Yep users would find a way like clicking on the install now button on the desktop or whatever:-) But in most cases your right live CD is the way to go asssuming he has enough storage capacity for content on the thumb drive he mentioned. All depends on the video quality and amount you watch I guess, Most of my 720p rips are about 1GB per 40 min, if you are away for a week with ~6 hours a night to burn you might need a pretty serious thumbdrive.
That is just it the other parties have had weak candidates with the exception (at least in comparison to how they normally do) the NDP (sadly they lost their charismatic leader so who knows how they'll do next time). Harper better than the alternatives != Harper good. That said living in Ontario I blame more of the problems on McGuinty than Harper but still Harper was a bit to much of Bush's best friend/clone for my taste back in the day.
From just taking a snapshot of the screen and cracking the much simpler static image? That said I'm really hating recaptchas. I've had sites where I had to click next about 10 times to find one that I could figure out what it is AND be able to type it (lots of German, Swedish, greek captchas which I can't be bothered figuring out the key strokes to reproduce). Also philosophically I'm against recaptchas because only half of the crap they want you to type is actually used for security the other half is free human OCR. If I want to spend my time converting text I'll let you know;-)
I don't use a crap load of plugins and tend to restart my browser once a day or so. Curious: if you have a gazzilon tabs open and you're up at 1.2GB like now, if you have the "load my previous tabs" or whatever setting on, when you restart your browser and everything is reloaded how close to 1.2GB are you? If it is a lot less it might just be worth biting the bullet every once and a while and restarting FF. Maybe a cron/scheduled task that fires off and bounces your browser early morning. Of course won't help if a lot of the tabs are stuff you have to login to.
I worked for an anti-spam company. It was the same way with web-based spam (people hacking or creating Yahoo, gmail etc accounts to spam with), porn was the method often used. Those captchas that some free sites throw up (maybe even the paid ones I wouldn't know) they sometimes come from a bot that is creating email accounts. The site makes money by creating a whole lot of email accounts automatically rather than having to pay someone to sit around solving captchas, then bundles them together and sells them to spammers. There is also a lot of cheap labour stuff going on (for some reason I think it is mostly Thailand) where people sit around solving captchas for 1c for 10 or something like that.
Nice company that they let you use it for personal use. I've only had that once but then again by then I was the server/network admin so they might just have figured that I wouldn't get caught even if they told me not to.
I wonder how many plugins really need to remain in memory all the time and how many stick around anyways? A lot probably could just be function calls that exit. Thinks like ad blocking could just be a function call that takes in the downloaded page removes the ads and returns the results to the browser. Similarly for flash removal, and a lot of other stuff. If they were just function calls the browser could control when they return and if they take too long kill them etc to make sure that they don't keep crap around.
That actually should be the model: plugins don't get to make any persistent memory, they read in a stream and return a stream to the engine and that is it.
Speaking of internet porn and going on a tangent: why is porn notorious as a virus vector? Is getting paid to film/participate in orgies really so bad that you have to do illegal things on the side to keep the lights on?
But your personal laptop does provide additional functionality namely not having to screw around with your works equipment to try to do something with it you shouldn't be in the first place. I can almost guarantee you that your corporate IT policy doesn't allow personal use of their equipment. So keeping your job is a nice additional function IMHO.
Another option... might be... talk to your work. Tell them hey I'm traveling and have nothing to entertain myself with when I'm not working. Can I use the laptop for this? If not can I install whatever it is I need for work on my personal laptop and use it instead?
I've gotten burned before when using a work computer for my personal use. I didn't have a working computer at home and had a corporate laptop so I was using for all my personal use. Well it got corrupted and IT spent a good day or so browsing through it looking for viruses. Which meant that they were looking at all my internet caches, downloaded files etc. So they came down on me pretty hard and pretty much blamed me for it crashing (maybe maybe not) but regardless resulted in a awkward conversation with my manager as I was 25 at the time and lets just say some things that a 25 year old might use the internet for to entertain themselves is not something you want all your coworkers to know about.
