Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Lite And Old PCs Could Crush IE
Eatfrank writes "A recent CNet article suggests that Mozilla should pipe a lite version of Firefox into older PCs to further attack IE's dominance: 'Firefox supporters, take note. A bare-bones Firefox will get the browser into more houses, increasing the Fox's market share and keeps it in novice users' eyes for when they get a new PC ... a truly great super-lightweight browser would have the security of Firefox, without the add-ons, without the tabs, yes, even without favourites, history lists and customisability. The Firefox name is synonymous with security and Web-browsing vigilance. Why not give this to the processing lightweights of the PC world?'"
Produce a stripped-down Mozilla light, that will be faster and have a much smaller memory footprint, and will run well on old hardware.
If my memory serves me well, it was going to be called "Firefox".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I thought Firefox was the light version of Mozilla.
"Nate is CNET.co.uk's expert on digital music and portable media"
Expert? He hasn't even figured out that the Opera browser even runs on mobile phones, and using the same engine as the desktop version...
Clever signature text goes here.
This doesn't sound like too bad an idea. One issue would be maintenence - if the full version and the lite version had to be maintained seperately, it probably wouldn't be worth it. To keep relevent bugfixes and such applicable to both branches, the code would need to be well designed and presumably fairly modular. Any Mozilla developers (or people familiar with the code) around and willing to comment on whether this would be feasible?
The GNOME people are probably salivating as they read that. If Mozilla actually did this, they'd probably make it their desktop's default web browser. Hell, they'd probably make it their fucking king.
Oh wait, no they wouldn't, because they like their feature-starved apps to perform just as badly as their feature-rich counterparts. Fuck knows how they manage that.
This post is being written on a machine with a 633 MHz processor. It's fairly ancient. It runs the full version of Firefox just fine. Mind you, it isn't running Windows, it's running DamnSmallLinux.
If I were to want a stripped down Firefox, it would probably be for embedded devices where resources are often quite limited.
"Firefox...without favourites, history lists and customisability"
:|
Firefox without favourites? Without history? Let's just get this straight - you want people to switch to a browser which has less functionality than the one they are currently using? Again - a browser without favourites? How is this going to give people a positive experience of Firefox and make them want to do anything but work out how to uninstall it...?
Most braindead idea I have heard all week.
And, as someone else has already pointed out, originally, Firefox was supposed to be the lite version of the oh-so-slow-and-bloated Mozilla Suite. Would that they had stayed true to their original intentions...
iqu
Well before going to extreme removing everything useful (heck Netscape 3 had a history and I remember running it on really slow computers) why not first change the rendering engine to use webkit which uses a lot less memory? Why do you think phone companies are investing in it over mozilla?
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I have yet to find the "config" item that will absolutely prevent Firefox or Seamonkey from using tabs, which I despise. I will gladly do without the history list, which I never use, and am annoyed when it pops up. I haven't used a "customization" that doesn't involve turning "features" off.
The only plug-in I use is a JRE, and many mobile devices have that (I'd rather download PDFs, since I usually end up doing that anyway, and I HATE Flash, except for the Ducati Monster Configurator, which I downloaded for off-line use).
I do use "Bookmarks" (favorites, in IE-speak), but could do that nearly as easily from a text file in another desktop window, which would be much easier to manage.
Chances are the old machines that don't have the resources to even handle a basic Firefox install are loaded down with tons of other crap anyway. I'm talking about system tray items for every app on the computer. And let's not forget, this was before automatic updates, so we can be fairly certain the machine isn't up-to-date patchwise. This means that there are probably god knows how many adware/spyware/viruses/trojans running in the background, too. In order for this lightweight version of Firefox to be truly useful, the machine should be thoroughly cleaned before installation.
This guy's the limit!
Yea but unfortunately over the years it has been getting quite bulky. It needs another diet.
Amazingly Firefox is actually a heavy version of Mozilla.
Getting rid of bookmarks,add-ons,tabs,history lists and customisability will not make firefox smaller.
The real problem is that gecko is a huge beast and XUL is resource intensive. But this too is difficult to solve. A native graphical toolkit could be used instead of XUL but solve the beast of gecko is more difficult. Gecko is the attempt at a solution for the broken nature of the web.
Browsering the web is amazingly resource intensive. I remember browsing the web with a Pentium 133mhz with 64MB of ram. Now it requires 100s MB of ram and I haven't really noticed much difference in the experience I'm getting.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Excuse me: "without the tabs" and "Firefox ... is synonymous with security"? For me Firefox is also - and actually formost - synonym with tabbed browsing.
My own windows box has IE 7 for the sake of those few sites that really need IE (Windows Update, mainly). Of course I use Mozilla (albeit Seamonkey, not Firefox) for all other browsing on Linux as well as Windows. But recently I had the misfortune of having to intensively use IE 6 for two months "at work". The one thing that I hated most was the absense of tabs, not the lesser security.
Don't get me wrong, the security argument is very valid. But the target audience is going to be much more convinced by the tabs. If not, I suggest putting Lynx on the machines. It's even more leightweight, and it even has more security advantages, since no hacker targets it (anymore) and since features that aren't there can't be abused. Now really...
Linux user since early January 1992.
Decided to post anonymously...
What we're seeing is a cult fanboy following. Firefox is gaining users, not because it's That Good A Browser, but because it has a large cult following of nerdy fanboys who do shit like make "crop circles" and make the media, place large "Get Firefox" banners all around and generally think of Firefox as the new god.
It is sad - and I mean really, REALLY sad - to see tons of those fanboys not even know how their browser is called. Thus they call it FireFox, with two capital "F" letters... But that doesn't stop them from spewing garbage about how darling invented tabs and is the bestest thing evar and everyone running something else than Firefox is a clueless n00b and an idiot.
There's also the issue of extensions. "Install extensions, they're what makes Firefox great!", followed by "Well, it's your fault that the browser is using 500 MB of RAM, you shouldn't have used (those) extensions."
Firefox doesn't even come with an ad blocker. It needs an extension to do that. Some other browsers *do* come with ad blockers, but then they are either convicted of being copycats (I think Opera had a crude content blocking method back in 2001), or auto-updating block lists, like, totally pwn everything else... Whereas I haven't updated any of my blocking lists for my browser(s) of choice since about three years ago, and I maybe see one ad every three months.
It took years to get really simple things in Firefox, like tab reordering and session saving in case of a crash (I've had people convince me that neither of those things are necessary, but when they appeared, they were oh-so-cool!).
Now we are slowly seeing cries for help; cries for a slimmer browser, one that would help Firefox "destroy the competition", one that would run faster and use less resources than other browsers.
An attempt has been made to create such a browser. It was called Phoenix. And it failed to do it at the start.
I don't understand why bookmarks get the flick, since they've been around since the year dot, and are both 'light' and important. Other than that it sounds like a good idea. Having said that, until two years ago I was using an AMD 400 as my internet PC, it seemed just fine on dialup, using FF 1.5 or so, on W98SE. I don't get the impression that browser speed or footprint is a big deal in itself, most of the processing seems to be content.
