Firefox is by far my main browser, that's due to AdBlock and FlashBlock mainly. I don't have a gazillion plug ins, just the aforementioned plus sun's java, & flash,
So...mainly due to features which are in no way exlclusive to it?
But the recent version had quite a bit of UI overhaul...
Also, this compression does help on older machines (I still have an old dual PII 266 that I check up sometimes); maybe they have less to process that way (images in much lower quality, restructured js), I don't know. Plus on such machine the snappiness of the browser as a whole is very noticeable, and of great value.
Not in practice with Opera. Mostly the same compression is available in Opera Mobile for smartphones & Opera Mini for j2me "feature phones" after all...and anyway I have a very old machine around here that I sometimes boot up, a dual PII 266. Opera Turbo works fine.
10.52 would be weird considering the latest version is 10.53
Anyway, Opera does seem to be the best fit for "ancient" machines. That's probably one of the main reasons why it's comfortably #1 browser in Ukraine and #1 "alternative" browser in Russia; in both of those places machines tend to live much longer...
BTW, what FF add-ons would that be? It's too often the case that people don't know how much functionality can be had from Opera...
Though Chrome is light & snappy as long as there's plenty of physical RAM available (which it does need more, if going into large numbers of tabs). If that's not the case, the experience goes down the drain...
And what would happen with FF or IE after a week or so of (presumably) normal browsing? (for various values of "normal" of course...I would say 10 tabs is very little foe Opera:p )
But there is one advantage to the iphone - since you can't take out the battery, it remains on the network for a longer time to receive the wipe signal.
You can take out the SIM card though? (and power it down) Sure, mobile phones without it can still sort-of connect to make emergency calls...but I don't see why they would be able to maintain a data connection / be reachable be remote kill service through ordinary cell network?
Impressive how they established this one bit with certainty - a command for transmitting back, basically, RAM content? Or at least checksums for various parts of it, narrowing down the location? (what about the storage from which it will be restored?) Would that even work considering the gibberish transmitted?
If that was determined based largely on a copy at hand - what if some other bit is also wrong?...
the voyager probes use a radioisotope thermoelectric generator so that wouldn't work anyway
Plus you wouldn't want it to work that way - planetary encounters are mighty interesting. They were the main reason for existence of Voyagers in the first place...
That's a self-correcting problem. a.) The specs of cell phones are dramatically rising every year.
I'm not buying that; in the last year almost 1.3 billion mobile phones were shipped. Not even 170 million were smartphones (and out of those which were, a lot had quite modest hardware; because Symbian allows it; because otherwise those people often wouldn't even get a smartphone...). Furthermore, the specs of batteries aren't rising at all...
b.) When it makes sense to optimize your app to reach a greater audience, the time and money is put into doing it. Just doing it now willy nilly will do little more than lengthen the time to develop and possibly even create more defects to correct.
What you describe isn't some imminent problem. It's a problem we've already gotten past.
That's quite limited view IMHO. Applying mostly to "developed world" only. (look at OLPC XO-1...x86 cpu? GTK+? (ok, this one could do...) Python?! Gecko?!!!)
And the point there where I used bold was simply to separate it from the preceeding line looking like that (and where that emphasis was used in widely different context);) But more generally, the point was that since large part of optimisations can be done on a common, small, and crucial part of code...it isn't that much of a problem.
We still need optimisation. How many PCs are there in the world, a bit over one billion? And at the same time there are also...around 5 billion mobiles phone users (there were 3 billion at the end of 2008 IIRC, 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, so now...). There are very good reasons for that. The same reasons why most of the world will be using "slow" computers (and will use each unit very long) The value of optimisation is so that those machines will be a reality. That's of monumental value to humanity, far overshadowing efforts at optimisation.
And here's the kicker...you wrote in the first post of this subthread "how much more they get done thanks to abstraction, pre built libraries/modules, nicely designed IDEs, and interpreted languages" - that is the proper place for optimisation; that's what NextStep did - offering great things in nicely optimised package to build upon (and making it easy to do it properly). Throw in some nice & efficient scripting language (I hear Lua is like that), nice & light IDE (can be done; Qt Creator being one possible example); and make sure the core, on which the rest will be based, is optimised to hell.
It apparently also doesn't matter that some software can get quite a bit more life out of old machines, give them a modern & packed with features experience that remains usable. One would think that has some value in our current world...