So the wipe it and restore it solution might not work. If it is corrupted enough and you can't get it working your company's IT will end up playing with it and if it is a slow day in the office they'll take their time and browse through it looking for a way of blaming it on a site you went to that you shouldn't have or whatever.
Well that depends a bit. the OP said 512MB I think is what he had. The size of the DIMMS available for a system that old is probably 512MB max say. So he might be able to double RAM but that would be about it. Also: sometimes the old ram is still really expensive because they know that you are trying to keep something running they feel fine charging you say $100 a stick for 512 even though you could get 4GB of DDR 3 for that just because they had to keep that 512 dimm on the shelf (at least in theory) for x years before someone wanted it. That was suns arguement anyways for there rediculous replacement costs on RAM. When a server came out they stored spare parts from the same time until they were used. So Even though ~6 years ago I was looking for a 32GB server drive from 2002 era, they wanted something like $500 for it. They had potentially 3 drives sitting around for each one they actually sold but they had to have it to insure that they could support servers on contract.
Umm, every 2 years? 512MB ram is about 8 years ago. Upgrading every 5 years or so should keep you happy with a browsing/email/office productivity kind of machine. You might get lucky and it last longer but it isn't guaranteed. I'm not rolling in money I just realize I can't use cutting edge techology on yesterday's equipment. What's so wrong with that. Computers can't last 10 years easily anymore because of the internet. Everything is interconnected so you have to be compatible with what sites are requiring. Before if you were happy with your spreadsheet and word processor you never had to upgrade your computer. Now that you are using content from other sources you need a computer capable with that content which is continually evolving.
As for the idiotic eye candy: I agree but what is the solution? Users with the new machines want the eye candy, people with the old machines/software maybe can't support it. Do developers have to backport every new feature into every slightly lower eye candy level version of the browser from the past? In a perfect world the presentation and protocol layers would be completely separate and only the protocol would have bugs and vulnerabilities.But the junk is scattered throughout the app so finding and fixing bugs is very much a per release kind of thing for the most part.
The browser is becoming more like an OS every day. So in analogy upgrading your browser is becoming more like upgrading your OS: there isn't a guarantee that the old hardware will run the new browser. Which is fine as long as you can get the features/content you want out of the old browser. But when you simply must have HTML5, silverlight etc running than it might be time for an upgrade similar to how you need to upgrade if you want to run Win 7.
In short if you want your computer to last 10 years than you need to stop expecting to be compatible with the rest of the world that has moved on.
1) Not all of the bloat is code not being optimized. A lot of it is doing things that in the past were not possible because of system limitations. Eg. running silverlight apps in a browser, newer fancier flash, translucent rendering on the desktop. Etc etc. all of it takes resources. The code could be just as optimized but it still would take up more room. Part of optimization is deciding RAM vs time tradeoff point. If RAM gets cheaper you move more stuff into a data intensive algorithm than you did before when you tried to do everything in a tight loop to minimize RAM.
2) How is using more of the system ram to prefetch/cache apps a bad thing for us? Would you rather that the system remain completely idle and than make us wait to get the stuff when we request it? If the RAM is there and not being used (and HDD io, CPU etc) it might as well be being used to try to make things more responsive for the user.
Performance wise probably. I think the reasoning was though that Apple got screwed over a few times with delays in the new PPC chips coming out. They needed to upgrade their offerings but couldn't get chips for them. Apple was starting to look bad because people were looking at them as the company with 3 year old computers.
Add to that the desire to run Windows and it made sense to switch.
There is a lot of very expensive things that have been added in the last 17 years. Live searching in the OS and browser. Spell correction. Far more complexity in the rendering (translucency on the desktop window for example), bigger screens (mine's 2560X1440) (I realize that the graphics card handles a lot of this but my guess is some of that overhead its the RAM too), etc. I agree we piss away a lot of RAM for relatively minor features but it isn't a straight up comparison. You'd have to go back to the quality of MP3s, webpages and videos of 1996 to compare. Yep everything is bigger needing more RAM. But RAM and CPU is cheaper so the cost of that extra junk has gone down.