Seriously, Firefox runs fine on a 500mhz machine with 128mb ram. It even starts sorta quickly.
However, using some extensions may slow it down noticeably. Eg with Firebug it takes a few seconds to open a new tab (yes, even if it's empty). NoScript adds another albeit smaller slowdown etc.
But the basic browser runs already fine. There is no need to strip features, which don't take much CPU anyways. Rendering a page creates a heavy usage load for 1-2 seconds, but thats it.
I highly doubt "tabs, ..favourites, history lists" are the memory burner. Would be an interesting area to analyse, though.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
I say we rename the article into "Phoenix". Then we will have a new thing to talk about, but with much less arguments in our way as we browse the discussion topic.
You are trolling, right? Firefox doesn't open any tabs unless you tell it to, by default, and the history list needs a Ctrl-H or Alt-S to be shown [although I gather you mean forms history].
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Could "crush" IE? Come now, that's a little euphamistic, no? Is Microsoft's browser still the juggernaut that it once was, and what is so important about "crushing" it?
There is simply too much glass..
I'm lost without tabs but I can agree with the sentiment behind the above, 90% of my prefs involve disabling stuff. Even worse, some of the new features can't be turned off although they're provably wrong.
Here are my pet-peeves: That doesn't include getting rid of the annoying drop down informing me I don't have a flash plugin, I was able to get rid of it once but I've forgotten how. If that bar had been there back when I started using phoenix, it would have been enough for me to delete it and continue using galeon.
I can live without history and bookmarks only really make sense as an online service these days.
Well, it's not that bad. Old laptop, 500 MHz P3, 128 MB of RAM, Debian Etch, Firefox, erm, Iceweasel runs fine enough.
....To get them web-able would mean I could find a usable home for them....
But I get the impression that what is referred to as old here is system produced 5 -7 years ago.
Hell I'm running off an overclocked to just over 500Mhz box right now using Ubuntu. Its my main internet system. It does just fine.
Having been screwed badly by the computer industry during the commodore fall and its thieving aftermath I haven't found a good enough reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest but rather wait for perfectly good hardware to be tossed out. I'll make smaller purchases in fixing or upgrading some tossed out systems but that's not very often. Getting to be just DVD R/W drives anymore. And that is so I can run live Linux CDs such as Dynebolic.
But this doesn't work for the older systems.
So to me old system fall in the category of 486's to Pentium I, and I have quite a few of those that will either make it into next years Decatur High free electronics recycling mine (yes, electronic based hardware has more mineral value in it than its weight in raw dirt based ore and such... And to think some places want to charge you to recycle) or I'll find an easy way to make them useful again which is the preferred method even with recyclers.
So if the software industry got back to lean and mean OSs and small but very usable internet applications and put together a package that could be test run via CD (or floppy/cd combo for those old system that just can't boot from CD) there could possible be an extension to the usable life of systems that otherwise make it to the landfill or recycling mine.
I'd been hoping that AROS would fit here but unless someone take on dev for old 486 systems, its not going to happen.
Anyone know of any such a package easy to test on old systems (live cd or floppy/cd bootable)?
This whole article is a troll.
Firefox 1.0 was 4.7MB
The latest version is a 5.7MB download.
Opera is 4.7MB.
IE7 is 17MB.
Safari is a 7MB download.
Firefox is at the compact end of current web browsers. It has grown by 1MB in the past three years. To put that in perspective, Adobe Acrobat reader has grown from 8.7MB to 30.7 in the same period.
There's an agenda here, and it's not to promote the idea of a slim Firefox. Somebody wants to plant the meme that Firefox is bloated when it is clearly not. The whole thing stinks of a smear campaign from somebody's marketing department.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I'm sorry but this has already been done, it includes tabs (as "pages") and bookmarks, but it's much lighter then Mozilla Firefox: K-Meleon
But I wouldn't recommend running Windows on old PC's, especially when they're connected to the Internet. Build Epiphany with XULRunner, it's a pretty good browser IMHO.
I suspect he means the history that shows when you start typing in the address bar. While I find that immensely useful, I could see how it would be annoying on a system not fast enough to do it well.
But yeah, he's trolling... The Flash comment proved that. There's nothing wrong with Flash itself, only how people use it. He then goes on to prove that at least 1 person did it well by his own standards, but he refuses to look at any other Flash. If we were talking about humans, this would commonly be called 'prejudice' and people would be up in arms. It's still prejudice (but without the human connotation), but this is Slashdot and tech-prejudice is expected here. (Call that flamebait if you want, but the lines here are clearly drawn and accepted.)
As for 'Firefox Lite'... My immediate thought was 'who the fsck would want a browser without bookmarks/favorites?' But then I remembered Del.icio.us and how much better it does the bookmarks, and that I never actually use them on my browser now, except for a single bar below my address bar. And that could be done away with using a good homepage. (Maybe modeled after Opera's Speed Dial.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Check out Minimo. Granted it's targeted for mobile devices, but would be the right starting point than scaling down Firefox.
No, I mean tabs. I've set every "tab"-related item I can find in "about:config" and the various preferences to off, but if I click a bookmark label that is a folder for other bookmarks (some of them have a lot of items) often all of the bookmarks in the folder are opened in tabs of the same browser window. This may even be a bug, but since I prefer each page to be in a separate window, I would rather have a browser that didn't have tabs in the first place. It's faster for me to use the window titles to find one of the many pages I have open than to wade through the tiny tab labels, and there's the "Window" toolbar item, plus I get more of the page into the window than if there's a tab bar cluttering it. Of the six available "bars" in Seamonkey, plus the sidebar, I only have two, Navigation and Status, so I could live without the code for all of the rest of them. On Firefox, when I use it, it also have a minimal set of toolbars and tools.
As for this story, I doubt that bookmarks, history and those kinds of features are the ones making Firefox run slow. It probably has more to do with the architecture itself.
tab killer addon
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
With FF2, 999 days history, massive favourites & 10 tabbed sites open, 123MB, with only 1 site open 114MB, not a big difference, those figures includes a bunch of extensions, the excellent AdBlock+, Forecast Fox, Gmail Notifier, Foxy Tunes & maybe 25 others.
The Fox rocks! I only ever use IE7 for Windows Update, sigh.
Nico M, London, GB.
For the ultimate in security, use the original text-based www client. Text only, no curses, nothing. Suitable for teletypes. Too bad it's not supported anymore. :)
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's what I was thinking. There's a reason an Apple team, lead by a former Gecko developer, went for KHTML for Safari. It's the same reason that Nokia later picked WebKit for their mobile devices. WebKit is much lighter than Gecko, and runs quite happily on devices with 200MHz ARM9 chips and 32MB of RAM (no swap space). If you want a light-weight browser for old PCs, I'd look at WebKit, not Gecko.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I can run Firefox 1.5.0.12, SeaMonkey 1.1.3, and with a slight tweak Firefox 2.0.0.5 under Windows NT 3.51 and Windows 95. On slower CPUs such as a Pentium 200 it runs acceptably for the most part. On faster CPUs speed is almost the same.
At about 5 megs, size wise Firefox is quite small to, compared to modern apps that often come on multiple CDs or DVDs bundled with gigs of junk.