Not to mention hundreds millions of people for which this might be pretty much the only available software of such type (each year there is way over a billion mobile phones sold; but not even 200 million of them are "smartphones")
Both. You seem to take "the former" (by using the order from your above post) too literally - of course it wasn't quite as nice as we would like it to be now...but it was pretty damn close. And managing that on very slow, by modern standards, hardware. There's no reason why we can't have it now, in similarly efficient way.
What I asked for wasn't to remind us about the status quo of the past (when NextStep was...overlooked; ignored (and not without a reason of course)) and how that differs from now.
You seem to not realise what NextStep was capable of (or of what its modern incarnation, GNUStep, is...while still being plenty light; well, there's that other more direct descendant, OSX...too bogged down with shiny, though). Look it up. To cut it short: it has basically all the characteristics which, on software level, give us those "glorious times".
Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning. Plus there are just so many ways to keep the browser afloat - while all other big ones exist thanks to major corporate backing (yes, also Mozilla...you don't remember AOL?), Opera simply always chosen to go without corporate daddy...but that needed a way to make revenue for a long time already, not only when lately revenue from searches became viable. They not only found their niche, but are giving for free a usable browser to the fastest-growing segment of the market. Millions of people who wouldn't have a browser otherwise.
Give them some credit...
PS. What was that mess with Firefox (free?) and Debian?
Try comparing them with bigger number of tabs (*1), running for a looong time (*2) and on as slow machine as you can find (*3)
(*1) why should the software limit what we want to do?
(*2) why should we restart a browser when there's hibernation available? Particularly on slow / mobile connection.
(*3) I would hope we can see the responsibility in using a PC for as long as it can do its job; and that includes choosing software which enables that.
NextStep (wrong spelling probably...) basically offered, and at a time when you "started 20 years ago": #1 (sort of(*)), #2 (ok, could've used a better menu structure; just a change of style) and #4.
We still need to do lots of #3 (mobile phones)
(*) just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...
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Firefox is by far my main browser, that's due to AdBlock and FlashBlock mainly. I don't have a gazillion plug ins, just the aforementioned plus sun's java, & flash,
So...mainly due to features which are in no way exlclusive to it?
Why others browsers don't have a problem with that?
But the recent version had quite a bit of UI overhaul...
Also, this compression does help on older machines (I still have an old dual PII 266 that I check up sometimes); maybe they have less to process that way (images in much lower quality, restructured js), I don't know. Plus on such machine the snappiness of the browser as a whole is very noticeable, and of great value.
So why do you want them to implement FF UI?...
Not in practice with Opera. Mostly the same compression is available in Opera Mobile for smartphones & Opera Mini for j2me "feature phones" after all...and anyway I have a very old machine around here that I sometimes boot up, a dual PII 266. Opera Turbo works fine.
10.52 would be weird considering the latest version is 10.53
Anyway, Opera does seem to be the best fit for "ancient" machines. That's probably one of the main reasons why it's comfortably #1 browser in Ukraine and #1 "alternative" browser in Russia; in both of those places machines tend to live much longer...
BTW, what FF add-ons would that be? It's too often the case that people don't know how much functionality can be had from Opera...
Though Chrome is light & snappy as long as there's plenty of physical RAM available (which it does need more, if going into large numbers of tabs). If that's not the case, the experience goes down the drain...
And what would happen with FF or IE after a week or so of (presumably) normal browsing? (for various values of "normal" of course...I would say 10 tabs is very little foe Opera :p )
First, that test is quite old.
Secondly...uhm...opening 25 tabs and just letting them sit there for 10 minutes? That constitutes "using them" to you?! O_o
Try few days, with more tabs, actual browsing, and on a memory-constrained machine.
But there is one advantage to the iphone - since you can't take out the battery, it remains on the network for a longer time to receive the wipe signal.
You can take out the SIM card though? (and power it down) Sure, mobile phones without it can still sort-of connect to make emergency calls...but I don't see why they would be able to maintain a data connection / be reachable be remote kill service through ordinary cell network?
Impressive how they established this one bit with certainty - a command for transmitting back, basically, RAM content? Or at least checksums for various parts of it, narrowing down the location? (what about the storage from which it will be restored?) Would that even work considering the gibberish transmitted?
If that was determined based largely on a copy at hand - what if some other bit is also wrong?...
the voyager probes use a radioisotope thermoelectric generator so that wouldn't work anyway
Plus you wouldn't want it to work that way - planetary encounters are mighty interesting. They were the main reason for existence of Voyagers in the first place...
V'Ger is unwilling to just transfer the data to its Creator...