The first computer that I actually bought (didn't get given to me) was a P3 450 with I think it was 128MB of ram I paid around 3k for it. My last computer purchase was about $2500 and is an iMac 27" with quad i7, 4GB ram and the 1GB video card upgrade. So ~500 cheaper, 15 years later from a by most people's opinion expensive vendor. I saved ~1k (in inflation adjusted terms) and got a "cooler" brand. So I think 4GB is approximately equivalent or even less than 128MB 15 years ago. Yeah the numbers that software is using has gone crazy but the cost to provide you with a system that can supply those numbers has gone down even quicker. That is why vendors or happy running java or.Net which inheriently adds another layer to the bloat (you need the vm and the "real" code) because nearly no one that is going to pay for the product (or be a dev on the project for FOSS) is going to have a machine with specs that can't handle it.
Everything is a pain in the ass with a lot of things open. Browsers, operating systems etc. To me it is just clutter. At some point I just give up and start closing things I haven't used in the last 5 minutes to free up space. The most I have open on my browser at any given time is probably 5 tabs and that is rare. Probably at work for example with a couple work sites, my email,/. and another tab for google searches/results. That said usually if I look at my browser in that state 3 of the 5 I haven't used in the last 10 minutes and have no reason to suspect I'll need in the next 10 minutes any more than any other site on the web. So I feel free to close them down before opening up more crap.
I simply meant changing architectures 286 being an obvious example for me from windows land. So: dusting off the 286 in 1995, better? Either way the expected hardware changed years ago so it isn't that reasonable to assume that people will keep supporting it. Apple I think contributes to this a lot: they really like to push people to upgrade. For example I seem to recall that one of the older OS X releases (Tiger?) would install on G4 systems not G3 systems even though as far as I know nothing instruction set changed between the cpus, and the older Macs had enough RAM to run it. Apple simply wanted to only supply the upgrade to people with newer systems.
I have never saw my browser use more than 600MB of RAM and that is with 10 or so sites open and some streaming content. I'm sorry but if your browser is using 4+ GB of RAM it either has a leak or something you added does. If it is in FF than they should fix it, if it is in an extension they should fix it (or you should realize that is the price you pay for using the tool and either live with it or stop using it). But still if you never restart a program that you suspect has a memory leak who's fault is it when you get to the point where you have 4GB + of RAM in use?
Part of the price of an extension IMO is seeing if it does what you want AND seeing what price you are paying for it. If you aren't willing to do the second part because your time is so valuable than you can't really whine about your RAM usage going crazy. Yes there is a piece of shit in your browser but since you aren't willing to give it a sniff test there isn't much that can be done for you.
Exactly: If you won't invest $50 into making your computer run chances are Goldman Sachs isn't looking for your business. A lot of time people have these dinosaurs as a second/multiple/kids computer. Which is fine. But you have to realize you stopped using it as your primary computer for a reason so just because you have a faster computer from work, new laptop etc doesn't mean your old piece of crap is going to make you any more happy. If anything the comparison will make you hate it more.
To add to that: websites will market/design to your capabilities when you are on your primary machine. A merchant doesn't care too much that the computer in the basement you dust off for 30 min a week doesn't work with there site or software as long as when you use one of your computers it does.
In short: there is a correlation to people using old hardware and being cheap. There isn't any reasonable expectation of making a sale to them anyways so why bother spending time targeting them? If nothing else, even if the guy has money, if you are asking say $100 for your software chances are they'll look at it and say "but my computer isn't worth that much any more", or "my 40GB harddrive doesn't have room for a 1GB app to do my taxes once a year" or whatever.
