Current Firefox (2.0.0.3) for Windows: 5.5MB download.
Current Opera (9.2) for Windows: 6.3MB download. Nope. You're not comparing like with like. According to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/, Firefox (English) is 5.7MB. Likewise, according to http://www.opera.com/download/, Opera (English) is 4.7MB. Opera *international* is 6.3MB, but that's due to the sheer number of languages it supports.
Couldn't give a hoot about the features. All the good in Opera is hidden behind a terrible user interface. I gots shit to *do*, ya know? But the whole point of Opera is that it's almost infinitely customisable; and the interface is very, very easy to change, much easier than Firefox. In fact, it's the interface that put me off Firefox -- not the default interface, but the difficulty of customizing it; unless you're willing to either manually manually edit.css files in your profile or install a shitload of extensions that make FF take about 10 minutes to start. E.g. I prefer the tab bar at the bottom of the screen. In Firefox I have to manually add a string to a.css text file; much harder in Opera.
Besides, what's so bad about the default interface? The only really unusual thing is that it puts the tab bar above the address bar, but as I said, that's very easy to change.
It seems that megabytes were used to mean 2^20 years before SI was ratified You're comparing two different things; usage and ratification. Yes, megabytes were used to mean 2^20 before SI was ratified, but compare like with like: If you compare usage with usage; 10^6 wins by a very long way -- using mega to mean 10^6 dates from the introduction of the Metric system in the 18th century; and of course if you're comparing dates ratified -- mega meaning 10^6 obviously wins because mega meaning 2^20 has never been ratified at all.
For example, I know that I rely on several Firefox add-ons to manage my information and tasks. It would take significant effort to move my stuff to something else. I know that, if FireFox decides to kill all add-ons in the next release, someone will instantly be able to fork it, so that I don't have to choose between staying with an outdated FireFox or keeping my crucial add-ons.
Suppose Opera had similar functionality. Suppose I was using Opera for the same purposes, and one day Opera kills them all. Then I am left in the cold. In practise, of course, just because someone is able to fork it doesn't mean they will -- and there are certainly a number of very useful FF1.5 extensions which haven't been updated or forked and don't work on FF2.0. If Opera, on the other hand, include a feature, you know it won't break when you upgrade because it's part of the browser and will be upgraded with it.
Considering the sheer number of extensions Firefox needs to bring it up to Opera's default functionality, the chance of this happening quite quickly approaches 1.
The end result of it is that you have a browser that looks 'relatively natural' on a wide variety of platforms and can be easily extended and themed But not only does Opera run on more platforms than Firefox does, but it's also just as themable as Firefox is (not to mention considerably more customizable out of the box without having to mess about editing css files by hand). Your argument doesn't really hold up.
Firefox also has better support of a number of standards (MathML, SVG, Javascript 1.7) that Opera has little/no support for (they support SVG tiny, but that doesn't seem to do too much). If you're trying to argue that Opera has worse support than Firefox than standards, I don't think you're going to succeed. The only major omission is MathML. You have SVG in your list, but in my experience, Opera has considerably better support for SVG than Firefox does -- you claim it only supports SVGT, which may have been true in version 8.0, but is no longer since 9.0 (incidentally, version 9 was also the first to completely pass the Acid2 standards test, which Firefox stil doesn't; not that that's a big problem for Firefox, but if you're criticising standards in Opera I thought I'd mention it). And, of course, the list of standards that Opera supports but Firefox doesn't is quite considerably bigger than vice versa (NavLinks, Web Forms 2.0, VoiceXML, WML, DOM3, etc.).
Likewise, computer data has a long-held convention but for some reason people want this one changed. On the contrary, people want the actual convention (you know, the one backed up by hundreds of years of usage and numerous standards organisations before binary computers were even invented) restored.
For an example of the difference, people don't say that they have a megadollar or a gigaduck (not normal people) Maybe not, but they do say "centidollar" -- at least in its abbreviated form, "cent".