Whoa there, why would you limit yourself to the US? There's quite a lot of places where average age of a PC is much higher...
Plus mobile phones might be already a much more widespread way to access the web, worldwide.
That's a self-correcting problem. a.) The specs of cell phones are dramatically rising every year.
I'm not buying that; in the last year almost 1.3 billion mobile phones were shipped. Not even 170 million were smartphones (and out of those which were, a lot had quite modest hardware; because Symbian allows it; because otherwise those people often wouldn't even get a smartphone...). Furthermore, the specs of batteries aren't rising at all...
b.) When it makes sense to optimize your app to reach a greater audience, the time and money is put into doing it. Just doing it now willy nilly will do little more than lengthen the time to develop and possibly even create more defects to correct.
What you describe isn't some imminent problem. It's a problem we've already gotten past.
That's quite limited view IMHO. Applying mostly to "developed world" only.
(look at OLPC XO-1...x86 cpu? GTK+? (ok, this one could do...) Python?! Gecko?!!!)
And the point there where I used bold was simply to separate it from the preceeding line looking like that (and where that emphasis was used in widely different context) ;)
But more generally, the point was that since large part of optimisations can be done on a common, small, and crucial part of code...it isn't that much of a problem.
We still need optimisation. How many PCs are there in the world, a bit over one billion?
And at the same time there are also...around 5 billion mobiles phone users (there were 3 billion at the end of 2008 IIRC, 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, so now...). There are very good reasons for that. The same reasons why most of the world will be using "slow" computers (and will use each unit very long)
The value of optimisation is so that those machines will be a reality. That's of monumental value to humanity, far overshadowing efforts at optimisation.
And here's the kicker...you wrote in the first post of this subthread "how much more they get done thanks to abstraction, pre built libraries/modules, nicely designed IDEs, and interpreted languages" - that is the proper place for optimisation; that's what NextStep did - offering great things in nicely optimised package to build upon (and making it easy to do it properly). Throw in some nice & efficient scripting language (I hear Lua is like that), nice & light IDE (can be done; Qt Creator being one possible example); and make sure the core, on which the rest will be based, is optimised to hell.
It apparently also doesn't matter that some software can get quite a bit more life out of old machines, give them a modern & packed with features experience that remains usable. One would think that has some value in our current world...
Not to mention hundreds millions of people for which this might be pretty much the only available software of such type (each year there is way over a billion mobile phones sold; but not even 200 million of them are "smartphones")
Both. You seem to take "the former" (by using the order from your above post) too literally - of course it wasn't quite as nice as we would like it to be now...but it was pretty damn close. And managing that on very slow, by modern standards, hardware.
There's no reason why we can't have it now, in similarly efficient way.
Opera has adblocker built-in, you just have to provide it with a list (updated of course; plus there's also a GUI way of blocking elements if something comes through...)
What I asked for wasn't to remind us about the status quo of the past (when NextStep was...overlooked; ignored (and not without a reason of course)) and how that differs from now.
You seem to not realise what NextStep was capable of (or of what its modern incarnation, GNUStep, is...while still being plenty light; well, there's that other more direct descendant, OSX...too bogged down with shiny, though). Look it up.
To cut it short: it has basically all the characteristics which, on software level, give us those "glorious times".
Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning. Plus there are just so many ways to keep the browser afloat - while all other big ones exist thanks to major corporate backing (yes, also Mozilla...you don't remember AOL?), Opera simply always chosen to go without corporate daddy...but that needed a way to make revenue for a long time already, not only when lately revenue from searches became viable. They not only found their niche, but are giving for free a usable browser to the fastest-growing segment of the market. Millions of people who wouldn't have a browser otherwise.
Give them some credit...
PS. What was that mess with Firefox (free?) and Debian?
Try comparing them with bigger number of tabs (*1), running for a looong time (*2) and on as slow machine as you can find (*3)
(*1) why should the software limit what we want to do?
(*2) why should we restart a browser when there's hibernation available? Particularly on slow / mobile connection.
(*3) I would hope we can see the responsibility in using a PC for as long as it can do its job; and that includes choosing software which enables that.
NextStep (wrong spelling probably...) basically offered, and at a time when you "started 20 years ago": #1 (sort of(*)), #2 (ok, could've used a better menu structure; just a change of style) and #4.
We still need to do lots of #3 (mobile phones)
(*) just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...
How are those glorious days we live now, which you described, that much different from what NeXtSTEP (or however it should be spelled...) offered?
Mobile phone users give a shit. There's much more of them than PC users.