Firefox does have a few performance issues. Try loading a page with a dropdown that has 100,000 or so items. Firefox will sit there, IE and Opera will work faster, and Safari loads it in a blink of the eye.
Now, Firefox 3 is planned to work under Windows 2000 and later only, dropping the ability to run under Windows 95/98/ME that is used on many older computers. Fortunately Firefox is Open Source so if somebody wanted to make a port that again ran on computers with these older versions, it is completely possible. Personally I would love to see such a version and hope somebody takes up the challenge, even if it meant stripping out a few of the newer features.
I am writing this from a 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM, Windows 2000 PC. It is 7 years old. I run the latest and greatest Opera, IE, Firefox, and Eclipse (w/ many plugins) all simultaneously for web development. I don't experience any problems in doing so. Eclipse takes a while to start up, but hell, it does so on my modern PC at the office as well. Face it, web browsing doesn't require much hardware at all - even with the newest browsers.
...because bookmarks take up a hell of a lot of resources, you know. Storing URLs sometime implies DOZENS of bytes!
Why not on new PC's. Are there people who enjoy having to run bloated software? Make it available and if it ALSO runs on older hardware, that is even better.
When did we stop to program with bounderies in our minds? Memory is not an issue. Drive space is not an issue. So please start programming again with these things in mind.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
> There's nothing wrong with Flash itself, only how people use it. He then goes on to prove that at least 1 person did it well by his own standards, but he refuses to look at any other Flash. If we were talking about humans, this would commonly be called 'prejudice' and people would be up in arms.
NOT prejudice, experience. I want INFORMATION from the web. Flash add-ons do not provide more information, just eye-candy (like the Monster Configurator, which is a toy, oh, and I like the "bubble wrap" Flash toy, also off-line), that I have to either watch or stop before trying to get to the real data. What is worse is that many web sites are not even usable without Flash because the alleged "Web Developers" were so busy showing off their own "skills" that they forgot about their customers, and customers' customers. I can't even let the site owners know that they have lost my business due to the site design because there's not even a "contact" or "about" if/until you watch the Flash. I stopped doing business with a local hard drive dealer when their site changed to require Flash on entry, because it wasn't worth wading through the nonsense compared to using a different dealers' site.
Here's one: http://digg.com/search?s=firefox&submit=Search&sec tion=news&type=title&area=promoted&sort=most
Well, I am writing this using Opera 9.22 on a Pentium II 233 Mhz with 160Mb RAM, so browsing the web isn't that much resource intensive (don't ask why I still have such an old computer (monetary question mostly)). I tried firefox (and IE7) and it is not really usable on a computer that old. Now, I don't think there is really a market for computer that old, so I'm not saying firefox should should make a lite version for me but, just to say that not all browser need really much resource to run. I do get lag in scrolling in some (heavy) web page, but I think the bottleneck is my video card and not the CPU/RAM, but I'm not really an expert in this domain.
Better approach should be to get the major vendors, HPs and Dells to install Firefox as OEM. Why no one is doing it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ummm, as the article states, one of the reasons why Firefox is increasing in marketshare is because Google is having it pre-loaded.
If people are on older PCs, and they haven't upgraded to IE7 through automatic updates, what are the chances that they are going to be downloading a lite version of Firefox and installing it?? Effectively, zero.
So could "Firefox Lite And Old PCs Could Crush IE"? Nope.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Firefox is a 5.7MB
Opera is 4.7MB.
Opera include not only a Web Browser but a Email too.
Firefox is Netscape Navigator for the new century, abandoning the suite was wholly unnecessary and the many compromises they have made has allowed short term gains but Firefox has just barely put a dent in the market share of Internet Explorer and older versions of IE still command a far greater market share than Firefox.
The combined challenge of Safari and other Webkit browsers might well outstrip the modest achievements of Firefox, but at the very least it might help make the web be a little less "designed for IE".
Everyone who cares will probably use FF sooner or later and those who don't care are hard to convince. Yes, I really think that people who are using their own computer at home and care to download and test this or that application have heard of Firefox by now.
Oh, and of course there will be a firefox mobile version.
And it'll be even faster with FF3... they're using SQLite under the hood for that :)
must crush internet explorer!
I suspect he means the history that shows when you start typing in the address bar. While I find that immensely useful, I could see how it would be annoying on a system not fast enough to do it well.
;-)
Just curious, how is having a history search available through the address bar immensely useful?
What I do is to make extensive use of keywords for bookmarks. Thus, typing 'slash' takes me to http://slashdot.org/ typing 'g' followed by a search string performs a Google search on that string, 'news' takes me to http://news.google.com/ and 'ebay' followed by a search string allows me to search eBay for old computers that don't run Firefox very well.
The only time I've made use of Firefox's history is on those rare occasions when I've bounced around sites while searching for something on Google and can't remember where I saw something worth remembering, or when I'm purging it. Having a history search performed in the address bar I personally find annoying, but obviously not enough to take the trouble to look up an about:config setting to see whether it can be disabled. That said, Firefox has in its favour the ability to tab through the history, unlike IE where one is required to use arrow keys (requiring removing one's hands from the keyboard).
I'm not really understanding this here. The point is to introduce a version of firefox with no tabs, no history--basically no kind of advanced functionality other than the ability to display a web page. This is supposed to replace IE, which now supports all of those (with the exception of tabs, unless they're running IE7--which requires XP or higher) and could be run on an older PC. And pray tell, how are we ever going to convince people to do that? In my experience, people trust their antivirus and antispyware stuff to protect them. They aren't going to switch browsers JUST for security reasons, ESPECIALLY if that browser has vastly less functionality than their previous one.
I'm sorry, but enough of this article is just silly for me to not take any of it seriously. A lite-Firefox without Favorites or History? You must be running on seriously old hardware if you need to strip out Favorites.
Thanks for the life story pal.
Okay so it's not a few... but yet I never have these memory leaks. Whenever it grows in memory, it's because I have 20+ tabs open. I use it on quite a few P3s at the office, on lab boxes, however IE6 runs just as well on these boxes, and security is not so much of an issue. Those fall more under the ID 10 T errors.
So I don't understand the need for an even lighterweight version of Firefox? Are there REALLY that many sub P3 computers still out there, that are also being used as web boxes?
I run Firefox 1.5 just fine on my Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 under pdaXrom Linux. For those who haven't seen one, a Zaurus SL-C1000 is a 416MHz Intel xScale processor, 64MB of RAM, a 640x480 screen, no Hard disk and everything runs from flash memory. Admittedly, pdaXrom has a pretty low overhead but I still think its a pretty good indication of how efficient Firefox actually is.
If you want to reuse an old computer, pick a lightweight Linux like Xubuntu or Damn Small Linux or even Gentoo (emerging packages may take days but they'll run faster in the end) and only install what you need to make it do what you require.
Eh. Firefox is already way faster than IE, and that's with all the crap I have tacked onto it. A lighter version of it would only run faster of course, but even as-is, it still beats IE.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
We don't care about you. Go away and die.
Your whole comment is wrong.