I'd like to see the pedantic community start discussing things in mebimeters and gibiwatts before they start trying to change the computer community's standard meanings. Huh? There would be no reason for people to use mebimeters and gibiWatts, because metres and Watts are Metric units and thus are base 10. It would not make sense to use base 2 prefixes (mebi, gibi) in a base 10 system. It does, on the other hand, make sense to use base 10 units in a base 10 system such as the metric system, and likewise base 2 units in a binary system.
I'm not sure the phrase "technically correct" is so cut-and-dried here. If all the technical people who invented computers defined megabyte to mean 2^20, then it's technically correct I would argue that the SI usage would be the correct usage no matter what "all the technical people who invented computers" said. Firstly, the 'mega' prefix (for example) was defined to mean 10^6 long, long before modern byte-based computing came along, for technical/scientific usage, the metric system (!) etc. The SI (decimal) uses are the standard uses, as decided by the CGPM, ISO etc. long ago. Secondly, even today computer geeks are but a subset of all geeks, and the computer industry still much smaller than the whole technical/scientific industry; and everyone but computer geeks and some of the computer industry use mega to mean 10^6, not 2^20. Even if the whole computer industry did agree to use mega to mean 2^20, it would still be nowhere near the majority usage (pretty much the whole world except America uses the metric system all the time, and even in America it's used in Science etc.) and would still not be a standard in either sense of the word.
To be fair, we didn't actually know what the technically correct answer was when conventional current was decided -- electricity was discovered way before electrons. They guessed, they had a 50/50 chance of getting it right, they got it wrong. That's not a problem we have in this situation.
Don't try to invent a new notation to make-up for corporate marketing corrupting established and well-understood notation. I would point out the "mega" was an established and well-understood prefix for 10^6 well before the computer industry (sans hard drive makers) started to use it mean 2^20.
Why so angry with Opera users? Did your parents force you to watch Wagner's complete ring cycle in a single sitting when you were three and it traumatized you against Opera for life, or something?
Every time I look into Opera, I am annoyed and wind up back on Firefox. I've done this with every major version released since FF 1.0 so far. Just out of interest, what annoys you? I ask because for me, it's been the opposite -- every so often I see an interesting FF extension and go off and try it, but get put off and go back to Opera.
The only thing I can think of that might put someone off is the somewhat quirky default interface, but that's very easy to change, much easier than Firefox. In fact, that's what put me off Firefox -- the difficulty of customizability; unless you're willing to either manually manually edit.css files in your profile or install a shitload of extensions that make FF take about 10 minutes to start. I shouldn't need to edit a text file to move a toolbar to the bottom of the screen; haven't mozilla ever heard of drag&drop? And what's with having to restart Firefox every time you change anything at all? Forget Vista's UAC, "You have changed a keyboard shortcut; you have to restart Firefox. Cancel or allow?". Plus the complete lack of spatial navigation -- there was an extension for that, but it doesn't work with Firefox 2.0; I tried.
(...Sorry, didn't mean to go into rant mode there. The question stands.)
Why does slimming Firefox down necessarily mean removing features? Opera can do pretty much all of the things you quotes and much, much more besides (email client, bittorrent client, customizable to the extent that would need about 15 different FF extensions to emulate, etc.) -- and it still manages to be slimmer than Firefox -- a smaller download (4.7 vs 5.7MB), faster to start, more responsive, a smaller memory footprint, etc.
Even though Opera certainly has many, many more features built in by default than Firefox, it still manages to be a smaller download (4.7 vs 5.7MB), faster to start, more responsive, and a smaller memory footprint.
And by the time you've added enough extensions to bring Firefox up to Opera's default functionality, the differences have multiplied 10fold.
It was a simple spreadsheet that charted out RAM requirements across the OSes. It was never intended to be a mathematical analysis of the issue. But you were inviting conclusions about Vista's RAM usage from it; thus, implicitly treating it as if it were a reasonable analysis. Nonwithstanding that in any linear plot of explonentially increasing numbers, the most recent one is always going to far dominate the ones that came before.
The original spreadsheet didn't even map by year! ...Well, yes, exactly; that was one of the reasons it wasn't very good.
you cant just say "go google it". Why not? Any answer KingMotley or I give would likely be just the result of Googling/Wikipediaing it and copying/pasting the answers, so why not skip the intermediate step and have you do the research yourself?
