tried Thunderbird for a few days last week... it was so riddled with bugs I found it unusable.

In particular:
- massive problems moving/deleting nested mail folders
- massive problems importing from another mail client (Eudora)
- seems to crash sometimes for no apparent reason
- crazy things happened with the preview pane all the time, like it would disappear at random or make itself really, really tiny and refuse to return to its former, big size
- some options tied exclusively to a particular account - e.g. filters - making the mail-checking process less transparent if you have multiple/many e-mail accounts
- seems to be trying to look a lot like Outlook, which is a shame and unnecessary

I wasn't looking for problems - I WANT to use it, and it has a lot of potential, but right now I'm not gonna use it myself and I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to any non-technical people.

Re:Thunderbird... buggiest thing on earth

[syrinx]

I use Firefox and Thunderbird for all my stuff, but I definitely agree that TB has a way to go. The biggest problem that I've noticed is that occasionally it will just start acting slow, and I have to close it and start it up again.

That said, I love Firefox, and if I'm forced to use IE (say, on someone else's computer), I feel like killing people (its designers, mainly). Is that what they mean by "killer app"?

OS X Talkback?

[Megane]

Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

Re:OS X Talkback?

[va3atc]

Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.

I can't speak for OS X, but as for Windows, I inquired about the removal of the talkback feature in the nightly builds they had this to say about it:

No, it's not possible to enable it. It's either built into the official builds or its not. Currently the official builds are not being built with talkback because of some talkback server issues, so there is no way to disable it. Hopefully by Firebird 0.9 all of the talkback issues will be sorted, but it's probably not going to happen for the Firebird 0.8 release.

Though if you page down it appears that we shall see it in this release of Mozilla

"The installer releases of Mozilla 1.7 Beta now include Quality Feedback Agent again, allowing users to report crashes, ..."

Hopefully all those new bug reports will help speed up development :-)

Re:OS X Talkback?

[rmohr02]

The talkback servers were hosted by Netscape, then AOL. The Mozilla Foundation does not have access to those servers anymore, but will hopefully have new talkback servers soon.

Re:Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers consider quicklaunch functionality to be a hack.

Re:MNG?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mngsuppo rt

That's a plugin for MNG support in Mozilla/Firefox. I would read the comments, though, some seem to warn against installing the plugin for certain builds. I only glanced over it, though; MNG support hasn't really been a priority for me, especially since I didn't even know MNG existed until people complained that they took support for it out of Mozilla.

Good point ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2 .... 10% is in the noise .... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region

Debugging code?

[ilikejam]

Are these speed / size / page-load figures accurate for the binaries with the debugging code still in?
If so then these performance gains will be even better once the debugging stuff's taken out for production. Will they not?

Re:Debugging code?

[Mia'cova]

The improvements are mostly in the algorithms, not the code-optimization. So yes, it affects both debug and production builds. But that being said, we're not downloading debug builds so it's a non-issue.

Re:Debugging code?

[Myen]

I believe the stats come from tinderbox (automated builds), which are now also being used to build nightlies. As the nightlies are not debug builds (it would be a pain to download, for one thing), my guess is that those stats are for non-debug builds.

Re:MNG?

[Arngautr]

This isn't a troll its funny, oh well, But I wish everybody would just do MNG (and PNG for that matter) right, GIFs are so limiting.

Building for Both - Lacks features

[GAVollink]

There are three ways to build web pages.

1. Code to Any Browser.
2. Code to Internet Explorer.
3. Code to The Mozilla Engine.

4. Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's CSS/EDGE. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.

   In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).

   So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.

   Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.

   Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.

Re:Building for Both - Lacks features

[0x0d0a]

Every time I've run into a web page designer that tried to make his page "feature rich", I've been disappointed with the actual usability of the page.

I don't *want* rollover menus, thank you very much.

5% to 9% is "dramatic"?

[shodson]

OK, I'm glad there's a new Mozilla release, and I'm glad it's a little faster, but calling the 5% - 9% increases "dramatic" is a little much, don't ya think?

Re:5% to 9% is "dramatic"?

