That is not a Firefox specific bug, pre se. It's a bug in the interaction between Firefox and Windows. The FF team let FF be 'memory friendly' to windows. This means that if you minimize FF and another program comes along and says "I need that memory", Firefox will give it up and go to page file. Coming out of page file is what you are waiting that 30-60 seconds for.
There are several settings and options that can make Firefox run as a much faster browser. You should test these techniques before you roll them out to, say, a thousand workstations in your company.
Speeding up the maximizing of Firefox
By default, when you minimize Firefox, it gives back to Windows most of the RAM the browser was using. It sometimes can take several seconds for the browser window to become fully loaded when you restore the window to its original size. This is one of those "version 1.0" things, in my opinion, that will become more streamlined in future bump revs of the program.
Fortunately, there's a hidden setting that can accomplish the restoration of Firefox windows much more quickly:
Step 1. Use about:config to create a new, Boolean value. Type or paste the following string into the dialog box that appears:
config.trim_on_minimize
Step 2. Click OK to close the dialog box. Change the value from "true" to "false" and restart Firefox.
This doesn't piggishly retain all of the RAM that Firefox has claimed. If Windows needs more RAM to devote to another application, Windows can take it. What the setting does is prevent Firefox from giving up most of its RAM until the memory is actually required elsewhere.
Setting this item to "false" may noticeably slow down other applications while Firefox is minimized, if your PC has less than 256 MB of RAM. If so, change the setting back to "true."
There's an extremely long discussion about the development of this trick, going back to March 2004 (and continuing up through today), in Bugzilla bug report #76831. If you're determined to delve into this, I'd recommend starting with comment 329.
This assumes that there are correct tags for everything in HTML, but I don't think that's true.
You are right. There aren't correct tags for everything in HTML - that is of course because HTML is not designed to host the limitless ways that a document could be marked up...it is a subset of XML (it is now anyways.)
If you really wanted power, you could define your own language with a DTD in XML and then style that use CSS. This would allow for *any* tag you could ever need.
CSS doesnt touch the content of a document at all - that's the whole point of it. You can "pretty up" a document without needing to redo all the content's code. In addition, no one doing to the documenting needs to worry about anything new - they just continue as always. The "extra" download can be turned off in cool browsers so that its formatted normally - heck, even a fancy JavaScript button can be set up to use different (or no!) style sheets.
So - Better appearance, negligable performance hit, backwards compatable, no change in article (html) formatting, and zero drawbacks. Why would they not put CSS into action? Even basic CSS can do wonders.
Odd, seeing as we just installed it on 3 pc's at my place ranging from a p3-800 to a dual athlon 1.7. Not a single problem....in fact it works flawlessly - we can even saher music across computers and across to the mac on the network without issue.
To bad you've had such problems...it's quite cool to have access to a months worth of music shared between all of us.
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There IS a fix though. ( Taken from http://windowssecrets.com/comp/041202/ )
You are right. There aren't correct tags for everything in HTML - that is of course because HTML is not designed to host the limitless ways that a document could be marked up...it is a subset of XML (it is now anyways.)
If you really wanted power, you could define your own language with a DTD in XML and then style that use CSS. This would allow for *any* tag you could ever need.
Of course they should!
CSS doesnt touch the content of a document at all - that's the whole point of it. You can "pretty up" a document without needing to redo all the content's code. In addition, no one doing to the documenting needs to worry about anything new - they just continue as always. The "extra" download can be turned off in cool browsers so that its formatted normally - heck, even a fancy JavaScript button can be set up to use different (or no!) style sheets.
So - Better appearance, negligable performance hit, backwards compatable, no change in article (html) formatting, and zero drawbacks. Why would they not put CSS into action? Even basic CSS can do wonders.
Odd, seeing as we just installed it on 3 pc's at my place ranging from a p3-800 to a dual athlon 1.7. Not a single problem....in fact it works flawlessly - we can even saher music across computers and across to the mac on the network without issue.
To bad you've had such problems...it's quite cool to have access to a months worth of music shared between all of us.