But if you are truly just using the machine for webbrowsing than you aren't multitasking. In my experience though people tell you they are using the machine for one thing and then it turns out it is used for a dozen things and then they wonder why it runs slow. I worked in a hospital ~6 years ago. We had win xp running on 512MB of ram (I think they were P4 2Ghz). People would ask why their clinical apps were running slow. I'd check the server then check the clients. Turns out everyone was in "shoe shopping" mode: they had multiple browsers open (funny one of them must have clicked okay on every offer to add a toolbar, they had about 10 installed, they ended up with about a 4 inch window on the bottom that actually displayed websites), multiple copies of the clinical app open to save time switching between patients, etc. In short: it is okay to run a low spec machine provided it can handle what you want to do with it. But if you are picking off things that are near the system limit than there shouldn't be any expectation that you can do multiple of those things and still get good performance.
It isn't that overlapping windows were overlooked they were hard. You had to have a way to keep track of which window was on top and render the windows in order so that the right parts are covered by the windows on top. It was much easier if you knew every window was in its own area, you could do things in any order and if something updated in a window that wasn't the topmost you could still rerender its window since you knew it wouldn't affect the active window. Think 10 windows open slightly overlapping each other. The background colour of the bottom one changes. You need a way to figure out that it AND everything on top needs to be rerendered (so that the right places are covered), or alternatively have a way to clip the image and render subregions of a window. Regardless it was difficult with the hardware/software capabilities at the time.
Exactly on the unsupported comment. You can't run a dinosaur computer and then complain it can't run the new stuff. If it worked that way a lot of people would still be using their commodores but since the vast majority of upgrades require more resources than what they replace you are guaranteed to at some point have something new you'd like to run that you can't. Developers aren't going to spend the rest of their lives writing new software and passing every previous version up to the same level so software needs to die. It is an engineered thing just like a road. At some point you just got to let it go and pave over the sucker.
Anonymous Coward, argh good chance you aren't going to see this. But IE 8-9 has a compatibility mode option. Seems to work pretty good. Click: tools->developer tools and in the middle of the toolbar there is a document mode: you can pick 7 8 or 9 in version 9. So... you can get the eye candy of ie 9 with the rendering of ie 7. I'm not sure if there is a way to save the setting so that it only applies to a specific page. I think the !DOCTYPE header in the webpage is supposed to control what version of IE mode that IE >=8 tries to render the page with so if you have access to the page try adding the appropriate flag to let browsers know what you want.
Please this is a CPU architecture change. It would be like dusting off your 286 and getting all bitchy that windows now wants at least 32 bit hardware.
Chances are there will be some non-mainstream browser available for the PPC till the end of time. You might have to use something called Goggzilly 3.1.233 that no one knows about other than people with the same problem and doesn't have all your favorite plugins but people will probably find a way to make the dinosaurs keep rendering pages.
Sorry mind fart, 1/14th of my RAM but the premise still holds. I have 4-5 things open that I actually am using at the moment iTunes and VLC ~50MB each, Vuze and FF ~200 each, VS ~230MB. So my apps are using about 750MB of RAM, so presumably the OS is using the other 2GB (though as I mentioned Win 7 is very aggressive in its loading of things in RAM, it would be fine with 2GB of RAM on the system I suspect it would just preload less stuff). The browser is a drop in the bucket for the typical desktop computer running Win/OS X. Sure linux can have a really low footprint and you can say wholly crap my browser uses as much ram as my OS, but for most computers 5 years old who cares?
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
For example right now I have: VS 2010 pro, Vuze, VLC running a video, iTunes, and FF 10 running on a Win 7 box which is notorious for being RAM happy (actually a good thing if the ram is there it might as well have stuff loaded in it just in case you ask for it later), anyways 2.8GB of RAM used. FF is using 200MB of that, I really don't care that 1/19th of my used RAM is my browser. The quick access to streaming porn is more than worth it to me.