[Mia'cova]

It is a dramatic increase. Just remember that every 0.1 increment in mozilla isn't some huge major revision. It's an evolution. 5-9% is a dramatic increase for a +0.1 release. It's all relative to the time spent since the last release.

We don't expect a 50% cut in speed every few months after all. It all adds up over time though.

Get an optimized build

[1001011010110101]

Dig up a bit in the forums. I'm using a Athlon XP optimized build (with all that black magic voodoo compiler switches). If you have the hardware to support it, you can REALLY feel the difference.

Re:Get an optimized build

[1001011010110101]

I'm using the Firefox now, but u should be able to find custom builds for the big zilla in the this forum

"dramatic"

[sacrilicious]

"Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size."

It would seem that the definition of "dramatic" just got marginalized. Personally I'd think of a 2x performance increase as dramatic. 1.1x is what I'd term "laudable".

Re:Who fucking cares

[cjsnell]

You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).

You, my friend, have obviously not been to the Bandera County Rodeo and Fair. Absolutely no Mozillas to be found, though there are some nice heifers!

Firefox

[miketang16]

I assume these speed changes will be transferred over to Firefox as well, since it uses the Mozilla code base. That will likely make Firefox amazingly fast, since it's already faster than the stock Mozilla.

smb:// now supported, and better GTK+ integration

[sn0wman3030]

As mentioned in this Footnotes article, the new Mozilla supports smb:// browsing through gnome-vfs, and the integration with your GTK2 theme has improved.

Re:Firefox

[foonf]

Every time I use a different web browser, whether its Mozilla/Seamonkey, Firefox, Opera, or even IE on Windows, I'm sure it feels faster than whatever I was using before. It doesn't matter what it is or how slow it is (unless it is really, really slow, like old Mozilla versions -- but even with them, I had myself convinced that some versons were dramatically improved from the last one, when they really weren't).

This was bothering me the last time I was playing around with Firefox. There is no reason for there to be any difference in rendering performance at all between any Gecko browsers using the same version of the rendering engine. A different user interface will not change that.

I decided to test this for certain. I got Seamonkey, Firefox, Galeon, and Epiphany, all running of of the same Mozilla version (okay, Firefox was actually a somewhat newer trunk snapshot, and had some optimizations, so if anything it should have been faster). I opened them at the same time, and in sequence, went to the same sites and watched them render. I loaded sites repeatedly from cache, and tried other sites I knew weren't cached. There was no difference at all. Every time I thought I noticed a difference, I went back to the other browser and loaded the same thing. It took the same amount of time.

I didn't see a "many percentage point" difference. All of the percentage points of difference were within the margin of error of my ability to distinguish differences in time, and while that could be a problem, all of the things I checked took long enough on my computer that if there were a significant proportional difference between browsers, it would manifest itself as a subjectively perceptible slowdown.

As for rendering, if you see any rendering quality differences between gecko browsers you need to check your font/screen dpi settings, because they ought to be exactly alike.

Firefox might be a nice browser, and it has its merits in terms of UI feel and features, but it won't succeed by being faster than Mozilla/Seamonkey, because it isn't.

I guess that makes it.....

[laddhebert]

"Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size."

I guess that makes it.....

29% Better!

-L

Re:MNG?

[Trejkaz]

Part of the problem there is that animated GIFs are still considered images, whereas MNG is probably considered video (since its mime type is... video/mng? Or is it video/x-mng?.) Therefore any site which only permits images to be displayed on it (various bulletin board sites are the main culprits, I suspect) might still cripple MNG supporters.

Unless you really can have <img> tags which contain MNGs, in which case I'll STFU.

Camino 0.8

[rixstep]

Camino 0.8 is on the way too.

22 January 2004: We are in the process of driving the Camino 0.8 buglist to zarro boogs. We will be branching off Mozilla 1.7 (now scheduled for April) and will release shortly after. We expect Camino 0.8 to be faster and even more solid than 0.7...

Why Thunderbird at all?