DEC Alpha chips were introduced in 1992 and were 64-bit. SPARC went 64-bit in 1995. MIPS went 64-bit in 1991. PA-RISC in 1996."
And how many did you see, across the board, in consumer grade "Bob Everyman" systems? Windows NT 4, hardly a niche OS, supported Alpha and MIPS.
Many other people have pointed out your mistakes-- using a line graph with a non-continuous x-axis (i.e. name of release), using a linear graph to plot something that should be expected to grow exponentially (think RAM equivalent of Moore's law; doubling every x years is exponential, not linear), etc. I've fixed most by taking your data and plotting the natural logarithm of recommended RAM against the release data:
...to do something they should have done (but didn't) at one (any one) of the previous Windows releases:
Shitcan the old code and start from scratch But they did do that, with Windows NT. NT 3.1 was written from the ground up, from scratch, as a completely 32-bit OS. Backwards compatibility with 16-bit apps was crap, but the architecture was good. And what happened? It took them over 8 years to persuade the market to switch over to it from the old architecture. They only acheived it in the end by devoting an entire Windows release (XP) to the task of retrofitting the NT kernel (i.e. Windows 2000) with a ton of emulation subsytems to let it run most Windows 9x/DOS apps. People care about backwards compatibility. And the biggest customers are the big businesses with their own custom business-specific software. If they can't run their apps on newer WIndows releases, they'll stick with the old one and eventually switch over to ReactOS or Wine. For Microsoft, dumping backwards compatibility would be equivalent to giving market share to Linux etc. on a platter.
Unify development of drivers, yes; but there's a hell of a lot of hardware out there that manufacturers can't be bothered to continue to develop drivers for, but with 32-bit 2000/XP drivers that still kindof work on 32-bit Vista.
Is this really an issue? I mean, isn't XP Pro the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft made? 2007
Yes.
2002
What? Windows XP Pro is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Wasting system resources on a Fisher-price UI? No thanks! 2000 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
2000
Windows 2000? I think not -- it requires 64MB of RAM for god's sake; and recommends 128MB! Who has that much RAM? Bloated piece of crap. 98 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1996
Windows 98? I think not! It barely does more than Windows 95 did, but have you seen how much bigger the sysreqs are due to bloated crap like active desktop and IE4? No, 95 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1995
No, Windows 95 is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Can you believe it needs a 32-bit CPU? What applications need 32-bit, anyway? None! Bigger isn't always better, you know; and that's certainly true for 32bit/16bit. 3.11 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1992
Windows 3.11? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. What use is a GUI, anyway? I can do things faster at the command line. Give me MS-DOS 5 and-day.
1991
MS-DOS 5? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. COMMAND.COM is over 47kB, can you believe it? I long for the good old days of 2.0 and 3.0.
1983
MS-DOS 2/3? Bah. Who needs the bloat? Give me something lean and mean like CP/M any say.
1976
CP/M? A general purpose operating system? Who needs it? Everyone knows it's more efficient to have different machines to do different tasks. Do one thing and do it well, I say.
Ah; I see, sorry.
The only question would be is, does windows update do any kind of authentication that would prevent me impersonating Microsoft's site. This suggests yes.
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Besides, what's so bad about the default interface? The only really unusual thing is that it puts the tab bar above the address bar, but as I said, that's very easy to change.
Considering the sheer number of extensions Firefox needs to bring it up to Opera's default functionality, the chance of this happening quite quickly approaches 1.
I argued this further in a previous post.
To be fair, we didn't actually know what the technically correct answer was when conventional current was decided -- electricity was discovered way before electrons. They guessed, they had a 50/50 chance of getting it right, they got it wrong. That's not a problem we have in this situation.
"Let's just all agree to not use the actually technically correct usage" is never a good solution to anything.
Why so angry with Opera users? Did your parents force you to watch Wagner's complete ring cycle in a single sitting when you were three and it traumatized you against Opera for life, or something?
The only thing I can think of that might put someone off is the somewhat quirky default interface, but that's very easy to change, much easier than Firefox. In fact, that's what put me off Firefox -- the difficulty of customizability; unless you're willing to either manually manually edit
(...Sorry, didn't mean to go into rant mode there. The question stands.)