Firefox 1.0 used quite a bit of memory
The latest version eats up hundreds of Megabytes just for fun.
Opera uses less memory than firefox.
IE7 uses less memory than firefox.
Safari uses less memory than firefox.
Firefox is at the huge-ass-memory-footprint end of current web browsers. It has grown by hundreds of memory leaks in the past three years. To put that in perspective, none of the other major browsers has worsened so bad in the same period.
There's an agenda here, and it's not understanding what TFS is about. Somebody (ozmanjusri) wants to distract from Firefox's bloated memory usage when it's clearly there. The whole thing stinks of not even reading TFS.
Yes, i have only one PC and those are its specifications and it runs FF2, with Kerio personal firewall and windows explorer with a music player on all the time in the background, this works smooth. Things do get a little slow with Gimp on in the background. The catch is that i use Windows 98SE, tweaked to handle memory well with fixed Swap file on another hard disk. Not to mention the thunderbird 2.0, the new one works more faster on my computer then the older 1.5 version i guess the newer one uses GTK 2.0 and older used GTK 1.0.
here's a grand idea that people have been asking for for a long, long time:
port firefox to the treo and other smart phones. if apple was able to get "safari" on the iphone, surely the good folks at mozilla see the importance of a good browser on a phone. let's face it, the palm browsers STINK! and opera for the palm (treo) is buggy as all get out.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
...what about calling it "Phoenix"?
During the first few major version bumps they could rename it to Firebird and later on (after renaming the current FireFox to FireDog -> FireHorse -> FireElephant -> FireWhale) to FireFox which would be the starting point of a brand new idea: Phoenix - a completely new, never been-there browsing experience with less of (the new) FireFox's bloat, memory leaks and everything.
This sentiment is really played out these days. --> Scribd.com
I'm not one for getting rid of older computers and still make use of my old Windows ME 700Mhz laptop with 56mb of RAM. It runs the latest version of Firefox 2 with around 10 addons (along with history, bookmarks, tabs and the things they want to get rid of) just perfectly and there's not much difference in speed between my 3.2Ghz and 1.5gb RAM desktop and the laptop, which I found quite surprising.
I'm not sure Firefox is quite as bloated or resource intensive as people often claim. How old are we talking about here?
My only disappointment will be that Firefox are dropping Windows 9x/ME support, which I think is a great shame, considering the number of users of Firefox still on those operating systems.
The worst memory hogs in Firefox are probably caching and anticipated browsing, witch downloads all links you are likely to click. They can easily be disabled. If that is to complicated to do for a lowtech user, just make it a second download.
you do realise that 'slash' will bring up slashdot even without it being in bookmarks, if it's in your history? I never even bother setting up a bookmark for /., rather just type 's l down-arrow'.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
...is just a bit of work and focus of streamlining and optimization. I too remember when Firefox was a lot faster. Now it's getting a bit bloated the more they add to it. When 2.x came out, I was heavily resisting the upgrade as I had heard too much about where 2.x was going wrong. I stayed with 1.5.0.x for as long as I could and then when I installed Fedora7, that was the end of my resistance.
So my thoughts to whoever may be in charge of directing Firefox development, it's time to freeze the code additions and look to optimization, reducing memory usage and stuff like that. The community has noticed that Firefox has gone beyond its intent.
Some years ago I made a set of patches to the Dillo browser to support tabs and frames and other such things. I kept logs of the increase in memory use, binary size and other metrics. While the binary size and memory use went up a tiny little bit (several kilobytes) this should be offset against running several open windows or instances of a program. Compared to that using tabs actually saves memory, not to mention hassle when not using a tabbed window manager.
--frank[at]unternet.org
the Flashblock plugin has made the web much faster for me. Are their plugins that block Javascript selectively?
Oh, of course. Gratuitous use of flash [and java/javascript] is probably the bane of anyone who wants to do something useful on the web. Just the other day I was trying to download the catalogue from this site. As you can see, there's an area entitled '2006 catalogue (click here)' that does absolutely nothing. The site might work if the person who wrote it spent a little less time writing the javascript to run it [view the source and hold on to your hat] and more time, you know, making something usable. Most of the time, flat HTML+CSS really is the best way to go, but that probably doesn't sit too well with many PHBs and ponytails.
But then I have to ask, what has this got to do with firefox? FF hardly is the reason for the proliferation of flash on the web, and if you don't like it you don't have to download it. It's not part of firefox at all.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
I have yet to find the "config" item that will absolutely prevent Firefox or Seamonkey from using tabs, which I despise...and I HATE Flash...
And stay off my lawn!!!
Punks. ;)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
You're a fucking idiot if you think the download size of the installer tells you anything other than how long it'll take to download.
You know, the cache is a big part of it. The main reason Firefox is so big is because it assumes that the operating system is better at paging out cache than itself [which is usually correct, though it gets a lot of flack for this]. I was going to say that this doesn't explain the large size at startup, but then again, it's not much larger than the latest Windows Dead Messenger.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Fun with numbers: W3Schools shows Vista with a 3.0% share in June. Up from 0% in January 2007. Linux at 3.4%. Up 0.4% from January 2004. OS Platform Statistics
It is worth taking a look at W3Schools Display Statistics
While surfing the content-rich web - the media-rich web - in 2007 is fundamentally a middle-class experience, the demands of the browser are trivial even at entry level - and have been for years:
Compaq Desktop PC w/ Intel Pentium 4 Processor
Vista Basic
3.2 GHz P4
512 MB RAM 160 GB SATA HDD.
DVD Burner
Intel integrated graphics (Pathetic, but upgradeable)
$328
Not the same. If he doesn't have 'slash' as a bookmark keyword, and types "slash" and presses Enter (no down arrow), it would go to the first result of a Google search for "slash".
Why in hell would they want that? Tabs are the bare minimum requirement to be considered a browser now. Even IE has them, for god's sake.
am I the only one getting sick of "lite?"
Honestly, you save one keystroke. Is it some awkward UK spelling thing I'm not aware of?
K-Meleon anybody? Geko engine in a nice lightweight UI. Got preloading too...
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/Download
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
For those of you looking for a more bare-metal kind of browser like Dillo except with more rendering capability then start packaging! I'm sure they could use the bug reports too. We could use a GNU version of it too.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
And that's something no one wants to see!
What are you saying, the down arrow is too difficult now? Does the effort of using the down arrow severely outweigh that of setting up a bookmark keyword? This is nothing but pedantry- the main thing is, the history in the URL line is just as usable, and I'd wager it's not fat at all.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
You of course mean: simply have it available as another download option. Your headline read like Mozilla should 'push' FF onto unsispecting users PCs.
"Pipe" not mentioned in the original article, FWIW.
VOTE!
I can do that here with the scroll button, but otherwise it's not something that has ever happened to me, on Windows or Linux.
:)
The one thing I would most like to see in Firefox would be threading [or even separate processes for different s/tlds and windows] for tabs and the GUI. It really is a pain having to wait until a tab has started before scrolling down or clicking another link. With that kind of model, I bet there wouldn't be much difficulty adding a compile time option for no tabs.
Come to think of it- I bet you can do it! Go on, get hacking!