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Yep users would find a way like clicking on the install now button on the desktop or whatever :-) But in most cases your right live CD is the way to go asssuming he has enough storage capacity for content on the thumb drive he mentioned. All depends on the video quality and amount you watch I guess, Most of my 720p rips are about 1GB per 40 min, if you are away for a week with ~6 hours a night to burn you might need a pretty serious thumbdrive.
That is just it the other parties have had weak candidates with the exception (at least in comparison to how they normally do) the NDP (sadly they lost their charismatic leader so who knows how they'll do next time). Harper better than the alternatives != Harper good. That said living in Ontario I blame more of the problems on McGuinty than Harper but still Harper was a bit to much of Bush's best friend/clone for my taste back in the day.
From just taking a snapshot of the screen and cracking the much simpler static image? That said I'm really hating recaptchas. I've had sites where I had to click next about 10 times to find one that I could figure out what it is AND be able to type it (lots of German, Swedish, greek captchas which I can't be bothered figuring out the key strokes to reproduce). Also philosophically I'm against recaptchas because only half of the crap they want you to type is actually used for security the other half is free human OCR. If I want to spend my time converting text I'll let you know ;-)
I don't use a crap load of plugins and tend to restart my browser once a day or so. Curious: if you have a gazzilon tabs open and you're up at 1.2GB like now, if you have the "load my previous tabs" or whatever setting on, when you restart your browser and everything is reloaded how close to 1.2GB are you? If it is a lot less it might just be worth biting the bullet every once and a while and restarting FF. Maybe a cron/scheduled task that fires off and bounces your browser early morning. Of course won't help if a lot of the tabs are stuff you have to login to.
I worked for an anti-spam company. It was the same way with web-based spam (people hacking or creating Yahoo, gmail etc accounts to spam with), porn was the method often used. Those captchas that some free sites throw up (maybe even the paid ones I wouldn't know) they sometimes come from a bot that is creating email accounts. The site makes money by creating a whole lot of email accounts automatically rather than having to pay someone to sit around solving captchas, then bundles them together and sells them to spammers. There is also a lot of cheap labour stuff going on (for some reason I think it is mostly Thailand) where people sit around solving captchas for 1c for 10 or something like that.
Nice company that they let you use it for personal use. I've only had that once but then again by then I was the server/network admin so they might just have figured that I wouldn't get caught even if they told me not to.
I wonder how many plugins really need to remain in memory all the time and how many stick around anyways? A lot probably could just be function calls that exit. Thinks like ad blocking could just be a function call that takes in the downloaded page removes the ads and returns the results to the browser. Similarly for flash removal, and a lot of other stuff. If they were just function calls the browser could control when they return and if they take too long kill them etc to make sure that they don't keep crap around.
That actually should be the model: plugins don't get to make any persistent memory, they read in a stream and return a stream to the engine and that is it.
Speaking of internet porn and going on a tangent: why is porn notorious as a virus vector? Is getting paid to film/participate in orgies really so bad that you have to do illegal things on the side to keep the lights on?
But your personal laptop does provide additional functionality namely not having to screw around with your works equipment to try to do something with it you shouldn't be in the first place. I can almost guarantee you that your corporate IT policy doesn't allow personal use of their equipment. So keeping your job is a nice additional function IMHO.
Another option ... might be ... talk to your work. Tell them hey I'm traveling and have nothing to entertain myself with when I'm not working. Can I use the laptop for this? If not can I install whatever it is I need for work on my personal laptop and use it instead?
I've gotten burned before when using a work computer for my personal use. I didn't have a working computer at home and had a corporate laptop so I was using for all my personal use. Well it got corrupted and IT spent a good day or so browsing through it looking for viruses. Which meant that they were looking at all my internet caches, downloaded files etc. So they came down on me pretty hard and pretty much blamed me for it crashing (maybe maybe not) but regardless resulted in a awkward conversation with my manager as I was 25 at the time and lets just say some things that a 25 year old might use the internet for to entertain themselves is not something you want all your coworkers to know about.