[mbourgon]

Okay - Firefox I understand. Lots of people just need a browser at work, for instance. But to be honest, if I need an email program I probably need a browser. What's the advantage of a standalone email client?

Re:Why Thunderbird at all?

[edwdig]

The big advantage is if your browser or email app crashes, it doesn't take the other one down with it.

The disadvantage of splitting the apps is greatly increased memory usage. There is some performance increase and memory usage reduction due to the simplification of the user interfaces, but that's greatly outweighed by each app using it's own copy of the Gecko libraries. (To those who want to complain about Mozilla having an IRC client and the like, that stuff has always been an optional part of the install) The development of Firefox and Thunderbird aren't syncronized at all, so there isn't any chance of that getting changed anytime soon.

Re:Why Thunderbird at all?

[TiggsPanther]

Maybe 'cos some non-IE people use Browsers other than Mozilla?

It means you can mix-and-match. You can use Opera, or Konqueror or even Internet Explorer, but without being tied to their particular mail-client. And then use a Moz-based e-mail/news client without being tied to the Browser.

Personally I mainly use the Mozilla suite. Although Firefox is fast reaching the point where I'll want to use it at work - where I need a standalone browser. But just 'cos I always use the browser and mail client together doesn't mean I don't know that some people want/use them seperately.

Plus if they do develop Thunderbird seperately, it's still based on the Mozilla codebase IIRC. So if they suddenly find some major optimisations for the mail/news side of things, they can probably be ported across to the full suite.

Tiggs

Re:no googlebar

[Trillan]

From the GoogleBar FAQ:

Someone told me that this works in Netscape and Firebird. Does it?
The answer is both yes and no. The toolbar works best in most recent versions of mozilla, since this has been where development has occurred all along. Due to XUL changes in the mozilla versions following the release of Netscape 6.2, the Googlebar will not work at all in any release of Netscape 6.2.x or below. However, in Netscape 7, which is a close cousin of recent mozilla versions, the Googlebar works. It has also been tested to work in Phoenix/Firebird 0.2 and above.

Mozilla Marketshare is Growing

[f0rt0r]

With a little help from me, I have gotten 10 or so Windows users at work to start using Mozilla, and one of them even tried out Firefox before I did! However, on the down side, I haven't gotten any of them to try Linux, though several have said "they should". I might just burn Knoppix to CD for them and hand it out.

Anyway, IE does have greater "marketshare", but all it took me was a few nudges to get Windows users to switch. Now if I can just get them to change their homepage to ./ , then it can do the rest of the work ( converting )for me. :)

All this from a former MCSE who though Microsoft was the end-all be all and Linux was just a flash in the pan...

that's KHTML

[tepples]

The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

Re:that's KHTML

[Brane]

Here you are: Mozilla ActiveX Control

Not just a similar API

An identical one! That's right, the Mozilla control will implement the IWebBrowser and DWebBrowserEvents interfaces that Microsoft have already defined for Internet Explorer.

Since the Mozilla control implements exactly the same API, it will mean that developers can take existing IE code and port it, sometimes in a matter of minutes!

Re:that's KHTML

[jsebrech]

Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.

There are good reasons for not implementing that. Implementing just document.all does nothing for IE-compatibility, since you have to implement the rest of the MS Document Object Model to actually get things done. Once you do that you would have three DOM implementations, the mozilla native one, the W3C one, and the IE one. All three would have to be maintained, and you'd need to constantly chase every new release of IE (though with IE's current lethargy this is less of a problem). Also, it's impossible to have perfect IE compatibility. IE for mac was a different engine, and wasn't anymore compatible with windows IE than mozilla is. You need to not only implement the same features, but you have to implement the same bugs, the same way of responding to error conditions, the same timing of screen updating behaviors.

Gecko's design is a very good trade-off between standards and compatibility. Dave Hyatt has stated on his weblog he tries to do things the gecko way often (looking to gecko for guidance on how to do a compromise). And safari pretends to be gecko in its useragent string.

Anyway, if a site doesn't work in mozilla, you can file it as a bug. If it can be fixed in the engine without breaking standards compatibility and a lot of sites would benefit from that fix, it probably will be. Otherwise it will become an evangelism bug, and mozilla people will contact the site to advise them how to become mozilla-compatible.