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Frankly, the article is useless.
The author seems to live in a "fanboi la-la land" world where there are only two web browsers, Firefox and MSIE, and his whole article is based upon that ignorance of alternatives.
There are, as others have pointed out, smaller, faster browsers than Firefox. Opera consistently beats all its rivals in speed tests, on older as well as newer hardware.
I appreciate that everybody has their personal preferences but the author is clearly blind if he can't see the alternatives available out there. For a technology journalist to be so ignorant about the technology that he's discussing is unforgiveable.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm not implying anything at all, just pointing out that there's a difference. (Of course, the down arrow is a difficult to hit key compared to Enter - but that's a detail)
On the other hand, I've never seen an ordinary computer user use the drop-down history, they just ignore it. Even after I've told them about it. They'll (slowly) type out a long URL while the browser lists it right underneath the whole time. I'm not saying that it's not a great feature - it is - but that even seemingly simple and convenient shortcuts can be difficult to teach to the computer-illiterate (particularly when minor mistakes, such as not pressing the down arrow, can take you to a completely different site).
Mine would be a folder with web link files.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
It's suggesting a Firefox Lite. Not Mozilla Lite. Yes, Firefox is supposed to be Mozilla Lite, but that is not what is CNet is talking about. Due to many features you may not need, Firefox has become bloated and sluggish at times.
Oh, I think you have something wrong in your settings somewhere. When I click on a bookmark that's a folder, my Firefox does not automatically open up all of the bookmarks in that file as a series of tabs. I can see why you're annoyed! That would annoy me, too.
For me that only happens if I use my middle click on my mouse. Sometimes I want this behavior, like when I want all my daily use websites to open at once. If I right-click on a bookmark, I get a choice between opening it in a new tab or in a new window. (If you go into your settings, you can sellect to have all pages open in a new window. I don't know how well that works, because I don't have it checked, but it's something for you to try.) What's maddening is I can't get my mouse on my Mac to behave this same way, and I can't figure out why that is. I blame it on OSX, though. ; )
I'm no expert, but I think you've got some extension that's messing up your mouse's normal action, or you have some sort of incompatibility between your mouse's driver and Firefox.
No bookmarks/history then and no way to install extensions? By the way, try these bookmarks (sandboxed for now.) This is a bookmark extension, obviously will not be an option in FF lite... at least not until version 2 ;)
You can't handle the truth.
They're expecting the programmers who came up with Firefox/Mozilla to write something lightweight? Haha.
;) ).
I've been modded troll for saying the following, but I'm going to say it again because it's true:
At my office, I run suse. I also run windows xp on vmware on the same box. And you know what? Firefox too often ends up using more RAM then the entire vmware virtual machine running IE+Windows XP! It uses even MORE if you count the amount it bloats up X by (fortunately once you kill firefox, X frees up the mem). I've no probs with XP desktop virtual machines that have 256-384MB of "RAM" (only had probs on a 128MB one when I had too many browser windows with "will it blend" videos at the same time).
One of my ex-colleagues recently grumbled that his Firefox 2 used up 1GB when he left it overnight. At that rate, I'm sure not going to "upgrade" to Firefox 2 anytime soon.
Trouble is, a year or so back I had probs with Opera sucking similar amounts of RAM too (maybe it was the flash plugin), so I gave up on it. Maybe I'm strange to regularly have 30+ (50? I don't really count) tabs/windows open[1], but I do that with IE all the time at home on Win2K and rarely have problems (my taskbar is doubleheight so I don't normally need to scroll my taskbar
Sure IE sucks, but sadly firefox isn't that much better.
[1] It's not that hard to end up with lots of open tabs:
One browser window for all the intranet tabs.
One for search and search results for a particular task (looking up bug).
One for search results for a different topic/task (downloading RPMs etc).
One browser window for news (and slashdot)
1-3 browser windows for reference (RFCs, different pages of online documentation etc).
I don't see why I should waste time closing and reopening stuff. And I don't see why it should use up that much RAM, when I've done similar stuff on IE on Windows and it's not a problem. In fact, I actually successfully do this on firefox and it's not a problem immediately, it only seems to become a problem after a _while_.
Because I type s and it drops down a list of all the sites that start with s (disregarded the www., if it was used). I believe it prioritizes the list according to frequency of use, as well. If it's a site that I frequently view a certain sets of pages, I can just arrow down until I get to the one I want. (This works well for GameFaqs, as I often visit the same few boards over and over for a month or so, then change to other games over time.)
It's rather like the frequently used bit of the Windows Start menu, but with a longer memory. (And thus more useful.)
I use the firefox shorts (google and dict are quite common for me) when I want to search for things, as well. The dropdown history doesn't store those, and I've found that to be both a blessing and a hindrance at different times.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
XP will run with 256. It will not fly, but tweaking it enough will yield you a usable workstation. Turning off the "XP interface" will give you a huge boost in performance. There are lots of guides out there documenting how to get the best of a XP machine. As a matter of fact I am typing this from a 256 MB XP station.
Why not upgrade? I took the Rambus pill. I refuse to pay 500 dollars for a memory upgrade. It will not happen, I rather invest in getting a new computer.
My other OS is the MCP!
I use Mozilla Firefox 1.07 and short of a system catastrophe, there is no reason I will upgrade it.
It may have the odd security hole that has been patched in newer versions, but (OTOH) it doesn't have any of the recent issues that malware makers are presumably focusing on. It's so old that it's not really a target!
Also it is lightweight and fast. I really like it. I won't try the newer, bloated versions of Firefox unless I am forced to.
Well, everything that's wanted to be made lightweight now is made web-based. Why not make a web based browser?
:)
I know it sounds like a joke, but if you don't need to render anything at the client, except lightweight code, maybe it'll be worth it. It will get a little more of your bandwidth, but indeed will weigh nothing.
Managing bookmarks within Mozilla can get quite troublesome. Instead I create a directory structure on my hard drive and pull any link into the appropriate folder. It's much easier to manage and it's a cross platform/browser solution, i.e. the bookmarks can easily be copied to another machine and can be used by any browser (well, except for Lynx ;P) so no need for ex-/importing etc. when switching or upgrading.
What I thought was strange though was the plan to omit tabs, one of the most useful features and even a fast light weight browser like Opera has no problems handling them. The overhead for tabs should be negligible. What actually is the resource hog in Firefox is that it's caching every tab's page content including pages several levels down the history. Getting rid of tabs all together shouldn't be the solution to this problem.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I use use old software. Redhat 5.2 runs great on my 10 year old laptop. I never understood the Firefox thing. The difference between it and the Mozilla suite has shown to be insignificant in both size and speed. So, I stay with the all inclusive suite. What do we have here? Bud Lite Lite?
What?
The author of the blog is assuming that a significant number of old PC's are in use by Firefox aware users, that are not using Firefox. If Joe User has a old PC that is struggling on the net, his most probable resolution will be to buy a new PC. At some point he might learn about Fifrefox and run it, but that probably has little to do with computer speed. This seems like a ridiculous theoretical exercise.