Why does slimming Firefox down necessarily mean removing features? Opera can do pretty much all of the things you quotes and much, much more besides (email client, bittorrent client, customizable to the extent that would need about 15 different FF extensions to emulate, etc.) -- and it still manages to be slimmer than Firefox -- a smaller download (4.7 vs 5.7MB), faster to start, more responsive, a smaller memory footprint, etc.
Features != bloat.
Even though Opera certainly has many, many more features built in by default than Firefox, it still manages to be a smaller download (4.7 vs 5.7MB), faster to start, more responsive, and a smaller memory footprint.
And by the time you've added enough extensions to bring Firefox up to Opera's default functionality, the differences have multiplied 10fold.
Excellent; so that leaves over 99.998% of the memory for everything else!
Ooops! I didn't see see GlobalEcho's reply before posting mine; s/he did the same thing before me.
Many other people have pointed out your mistakes-- using a line graph with a non-continuous x-axis (i.e. name of release), using a linear graph to plot something that should be expected to grow exponentially (think RAM equivalent of Moore's law; doubling every x years is exponential, not linear), etc. I've fixed most by taking your data and plotting the natural logarithm of recommended RAM against the release data:
P djJ0gOQ4r0MQ
u irementscb5.png
Google spreadsheets: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pLElDZW8Ea
PNG (for those who can't view Google Spreadsheets): http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/6696/memoryreq
As you can see, it's pretty much a straight line, exactly as you'd expect.
...to do something they should have done (but didn't) at one (any one) of the previous Windows releases: Shitcan the old code and start from scratch But they did do that, with Windows NT. NT 3.1 was written from the ground up, from scratch, as a completely 32-bit OS. Backwards compatibility with 16-bit apps was crap, but the architecture was good. And what happened? It took them over 8 years to persuade the market to switch over to it from the old architecture. They only acheived it in the end by devoting an entire Windows release (XP) to the task of retrofitting the NT kernel (i.e. Windows 2000) with a ton of emulation subsytems to let it run most Windows 9x/DOS apps. People care about backwards compatibility. And the biggest customers are the big businesses with their own custom business-specific software. If they can't run their apps on newer WIndows releases, they'll stick with the old one and eventually switch over to ReactOS or Wine. For Microsoft, dumping backwards compatibility would be equivalent to giving market share to Linux etc. on a platter.Unify development of drivers, yes; but there's a hell of a lot of hardware out there that manufacturers can't be bothered to continue to develop drivers for, but with 32-bit 2000/XP drivers that still kindof work on 32-bit Vista.
Yes.
2002
What? Windows XP Pro is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Wasting system resources on a Fisher-price UI? No thanks! 2000 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
2000
Windows 2000? I think not -- it requires 64MB of RAM for god's sake; and recommends 128MB! Who has that much RAM? Bloated piece of crap. 98 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1996
Windows 98? I think not! It barely does more than Windows 95 did, but have you seen how much bigger the sysreqs are due to bloated crap like active desktop and IE4? No, 95 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1995
No, Windows 95 is crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. Can you believe it needs a 32-bit CPU? What applications need 32-bit, anyway? None! Bigger isn't always better, you know; and that's certainly true for 32bit/16bit. 3.11 is the last reasonably respectible OS Microsoft has made.
1992
Windows 3.11? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. What use is a GUI, anyway? I can do things faster at the command line. Give me MS-DOS 5 and-day.
1991
MS-DOS 5? Crap, bloated, and has ridiculous hardware requirements. COMMAND.COM is over 47kB, can you believe it? I long for the good old days of 2.0 and 3.0.
1983
MS-DOS 2/3? Bah. Who needs the bloat? Give me something lean and mean like CP/M any say.
1976
CP/M? A general purpose operating system? Who needs it? Everyone knows it's more efficient to have different machines to do different tasks. Do one thing and do it well, I say.
etc., etc.
The only question would be is, does windows update do any kind of authentication that would prevent me impersonating Microsoft's site. This suggests yes.