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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?'"
"Firefox...without favourites, history lists and customisability"
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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
Just because machines are faster and have more RAM shouldn't give programmers a blank check to write programs that hog memory and CPU cycles. People should write software to take advantage of that extra performance, not penalize those who don't have it.
If we write inefficient and, honestly, dumb software, on the assumption that hardware will compensate for our bad choices, how is the new hardware an improvement at all? It's like you're purchasing upgrades every year to keep up with the increasing laziness of bad programmers.
If C|net really thinks that removing trivial user-interface functionality like bookmarks and history is going to significantly reduce Firefox's memory footprint or CPU usage, then I would suggest that C|net is not qualified to be giving advice to the Mozilla team on this subject. This guy is C|net's "expert on digital music and portable media"; has he ever even written a line of code?
Let's look at his other suggestions. Removing tabs would probably result in people opening fewer pages at a time, but people are already free to ignore tabs if they don't want to use them. There is no point in removing the functionality. (In fact, I would be willing to bet that one window with three tabs uses less memory than three windows). The same goes for extensions; people are free to not install any and removing the functionality would likely not further reduce the memory footprint.
Yup, basically, this guy has no idea what causes memory usage in Firefox. I'm glad that the Mozilla team will undoubtedly ignore his misguided advice. Here's a hint: the main driver of Firefox memory and CPU use is web pages. Parsing, rendering, and running scripts. Web pages are huge nowadays, with tons of scripting, huge images, and even videos, and all that stuff has to be kept in memory while you have a page open. If you want to make Firefox more efficient, don't look at the UI. Look at Gecko. Unfortunately, this means you have to be a programmer to make informed comments about Firefox's memory use.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}