Until then: With browsers now having to handle heavy use of Ajax, the newer browser's rendering improvements save time and are much nicer to the client CPU as well.
A lightweight browser for windows? I believe a beta is already out.
Only 3 tabs or popups open at any one time!
I don't feel like it...
I thought that was what Kmeleon was for.Great thing about open source:you have choice.Kmeleon is lightweight,Firefox has the extensions,and Seamonkey has everything.I have all three and haven't touched IE in years.My Xandros Pro laptop has IE though (installed as part of office 2k).It is probably the only place where IE6 is safe to run,LOL!Still I won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I would like to see various default functions of firefox implemented as extensions, rather than as something fully integrated into the package. That way, if you don't like something, you can just turn it off. (like the website builder Drupal)
That way, anything that you don't like, you can just turn off. If you want a lite version of firefox, just turn off all the extensions.
Some of the features of firefox are fast page loading times between hitting the 'back' and 'forward' button; firefox retains these pages in memory so that it doesn't have to fetch each page when you use 'back'. The amount of caching increases with multiple tabs. Try disabling this; does this really make firefox a better browsing experience?
Most people also hate that Firefox uses large amounts of memory due to it's extensions, spellchecking, and other useful features.
There is a "Firefox Lite", at least for OSX. It's called Camino. I briefly used it myself, and while I do agree it was fast, the lack of extensions was a dealbreaker.
Now yes, we could make a Firefox Lite, but why? Mozilla =/= Microsoft. They simply want people to be able to use a quality web browser. If that browser happens to be Opera (as one parent pointed out), we should put aside personal biases and point users with slower PCs towards Opera.
On another note, those experiencing problems with Firefox, and who are using OSX, try this. Apparently they put in some architecture specific code to speed up the browser, and it's still compatible with firefox extensions.
Ironically, slashdot has stolen an article from digg, instead of the other way around.
Maybe this could be used to crush Windows altogether.
What?
Please actually test if you think firefox is some sort of "memory hog"
15 tabs (Slashdot RSS Feed) opened in iexplore.exe (7) 121,532k
15 tabs (Slashdot RSS feed) opened in firefox.exe (2.0.0.5) 113,700k
And this, of course, is also running gmail notifier, webdeveloper toolbar, noscript, and adblock(standard)
And by the way- whens the last time you opened 15 WINDOWS of IE6 on an old machine?
I only reply because I have a processor (PPC G3) of the same speed as you, as well as the exact same amount of memory. I'm running Ubuntu LTS. Firefox runs fine, but definitely slow compared to my Athlon X2.
Opera Mini
[quote]The security of Firefox[/quote]
Vehicle Stars used car search is my current project
I'm running FF at this second, 4 tabs open, 108,572K
Its using over 100MB and Ive got 4 tabs open, but tbh i don't care, its not like 100MB is really that much to me, id rather use it then have it sit there idle
Won't even display to an 8-bit display since April 2006. 1-bit went a couple years before that. All on their relentless march of incompatibility.
More generally, when it comes to bloat, linux and windows are the same species of pig.
The Firefox name is synonymous with security
l nerabilities.html#Firefox
You were just kidding right? List of known vulnerabilities in Firefox:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vu
And the group of computer wizards planning to crush The Browser That Shall Not Be Named was called the Order of the Phoenix.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
A new player recently appeared: Safari for Windows. It is small, fairly bare-bones, and really fast.
Until last year I had a P-3 slot 1 550 (upgraded from a 400-500-550-750 then the 750 died went back to the 550) with 224MB RAM running W2KSP5 and Netscape 7.2 and it ran fine. If I were doing the same thing today I'd just replace NS7.2 with Seamonkey 1.1.3 which is what I have running today on all the other machines. I am typing this on a homemade slot 370 P-3 1200Mhz machine with 512MB RAM and Seamonkey. A little slower to start than new machines but entirely usable.
Seamonkey is a bit lighter and quicker than FF, it handles multiuser profiles a bit better than FF and most of the useful xpi extensions run on it.
Yes, Firefox has a memory-hog problem. But it's not that "Firefox is too big".
The memory hog problem comes from the Firefox "feature" of storing recently rendered pages as images. That creates the illusion that the browser is "faster". Until you run out of memory and the system starts paging.
You can turn off that feature by opening "about:config" and setting "browser.cache.memory.enable" to "false". Memory usage will go down and page redraw time may increase slightly. You probably won't notice. The content is still being cached, just not as a bitmap of the page. That feature wasn't really a win. Most page delays are on initial loading, for which caching doesn't help.
Is it possible to get firefox 1.0 again?
Yes, how old are we talking about? A Seamonkey full install runs quite nicely on my 333mhz PII, 256M, Win98 (not SE) system. If you get much older than that, (P1's, K6's, Cyrix's, etc.) you're talking about a vanishingly small market share. Then there's the question of demographics. Who's running most of these old machines? My bet is that very few are granny's or impoverished neophytes who lack awareness of non-MS browsers. I'd bet that it's mostly long-experienced and tech-savvy geeks who are putting the old hardware to use for dedicated purposes. Purposes such as Linux based DIY routers. Purposes such as dedicated front ends for DIY home automation. Purposes such as running old software such as DOS based games that won't run well (or at all) on more modern machines. Purposes such as extra machines for the garage or workshop. These are people who need no introduction to non-IE browsers. They already have newer and faster machines that can run the modern, full featured, browsers. And if they do feel a need to run a web browser on a really old machine, they know enough to go hunt down a leaner one like Opera, or if that's still too much, Lynx. Even with schools or other organizations who may be running donated or older machines, you'd be hard pressed to find machines that aren't at least as capable as my old PII-333, because better machines than that are retired all the time now, so should be easy to get as donations, or to purchase cheap at a flea market. And machines at that level don't need feature-reduced browsers. They just need browsers that will run on an old Windows version if they're not running Linux.
Hmm hmm ... interesting ... maybe I should give Firefox a try again. In fact, I said firefox was unusable, but that was only the experience with a base default install (don't remember wich version, sorry, pretty sure it 1.something though), and I'm not running a base default opera install (tweaked a lot of the settings) so I agree that's a little biased. I've noticed, at my PC at work, that a base install of opera seem to be kinda sluggish (like more than when I'm at home) when used on a Dual Pentium 4, 2.8 Mhz (512Mb RAM) so well, I agree that if I tweaked firefox too it might give different result.
I'll try and see if I can get it to run as smooth as the opera install I'm running right now. Thank you for making me notice that fact.
And let's train each and every person who can't afford a new computer how to install patches and do builds and blah blah blah.
Shut up already. You're geeks, not people. Stop trying to make people into geeks, fer chrissakes. HONESTLY. STFU.
Correctly != efficiently. How does Windows decide which pages are "unused", and how does it decide which of several "other purposes" to use memory for? And what happens once the swap file exceeds 4 GB, the limit of address space on a 32-bit architecture? And due to the 4 KiB page granularity of x86 virtual memory, what happens when tens of megabytes of pages are allocated with some 100-byte object that the program has to periodically visit, all of the other objects in the page having been deallocated?
and Darth Vader? Yep, Luke's father.
