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Firefox Lite And Old PCs Could Crush IE

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the we-don't-play-to-bake-bread dept.

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?'"

15 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. They've had this idea before... by gowen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

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    1. Re:They've had this idea before... by hkmwbz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually, it was going to be called Phoenix. Then Firebird. THEN Firefox ;)

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    2. Re:They've had this idea before... by Mike89 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think this comment is just silly. What evidence is there to support this? I mean, Firefox isn't that big as it is. Plus, does hard drive space even matter anymore? The smallest hard drive you can find if you stolled into a best buy is like a 160 GB so what's the point.
      It's not about the size of the installation, it's about memory and CPU usage. Firefox is ridiculous in both of these categories. Good luck running it on old (heck, even old-ish) hardware.
    3. Re:They've had this idea before... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When the local Wal-Mart is selling new PCs for $280, who cares about old machines?
      That's a horrible attitude to have about software development, and unfortunately I see it all the time from programmers.

      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.
    4. Re:They've had this idea before... by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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  2. Opera? by hkmwbz · · Score: 5, Informative
    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...

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    1. Re:Opera? by SirMeliot · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Nate is CNET.co.uk's expert on digital music and portable media" Er, I think that means he's the one who's got an iPod.

    2. Re:Opera? by jkrise · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
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    3. Re:Opera? by hkmwbz · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:Opera? by kbrosnan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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  3. Just how old are these machines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Opposite effect? by ickoonite · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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 :|

  5. Ok I have some old 486's and up.... by 3seas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ....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)?

  6. Re:mozilla firefox ??? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  7. Re:Why not Lynx? by One+Childish+N00b · · Score: 4, Funny

    For even greater security, I use telnet and mentally parse the source.

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