So the wipe it and restore it solution might not work. If it is corrupted enough and you can't get it working your company's IT will end up playing with it and if it is a slow day in the office they'll take their time and browse through it looking for a way of blaming it on a site you went to that you shouldn't have or whatever.
Well that depends a bit. the OP said 512MB I think is what he had. The size of the DIMMS available for a system that old is probably 512MB max say. So he might be able to double RAM but that would be about it. Also: sometimes the old ram is still really expensive because they know that you are trying to keep something running they feel fine charging you say $100 a stick for 512 even though you could get 4GB of DDR 3 for that just because they had to keep that 512 dimm on the shelf (at least in theory) for x years before someone wanted it. That was suns arguement anyways for there rediculous replacement costs on RAM. When a server came out they stored spare parts from the same time until they were used. So Even though ~6 years ago I was looking for a 32GB server drive from 2002 era, they wanted something like $500 for it. They had potentially 3 drives sitting around for each one they actually sold but they had to have it to insure that they could support servers on contract.
Umm, every 2 years? 512MB ram is about 8 years ago. Upgrading every 5 years or so should keep you happy with a browsing/email/office productivity kind of machine. You might get lucky and it last longer but it isn't guaranteed. I'm not rolling in money I just realize I can't use cutting edge techology on yesterday's equipment. What's so wrong with that. Computers can't last 10 years easily anymore because of the internet. Everything is interconnected so you have to be compatible with what sites are requiring. Before if you were happy with your spreadsheet and word processor you never had to upgrade your computer. Now that you are using content from other sources you need a computer capable with that content which is continually evolving.
As for the idiotic eye candy: I agree but what is the solution? Users with the new machines want the eye candy, people with the old machines/software maybe can't support it. Do developers have to backport every new feature into every slightly lower eye candy level version of the browser from the past? In a perfect world the presentation and protocol layers would be completely separate and only the protocol would have bugs and vulnerabilities.But the junk is scattered throughout the app so finding and fixing bugs is very much a per release kind of thing for the most part.
The browser is becoming more like an OS every day. So in analogy upgrading your browser is becoming more like upgrading your OS: there isn't a guarantee that the old hardware will run the new browser. Which is fine as long as you can get the features/content you want out of the old browser. But when you simply must have HTML5, silverlight etc running than it might be time for an upgrade similar to how you need to upgrade if you want to run Win 7.
In short if you want your computer to last 10 years than you need to stop expecting to be compatible with the rest of the world that has moved on.
Two things:
1) Not all of the bloat is code not being optimized. A lot of it is doing things that in the past were not possible because of system limitations. Eg. running silverlight apps in a browser, newer fancier flash, translucent rendering on the desktop. Etc etc. all of it takes resources. The code could be just as optimized but it still would take up more room. Part of optimization is deciding RAM vs time tradeoff point. If RAM gets cheaper you move more stuff into a data intensive algorithm than you did before when you tried to do everything in a tight loop to minimize RAM.
2) How is using more of the system ram to prefetch/cache apps a bad thing for us? Would you rather that the system remain completely idle and than make us wait to get the stuff when we request it? If the RAM is there and not being used (and HDD io, CPU etc) it might as well be being used to try to make things more responsive for the user.
Performance wise probably. I think the reasoning was though that Apple got screwed over a few times with delays in the new PPC chips coming out. They needed to upgrade their offerings but couldn't get chips for them. Apple was starting to look bad because people were looking at them as the company with 3 year old computers.
Add to that the desire to run Windows and it made sense to switch.
There is a lot of very expensive things that have been added in the last 17 years. Live searching in the OS and browser. Spell correction. Far more complexity in the rendering (translucency on the desktop window for example), bigger screens (mine's 2560X1440) (I realize that the graphics card handles a lot of this but my guess is some of that overhead its the RAM too), etc. I agree we piss away a lot of RAM for relatively minor features but it isn't a straight up comparison. You'd have to go back to the quality of MP3s, webpages and videos of 1996 to compare. Yep everything is bigger needing more RAM. But RAM and CPU is cheaper so the cost of that extra junk has gone down.