Wow, coming from an Anonymous Coward, that must mean a lot.
"May evil beware, and may good dress warmly and eat plenty of fresh vegetables." -The Tick
And OpenGL rendering acceleration in gtk2 please.
Hardly a new idea.
"Download the Safari 3 public beta and experience the world's fastest, easiest-to-use web browser. Free for Mac and PC."
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Give me a break. At our company we're seeing our last batches of 733mhz PCs starting to fail left and right, and your standard desktop is now a P4 3Ghz+ w/ 1GB RAM and sits idle 99% of the time, no matter how hard that receptionist pushes it. "Old" hardware nowadays is an Athlon 1.3 with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. Up until 3 months ago, I was running XP SP2 w/ full Office suite, Visio, AutoCAD 2004, and bouncing between Firefox and IE with NO issues whatsoever on that exact hardware. Just don't see the real issue with a "lite" version when your hardware is going to fail before you even come close to justifying this. If Firefox is slowing down your system, you have bigger issues.
This is soooo last Millenium's software showdown...
Even so, if such a pc became available: It won't have any more effect on the business market than NCs did. It won't dent a consumer market with cheap, NEW PCs and with powerful handhelds out there that do more, for less, and have apps that aren't limited by the age of hardware.
How much smaller can they get? Firefox fits into the 50MB DSL boot disk which is designed to work with 100MHz 64MB computers. They also have a version for Windows 98, which should also work with that kind of hardware. If you start stripping stuff out of Mozilla you get something like Galeon, which is nice enough. If you start from scratch, you get Dillo which is also in DSL and works much faster. It has tabs and all but it lacks scripting and other fancy schmancy junk that many web sites now demand.
If the author wants to find the people "slave whipping" old PCs he has no further to look than his own site, which serves up a whopping 12 bugs and an obnoxious pile of advertising links. He should try it out on his new iPhone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Okay - so I opened up about 50 youtube videos, browsed a few other websites that had flash, and I closed all but one tab (slashdot)
88mb used. Big whoop?
To the guy who "wants to use other applications"
Old computers aren't meant for using modern-day applications that aren't specifically designed for *gasp* old computers.. Go figure?
Lets say you're a game designer. Do you (A) Design a game that will run within 640kb of memory, or (B) Use a bit more memory to get more stuff into your game, speed up load time, etc? Obviously if your target market is the "general" computer users, you'd make a pretty general allocation of memory. If you're marketing towards power gamers, you wouldn't be afraid about higher system requirements, necessarily.
I laugh every time this comes up because it falls under the "duh" category.
What machine out there doesn't have at least 256mb of RAM that expects to run any sort of modern application and multitask? You're crazy if your expections are to be able to run premiere CS3, firefox, and windows vista on 256mb of RAM. crazy.
It is very very important to have in your mind only kill all browsers of other kind to end the game.
And the web developer should have in mind that the small devices were only your target. The desktop browser is just a life style to be pass away.
Personnaly (Firefox on Linux) the hugest memory and CPU hog comes from Flash.
the official Macromedia-now-adobe Flash seems to be completly crappy : it can freeze Firefox with 100% cpu usage when starting or stopping, takes ages before starting to stream video, eats memory like candy.
I switched to the opensource gnash. Gnash runs in a separate process and has the option not to immediately start playing flash.
Thus even if gnash' support of flash is still patchy, those bugs run in a separate process, that crashes alone and can be safely killed.
The rest of firefox seems much more happy.
I really hope gnash will quickly reach a stable 1.0 release because it looks like a very promising option for flash, both in term of opensource and portability, but also in terms of running flash crap in a separate compartment.
The second biggest memory hog is firefox caching mechanism. I think they got the whole idea wrong, given that on a modern machine firefox allocates more cache in the memory (several hundreds of MB) than on disk (only several dozens).
I think it's pretty stupid because most modern OS (specially Linux, but I think windows as well) uses any non-allocated memory as disk cache. Thus, writing cached pages to the disk, is actually efficient, because the OS RAM file-cache will be used as long as RAM is available, but on the other hand no memory will be allocated and there will be still free memory for other application in case those need it.
They should disable the huge memory cache by default and leave options to enable it in the settings.
They should also use a bigger disk-cache by default.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Making the browser lighter won't help if you are going to surf today's Web. The Web pages are heavy. Many sites will put multiple Flash movies in a page, and there is video everywhere. User-generated content means even less QA than in the past, as well as really large pages that keep growing.
The pipe gets bigger and you have to have a bigger mouth to take a sip.
They stopped support on Win98 and earlier so this idea won't happen. Pretty soon they'll stop support for 2000 probably. Why??
Usually it's better to replace flash with a simple BLINK tag and although that is not quite as good at annoying people creative choice of colours has a similar efect.
I know it won't happen, but will the perception of IE and firefox be reversed if/when firefox wins the race???
Just a thought!
Boz
www.boznz.com Simple solutions to complex problems.
http://browser.garage.maemo.org/
From the site:
"The Mozilla based browser for maemo is under development and is provided here for maemo developers. It provides support for the latest web standards and is flexible and extensible, and is based on mozilla.org's current Gecko layout engine which will be version 1.9 when it is released with Firefox 3.0."
An example of where this makes sense is the server world, where they actually can choose between paying you for more hours and paying someone else for more RAM or CPU. That's why, for instance, Ruby on Rails has caught on as well as it has.
I dislike that intensely, which is why the app I'm currently developing uses mod_perl, and I'm even using Expat for processing XML coming from the client via AJAX. But I have to make it work on a 500 mhz K6, and I may be able to resell it to others -- and not having to buy new hardware means they're more likely to buy it, and pay me more for it.
A common Perl pitfall is slurping a whole file, when you're only going to process it a line at a time anyway. The fix actually removes a line of code -- so it's actually easier to do it the right way, if you know how. In more complex examples, such as parsing a huge XML file, say, even if it takes you an extra 10 minutes, I don't care who you are, your 10 minutes is worth it to keep your code running in under 10 gigabytes of RAM.
So these are two examples of where efficient programming makes sense: When you intend to sell this product to a lot of people, and your competitor has a product which is $50 cheaper but doesn't require that $300 Wall-Mart computer, who do you think they're going to pick? Also: While you may not always be able to save gigs of RAM usage at a stroke, you certainly could by taking a bit more care while developing the product. If it takes you 10% longer, but it's 10-100x as efficient, it's probably worth it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I remember when I first ran Opera - there was no reason not to download it, because it fit on half a floppy disk. I didn't really like the tabbed interface (:-) and it wasn't compatible with some web pages, and it wasn't free (even free-as-in-beer), but it *was* certainly a lot smaller and faster than Netscape...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That feature, in particular, could be done well on just about any machine. In particular, you need to start a separate thread to pull in the history, and most importantly, let the user keep typing!
As a simple example, I've done a web app recently which has a feature like that, except instead of history, it pulls in results from a database which isn't even on the same webserver as the one it's talking to (they're sort of proxied through). Here's the possible ways I could have done it:
I went with #5. On a local machine, I'd probably go with #4. But if I can do this in Javascript, you'd think a web browser could do it faster and better in C++ or whatever. And it's even responsive over the Internet, so there shouldn't be a problem with local access.
