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?'"

Comments

They've had this idea before...

[gowen]

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".

Re:They've had this idea before...

[tomhudson]

"160go hard drive don't work under some old computers (PII, 1st or 2nd generation of celeron with old bios)."

Stick the drive in a newer linux box, and make a small boot partition (/dev/hda1) that is small enough for the current bios (I've stuck 160 gig hard drives in machines that won't see beyond 8 gigs with this trick), so it works. Make /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, etc in your preferred layout. Format each as ext3, reiserfs, fat32, whatevr your poison. This works for win9x, winnt, as well as linux.

Move the drive to the old box, boot off the cd-rom, install on the only visible partition (the small one).

Reboot, and at the end of the boot process, your other partitions are visible. On wn9x systems, your other partitions are limited to 32 gig each, so make sure you do under that. On winnt systems, you're limited to 128gig (yes, I know, its supposed to be 256 gig, but don't do it ... you might even want to stay below the 32 gig limit and stick with vfat, just to be safe), on linux systems, you're limited to ... whatever your heart desires.

Note: if you're using fat32 and are foolish enough to go over the 32 gig limit, you WILL be sorry. It will appear to format, and it will even appear to hold, say, 128 gig. However, once you try to write past the first 32 gig, it will over-write from the beginning of the partition, erasing data ... so if you're doing this with a windows box, your absolute safest bet is:

1. boot partition the maximum size your bios can see (say, 8 gigs, assuming really old hardware - a p150, for example)
2. 4 partitions of 32 gigs each
3. one partition with the rest.

Opera?

[hkmwbz]

Several comments in that blog already point out the obvious: Opera already does this. It runs perfectly even on old hardware, and you won't even have to sacrifice any functionality. Hell, there's even K-Meleon, which uses Gecko.

"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...

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is much faster than Firefox, so apparently there is some kind of conflict on your computer. Any virus scanners or firewalls blocking Opera? And F5 is reload. When you tell the browser to reload, you tell it to re-fetch everything from the server. That's what reload is supposed to do.

Re:Opera?

[CdBee]

Opera faster than firefox? absolute rubbish. It certainly was, once.. but the last speed-demon Opera was version 5.12. V6 was the start of a long downhill road where it became more standards-compliant and more beautiful to look at but a shedload more chunky and slow.

Re:Opera?

[squiggleslash]

He hasn't even figured out that the Opera browser even runs on mobile phones, and using the same engine as the desktop version

If you're referring to Opera mini, which is pretty much the only genericly available "runs on mobile phones" browser (as opposed to versions that run on some smartphones), then no, it doesn't use the same engine. Opera mini is a very lightweight client to a proxy that runs at Opera's HQ, which reformats web pages to create much simplier pages containing more or less the same content.

It's very useful, better than nothing, and arguably better than trying to fit a "real" rendering of a webpage onto such a small screen (I also have the Nintendo DS version of Opera, which has a mode based upon this simplified page rendering as well as a full HTML mode, and the former is, usually, more practical than the latter. Something for Apple to think about, perhaps), but it's certainly not using the same engine or anything close to it as the desktop Opera.

Re:Opera?

[hkmwbz]

No, I was referring to Opera Mobile. It has been preinstalled on phones with as little as 4 MB of memory or so. It might not run on all phones, but it certainly runs on phones that Gecko could never even dream of touching. Oh, and it runs on the Nintendo DS Lite, which is underpowered even compared to today's mobile phones.

Re:Opera?

[fosterNutrition]

I currently run XP pro inside a VM that only has 256 megs of RAM allocated to it. I obviously don't use it as my regular-use system (it's used for running strange games that wine sometimes can't handle properly). And it's not the greatest system around, but with effects turned down, you can actually use it quite decently... Firefox, for instance, works just fine.

Re:Opera?

[sumdumass]

I have found the magic number for ram to be something just short of 512 megs for a bare XP install.

When I sat magic number, I mean the point where more memory doesn't make a difference on a default install. I have always encouraged people to raise their ram to at least this number and on more then one occasion have heard reports of "it acts like a new computer".

If you are using just 256 of ram, you probably won't know what your computer could do so you don't see it as a slow down. However, When Someone who does have enough memory, even if it is the same processor, uses the same computer, they will think it is slow. If your ever using XP with less then 512 memory, try begging, barrowing or whatever you have to do to jump it up to at least 512 and you will see the difference. You will probably wonder why you ever had less. And yes, this does effect just using it to write letters, surf the interweb, and check email. You don't need to be doing anything fancy to see the benefits.

Re:Opera?

[bluephone]

As someone who has tracked the project since it's inception (Mozilla.org in 1998, not just Phoenix) I can promise you there is no "influence" from Microsoft. Mozilla isn't opposed to working with Microsoft on things, but there is no influence, as there is even a strong anti-MS mentality among many employees. Many devs actually work on Macbook Pros with Parallels or VMware, as opposed to Windows PCs.

Also, if you thought Opera was less confusing to use than Firefox or IE, I am sooooooo glad I don't work at your company. ;)

Re:mozilla firefox ???

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Opposite effect?

[hacker]

Firefox without favourites? Without history?

Yes, it's called a default homepage. You build a local index.html that includes the links you want (you call them Favorites, but we in the non-Windows world call them Bookmarks) and load that as your default homepage in FF-Slim.

This is not an issue at all. History might be a problem, but you can always use 'about:cache' or 'about:history' to derive that.

Tabs heavy? I'd suggest the opposite...

[knarf]

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.