The first computer that I actually bought (didn't get given to me) was a P3 450 with I think it was 128MB of ram I paid around 3k for it. My last computer purchase was about $2500 and is an iMac 27" with quad i7, 4GB ram and the 1GB video card upgrade. So ~500 cheaper, 15 years later from a by most people's opinion expensive vendor. I saved ~1k (in inflation adjusted terms) and got a "cooler" brand. So I think 4GB is approximately equivalent or even less than 128MB 15 years ago. Yeah the numbers that software is using has gone crazy but the cost to provide you with a system that can supply those numbers has gone down even quicker. That is why vendors or happy running java or .Net which inheriently adds another layer to the bloat (you need the vm and the "real" code) because nearly no one that is going to pay for the product (or be a dev on the project for FOSS) is going to have a machine with specs that can't handle it.
Everything is a pain in the ass with a lot of things open. Browsers, operating systems etc. To me it is just clutter. At some point I just give up and start closing things I haven't used in the last 5 minutes to free up space. The most I have open on my browser at any given time is probably 5 tabs and that is rare. Probably at work for example with a couple work sites, my email, /. and another tab for google searches/results. That said usually if I look at my browser in that state 3 of the 5 I haven't used in the last 10 minutes and have no reason to suspect I'll need in the next 10 minutes any more than any other site on the web. So I feel free to close them down before opening up more crap.
I simply meant changing architectures 286 being an obvious example for me from windows land. So: dusting off the 286 in 1995, better? Either way the expected hardware changed years ago so it isn't that reasonable to assume that people will keep supporting it. Apple I think contributes to this a lot: they really like to push people to upgrade. For example I seem to recall that one of the older OS X releases (Tiger?) would install on G4 systems not G3 systems even though as far as I know nothing instruction set changed between the cpus, and the older Macs had enough RAM to run it. Apple simply wanted to only supply the upgrade to people with newer systems.
I have never saw my browser use more than 600MB of RAM and that is with 10 or so sites open and some streaming content. I'm sorry but if your browser is using 4+ GB of RAM it either has a leak or something you added does. If it is in FF than they should fix it, if it is in an extension they should fix it (or you should realize that is the price you pay for using the tool and either live with it or stop using it). But still if you never restart a program that you suspect has a memory leak who's fault is it when you get to the point where you have 4GB + of RAM in use?
Part of the price of an extension IMO is seeing if it does what you want AND seeing what price you are paying for it. If you aren't willing to do the second part because your time is so valuable than you can't really whine about your RAM usage going crazy. Yes there is a piece of shit in your browser but since you aren't willing to give it a sniff test there isn't much that can be done for you.
Exactly: If you won't invest $50 into making your computer run chances are Goldman Sachs isn't looking for your business. A lot of time people have these dinosaurs as a second/multiple/kids computer. Which is fine. But you have to realize you stopped using it as your primary computer for a reason so just because you have a faster computer from work, new laptop etc doesn't mean your old piece of crap is going to make you any more happy. If anything the comparison will make you hate it more.
To add to that: websites will market/design to your capabilities when you are on your primary machine. A merchant doesn't care too much that the computer in the basement you dust off for 30 min a week doesn't work with there site or software as long as when you use one of your computers it does.
In short: there is a correlation to people using old hardware and being cheap. There isn't any reasonable expectation of making a sale to them anyways so why bother spending time targeting them? If nothing else, even if the guy has money, if you are asking say $100 for your software chances are they'll look at it and say "but my computer isn't worth that much any more", or "my 40GB harddrive doesn't have room for a 1GB app to do my taxes once a year" or whatever.