There most definitely is something wrong with flash.
On a 1.8 ghz amd64, in windowed mode, playing a tiny YouTube video -- 50% CPU usage.
On the same machine, using the same video (after downloading the flv), in mplayer or VLC, fullscreen -- 0.1% CPU usage.
Or maybe you'd rather take a machine that can play Doom3 or Quake4 at 1600x1200, with no lag, and watch a simple Flash game or animation bring it to its knees when run fullscreen.
So, performance-wise, there most definitely is something wrong with Flash. I honestly cannot think of a single application of Flash for which there isn't a much better, standard, open way of doing it -- often something that's been around for years. I suppose I could be wrong -- I mean, maybe Flash really is that much better at DRM than Windows Media Player or RealPlayer -- but somehow, that doesn't concern me much.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"synchronous requests freeze the browser on Firefox." - Indeed. I've heard (but not checked for myself) that javascript runs in the same thread as the UI stuff, and that includes AJAX. It's horribly short-sighted of them.
"So, performance-wise, there most definitely is something wrong with Flash." - I haven't done the tests, and wouldn't disagree anyhow... But Flash isn't for programmers, it's for designers. If there were a way to do all that stuff in straight HTML, then Flash would never have had a reason to exist or get popular. The Canvas stuff can apparently do a lot of it now, but it STILL doesn't do well at tying graphics, audio and interaction together well, from what I've seen. (And it doesn't work on IE, either.) It's not about a single application, it's about enabling non-programmers to use it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
88mb used. Big whoop? I've been able to pump it up higher, especially by doing back/forward in each of about 10 tabs. True, I haven't yet made a reproducible procedure against any Firefox version. But right now, as of Gran Paradiso alpha 6, starting the browser and printing even the simplest HTML page takes 200 MB of RAM. Lets say you're a game designer. Do you (A) Design a game that will run within 640kb of memory, or (B) Use a bit more memory to get more stuff into your game, speed up load time, etc? If I'm developing game software that runs on one of those no-cartridge consoles with graphics like those of a 8- or 16-bit game console, and the hardware guys say they can't put more than 640 KiB of RAM into the thing without driving up the manufacturing cost beyond profitability, then I fit it into 640 KiB. What machine out there doesn't have at least 256mb of RAM that expects to run any sort of modern application and multitask? Handheld devices, for one. Right now Opera kicks Minimo's behind in that respect. You're crazy if your expections are to be able to run premiere CS3, firefox, and windows vista on 256mb of RAM. No, but I did run GIMP, Firefox, and Windows 2000 on 128 MiB for a long time until I got a 256 MiB stick for the motherboard's other slot. (It has two slots that take up to 256 MiB each.) Tripling the RAM did improve things. But there are some cases where hardware is not upgradeable, such as pretty much anything but a desktop or laptop PC.
Firefox appears to be suffering from the same problems that Netscape had. At one time, Netscape was a pretty good browser-- then they kept enhancing it and enhancing it, and before long it started to behave weirdly-- hanging, going to sleep for long periods of time and otherwise apparently getting confused trying to do the basic job of aquiring pages and displaying them. Out of frustration, I eventually went with IE for awhile, which didn't have this trouble. I never went back to Netscape. When Firefox came out I tried it as a hopeful alternative to IE which it was at the time. But now I'm seeing some of these same quirky behaviours that plagued Netscape in Firefox. If it gets much worse I'll be moving on again, though this time probably to Opera or Safari or something else...
Yes, I'd like to see a Firefox-lite-- and I'd probalby use that even on my high end machines, actually. I want a browser that just does the basics-- "Less is More" should be the rule in browser design...
i was first introduced to ,a href="http://www.dillo.org/">Dillo on DamnSmall Linux. Sure, it's "ugly" and "lacking features", but it gets the job done and renders pages almost instantaneously on my pentium 133mhz laptop. I'd use it on my desktop if more pages supported it and rendered correctly in it, but the speed is amazing. I'd like to see other browsers strive for dillo's speed and minimalism while rendering pages "correctly".
Actually, it's very smart of them in one sense -- the UI stuff is mostly written in AJAX, after all. Or DHTML, or whatever buzzword you like -- it's in XUL and JavaScript.
What's short-sighted of them is how much they haven't threaded even in their UI -- I really don't see any reason for Javascript to be less suited for threading than any other language.
Well, video, for example, has been supported by <embed> forever, in all browsers, and in an open way (so it works on Linux). There was absolutely no reason for YouTube etc to go with Flash, except (maybe) that it makes it (slightly) harder to copy the video.
That's no excuse for it being retardedly slow.
I'm fairly sure that we've had SVG and such available for awhile, but I'll have to take your word for it not being good at tying them together.
As for not working on IE, people would download Firefox if they needed it for Youtube or something like that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"Well, video, for example, has been supported by forever, in all browsers, and in an open way (so it works on Linux). There was absolutely no reason for YouTube etc to go with Flash, except (maybe) that it makes it (slightly) harder to copy the video."
Actually, there is: Interface. The generic interface that comes with the browse is not only different on each browser, but on each system, and if they have certain plugins installed. The Youtube interface not only unifies these, but adds to it with the other suggested clips at the end, etc.
"That's no excuse for it being retardedly slow."
I've never found Flash to be slow on any system I've ever used it on. Maybe it took up a crazy amount of resources, as noted, but not slow. I've never had it make other things slow to a crawl, either.
"As for not working on IE, people would download Firefox if they needed it for Youtube or something like that."
Put the cart before the horse, there. People go to Youtube because it works well, not because it's there. If Youtube hadn't targetted IE, someone else would have and that would be the site that was used. I think the number is still something like 78% for IE. That an enormous percentage, and if you're developing an application, ignoring that needs a -very- good reason.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
So they force us to use Flash, which is crappy everywhere, and is -- guess what? -- a plugin that they have to install.
But why not just let 'em have whatever plugin they want? On some platforms, I want to be able to go fullscreen. On most platforms, my native video player knows how to use hardware to do the video and the scaling.
If you're worried about the plugin not being installed, really, anything that comes with Flash is going to at least come with something that can play mpeg2 (.mpg) files. Flash forces you to flv and to the codecs it supports, and I doubt any of those are better than mpeg2.
So drop "suggested clips" from the end -- that feature is already there (in standard HTML/CSS/AJAX/etc) on the page, it doesn't need to be at the end of every movie.
Any other feature we desperately need that we couldn't do without Flash?
Fair enough. But don't assume that just because resources are available that they're "free". I don't want my laptop putting out tons of heat into my balls because someone was lazy enough to use Flash, and not provide an alternative.
Indeed. In fact, it works so well that people create ways of using youtube from Xbox Media Center, the iPhone, etc. I guarantee that most of these don't run Flash natively, which means they have to code around the fact that Youtube uses flash, and not something else.
It's hard to say whether it would have gone one way or another, but I bet if you told people there was a new website up that lets you watch all kinds of videos for free, and it's really amazingly simple and easy to use, and you just have to download Firefox...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!