Faster?

[crashnbur]

In only a matter of seconds, I'm not going to notice less than a 10% improvement on an application's speed. With something like Photoshop, maybe that would matter.

Of course, I'll download it anyway, because I always update my browsers upon full (non-beta) releases. Just waiting on the full 1.7 release...

Re:MNG?

[Trejkaz]

Well I for one welcome our new MNG overlords, but I just don't see anything happening unless people get enough impulse to stop using GIF. And there's also that slight problem of the other, more broken browser which can't implement many other standards well, including PNG, and has even less chance of getting MNG right.

JS difference between Mozilla and MSIE

[solprovider]

Javascript with timers. The way things are right now [in Mozilla], using even one, unless it's VERY tightly coded, will drive CPU utilization up to 100% and just keep it there. Even when tightly coded, it still eats a massive amount of CPU time.

Be careful when using setInterval() and setTimeout(). Mozilla 1.3 cannot use setTimeout() recursively to create the effect of setInterval() without maxing CPU usage. setInterval() works fine. If you want something to happen at regular intervals, use setInterval() to make all browsers happy.

---
One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:

MSIE6 requires:

function inputIE(){
addchar(window.event.keyCode);
}
document.captur eEvents(Event.KEYPRESS);
<BODY ONKEYPRESS="inputIE()">

Mozilla1.3 works with:

function input(e){
addchar(e.which);
}
document.onkeypress = input;

[addchar() is a generic function to handle the processing of each key regardless of the browser.]
[Why did Slashcode add a space within the ECODE tags?]

Luckily both sets of code can be on the same page with the KeyPress event being set correctly without testing for the browser names. I prefer the second method because it allows the code to be contained in a .JS file without modifying the BODY tag. This may have been due to misunderstanding MSDN. There is something called a "named script" (<SCRIPT FOR = object EVENT = onkeypress>) that looks awful and is specific to MSIE. Maybe I just did not find the correct object in MS's DOM to set the onkeypress function for the entire page (maybe document.all.onkeypress?) I stopped researching it once the page worked correctly with both browsers.

To be on-topic:
Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?

my Book of Mozilla entry.

[burtonator]

And so the beast became agile. The unbelievers fell silent and the followers of
Mammon were left behind. The beast had been improved and awaited the release of
the great FireFox.

from The Book of Mozilla, 1:7b
(Red Letter Edition)

From whence the numbers?

[beforewisdom]

I followed the link to the article.

I couldn't find anything about what those percents mean.......ie how many seconds faster on what kind of hardware.

Its a step in the right direction though

who closes Mozilla?

[victorvodka]

Wait - what sort of person quits Mozilla after firing it up? I usually have at least five Mozilla windows open. The only time I have no Mozilla window open is immediately after a reboot. I suspect that for most users, Mozilla's absolute paging behavior (what happens when you quit it entirely) is a non-issue except how it handles the creation and destruction of additional windows beyond a certain low number.

Dramatically?

[Rui del-Negro]

Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size.

Dramatically? I don't know about you, but an 8% increase in speed and 5% decrease in size doesn't seem very dramatic to me. Mozilla is okay, but still fels like a truck compared to Opera.