But if you are truly just using the machine for webbrowsing than you aren't multitasking. In my experience though people tell you they are using the machine for one thing and then it turns out it is used for a dozen things and then they wonder why it runs slow. I worked in a hospital ~6 years ago. We had win xp running on 512MB of ram (I think they were P4 2Ghz). People would ask why their clinical apps were running slow. I'd check the server then check the clients. Turns out everyone was in "shoe shopping" mode: they had multiple browsers open (funny one of them must have clicked okay on every offer to add a toolbar, they had about 10 installed, they ended up with about a 4 inch window on the bottom that actually displayed websites), multiple copies of the clinical app open to save time switching between patients, etc. In short: it is okay to run a low spec machine provided it can handle what you want to do with it. But if you are picking off things that are near the system limit than there shouldn't be any expectation that you can do multiple of those things and still get good performance.
It isn't that overlapping windows were overlooked they were hard. You had to have a way to keep track of which window was on top and render the windows in order so that the right parts are covered by the windows on top. It was much easier if you knew every window was in its own area, you could do things in any order and if something updated in a window that wasn't the topmost you could still rerender its window since you knew it wouldn't affect the active window. Think 10 windows open slightly overlapping each other. The background colour of the bottom one changes. You need a way to figure out that it AND everything on top needs to be rerendered (so that the right places are covered), or alternatively have a way to clip the image and render subregions of a window. Regardless it was difficult with the hardware/software capabilities at the time.
Haha he said seminal :-)
Exactly on the unsupported comment. You can't run a dinosaur computer and then complain it can't run the new stuff. If it worked that way a lot of people would still be using their commodores but since the vast majority of upgrades require more resources than what they replace you are guaranteed to at some point have something new you'd like to run that you can't. Developers aren't going to spend the rest of their lives writing new software and passing every previous version up to the same level so software needs to die. It is an engineered thing just like a road. At some point you just got to let it go and pave over the sucker.
Anonymous Coward, argh good chance you aren't going to see this. But IE 8-9 has a compatibility mode option. Seems to work pretty good. Click: tools->developer tools and in the middle of the toolbar there is a document mode: you can pick 7 8 or 9 in version 9. So ... you can get the eye candy of ie 9 with the rendering of ie 7. I'm not sure if there is a way to save the setting so that it only applies to a specific page. I think the !DOCTYPE header in the webpage is supposed to control what version of IE mode that IE >=8 tries to render the page with so if you have access to the page try adding the appropriate flag to let browsers know what you want.
Please this is a CPU architecture change. It would be like dusting off your 286 and getting all bitchy that windows now wants at least 32 bit hardware.
Chances are there will be some non-mainstream browser available for the PPC till the end of time. You might have to use something called Goggzilly 3.1.233 that no one knows about other than people with the same problem and doesn't have all your favorite plugins but people will probably find a way to make the dinosaurs keep rendering pages.
Sorry mind fart, 1/14th of my RAM but the premise still holds. I have 4-5 things open that I actually am using at the moment iTunes and VLC ~50MB each, Vuze and FF ~200 each, VS ~230MB. So my apps are using about 750MB of RAM, so presumably the OS is using the other 2GB (though as I mentioned Win 7 is very aggressive in its loading of things in RAM, it would be fine with 2GB of RAM on the system I suspect it would just preload less stuff). The browser is a drop in the bucket for the typical desktop computer running Win/OS X. Sure linux can have a really low footprint and you can say wholly crap my browser uses as much ram as my OS, but for most computers 5 years old who cares?
Are people really running machines with that little ram? I have 4GB on my 2 year old computer. Heck my last computer (which was work supplied and circa ~2008) had 2GB (Mac Leopard) and was fine. 400MB is a lot of RAM for a browser put it is rare that I'm anywhere's near my system RAM limit so I don't care.
For example right now I have: VS 2010 pro, Vuze, VLC running a video, iTunes, and FF 10 running on a Win 7 box which is notorious for being RAM happy (actually a good thing if the ram is there it might as well have stuff loaded in it just in case you ask for it later), anyways 2.8GB of RAM used. FF is using 200MB of that, I really don't care that 1/19th of my used RAM is my browser. The quick access to streaming porn is more than worth it to me.