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

Just how old are these machines

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Opera?

[jkrise]

You've missed the point entirely.

The whole idea is to create a new FF version that does the things that Opera or K-Meleon do but still carries the branding of Firefox. I think it's the Firefox team that's completely missed the point. At my firm, we have several hundred PCs with 256MB RAM running Win2K and XP. We wanted to get rid of the buggy IE7 which go tinstalled as critical update on XP.

Firefox and Opera were evaluated - and the latter won. It appeared Firefox was not only 'compatible' with IE and rendered all IE-only pages, it was bloated and clumsy like IE as well. The development team seems to have gotten hijacked by a few misguided elements, probably under influence from Microsoft. Firefox on Windows behaves differently to Firefox on Linux - but Opera stays the same.

The only plus for Firefox is the numerous plug-ins, but what we like to see is pluck-outs that would ensure no memory leaks and lesser footprint. Until those things happen, Firefox will be a product that never reached it's potential.

Ok I have some old 486's and up....

[3seas]

....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)?

Re:Opera?

[kbrosnan]

Chasing after a declining marketshare is a poor business strategy. Windows 98 and ME boxes will be replaced as the years go on.

Current security bugs often require completely different patches to fix the security flaw. The code base that was used to develop Firefox 2, Gecko 1.8, became largely static in August of 2005. This means that security patches for Firefox 2 start taking significantly more developer time as code bases diverge. The Gecko 1.8 and 1.9 have already have significant differences in the code base different graphics rendering platform, text layout and html processing just to name a few.

Firefox 3 and Gecko 1.9 will not run on any version of Windows earlier than 2000. This means that the project he suggests would need to be build off the Gecko 1.8 code base. This code base is too old for new projects to be developed on it. The last security patch on the Gecko 1.8 code base will be about a year from now. This leaves any code using this open to any security issues discovered.