RMN
~~~

Firefox

[bonch]

Does this have anything to do with Firefox's string changes which reduced the code and increased speed by about 5%?

Re:MNG?

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

How could I tell? There are no pages I could test it on...

That's because KDE = Windows

[bonch]

...and everyone knows it. :) KDE is obsessed with becoming Windows. They even integrated the HTML browser and file browser--there is *absolutely no point* in doing that, and now I have to wait through seconds of lag time to open simple folders.

All the volunteer effort in the world and what do we do? We make another UNIX. Then we make another Windows on top of it!

"stylish" != "good"

[0x0d0a]

I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.

Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:

* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.

* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.

* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.

* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.

* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.

* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.

* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.

Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.

Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h

Resume.

[zonix]

A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...

If you double-click on each download in the Download Manager, you'll get access to pause/resume features. That feature has been there for while. Of course, in the Firefox Download Manager these features are shown up front.

z

Mozilla/FireFox Usage According to Google

[CritterNYC]

The Google Zeitgeist shows their current visitor breakdown as a graph. It isn't labeled, but by breaking it down and determining which pixel the lines fall on at the end, the percentages look like this:

Internet Explorer (5/5.5/6): 89%
Mozilla/Netscape (5/6/7): 5%
Unknown/Other: 6%

Mozilla IS getting faster

[georgevulov]

You all might snicker at the single-digit speed improvements in the latest release, but I just upgraded from 1.2 to 1.7 and the difference is not only noticable, it's unbelievable! Especially the startup time, must be a quarter of what it previously was (no preloading in memory under linux, startup times for mozilla used to be awful)
The GUI is also much snappier.

I see good days ahead for Mozilla. A few days ago, a non-techie friend of mine saw me using Firefox and inquired about it. Once he installed it and saw the tabbing, pop-up blocking, speed, and skinnability, he immediately set it as his default browser. Though IE is the most common right now, people will find about the quality of Mozilla sooner or later. Actually, who cares? Even if they don't, I and all my friends still get to use a superb browser

Mozilla@linux + Macromedia (flash/shockwave)

[boaworm]

That sounds very interesting, gotta try it out (PowerBook + G5 DP). Although I have another issue with Mozilla on Linux though.

When accessing shockwave/flash pages, Mozilla (and Netscape, and Opera) crashes on me rather frequently. It happens atleast a couple of time every business day. I just copied the plugins from the standard Netscape 7.1 distribution.

Are there any other shockwave/flash plugins that I can use that dont bring my browser down all the time ? Any hints/tricks/tips greatly appreciated! (Apart from trying out Mozilla 1.7 :-)

Re:Mozilla@linux + Macromedia (flash/shockwave)

[sam0ht]

Ok, I used
http://macromedia.mplug.org/tarball/generic/ instal l_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz
I think. Works for me with Mozilla 1.7a on Fedora x86.

BTW I also got Flash Click-to-play, which stalls each animation until you click to activate it.

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Check
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html
f or more links

Mozilla still in bad shape

[mnmn]

I dont know quite what went wrong, but Mozilla's development just spiralled upwards into features and bloat year ago. That is bad considering its the only really free standalone browser. If youre running say NetBSD on some exotic hardware, or Solaris on x86, or something not mainstream, youre really stuck with Mozilla unless you can get around the overhead of KDE/GNOME and use their browsers.

Mozilla firebird/thunderbird has caught most peoples attention and can be far more popular than mozilla if it didnt crash so much. For now, people with exotic setups will have to use lynx, keep trying mozilla and firebird intermittently and turn back to Windows or Linux on x86 when they get frustrated. I do wonder whose interests is Mozilla serving anyway with such extreme bloat.

Re:Help me out

[jsebrech]

Firefox roadmap. Plus, it's been announced on mozillazine.org in even greater detail.

Rollover menu?

[GAVollink]

Rollover menu wasn't my choice, or my problem. In some sites I've been required by the customer that rollover "light up" menu links appear. These are relatively easy with a decent understanding of CSS.

CSS2 and Mozilla (not I.E.) can do full roll-over menus without the help of scripting. But this does NOTHING on I.E. Similarly, microsoft.com has menus (in black, top right of screen) that do nothing unless I.E. is loading them).

If your boss/client wants menus like that, then there is no choice but to break the Any Browser campaign (which I believe in), and use JavaScript (or Server Side Includes) to create different pages for different browsers - again, breaking many browsers that spoof their headers, or otherwise lie (Opera, "MSIE Compatible").

Re:Firefox

[FooBarWidget]

Firefox *is* faster than Mozilla 1.6 (and Galeon using Mozilla 1.6). Try loading a large page like http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html
When loading in Mozilla, my CPU usage was at 100% for 22 seconds. When loading in Firefox, 100% CPU usage lasted for 16 seconds.