Hi, and I see that I am starting a (potential) flamewear, but this is something that I feel that must be (rationally) discussed and addressed.
On Jul 18 2005, Leonid Grinberg wrote: > I do not have this problem. In any case, I suggest you use Firefox as > opposed to the old mozilla. Well, calling it "old mozilla" is ignoring some facts, in my humble opinion. When I first used Mozilla in the Mxx milestones era, I thought that it was way too heavy for my own computer, compared to, at the time, Opera. I wouldn't like to use it as my default browser and even survived the ads of Opera (which never really annoyed me, actually) just for the sake of being able to use a browser that would not make my computer crawl. As I perceive both in mailing lists and in sites like Slashdot, it seems that people in the US or Europe are much more frequently upgrading their computers than people in other parts of the world can (which is my case). The fastest computer that I had access to recently had a Duron 600MHz and now I just got a "new" (used) processor that is a Duron 1100MHz. Quite an upgrade, but still not as much as people changing the whole system at a time. Anyway, back to Mozilla, at that time, the suite was slower than the alternatives and I just wished that it did one thing and did it right, in the good old Unix fashion. One year ago (more, perhaps), with the same computer (modulo processor), I decided to use only Free Software and was excited with Firefox (which was obviously not even named this, as most can recall). Excited with the promise that it would "shrink" in size in comparison to the suite/Seamonkey (which was one of the main arguments that they were using in the Phoenix 0.4 or so days), I started to use it as my main browser and also advocating its use for fellow people and to my students. And then came Thunderbird. I also tried it, but was a bit puzzled at first to see that it was a bigger download than Firefox. I thought "well, they may reduce the size of it in the future". But now, here we stand, with Thunderbird and Firefox being two excellent pieces of software (and also the suite) and with Firefox being the primary focus of the Mozilla project, but something strange is easily noticed: their size for Windows is about the half of the size for Linux. Point 1 here: perhaps some components between Firefox and Thunderbird could be shared so that the sum of their binary sizes would be approximately the same as that of the suite. Furthermore, once loaded, Firefox uses about the same amount of virtual memory (in my, admittedly, non-scientific tests) as the suite, after browsing some pages. And that's not even counting having Thunderbird launched, which uses a bit more memory (as expected). Point 2 here: Here I think that some components/libraries being shared between Firefox and Thunderbird would decrease the amount of memory needed by them (and since shared libraries under Unix systems are put in read-only pages, they can be actually used among multiple software, but only if the software actually declares this to the library loader). For saving space, I actually came back to using the suite rather than Firefox and Thunderbird. Point 3 here: Another thing that is slightly disturbing is that, under the very same hardware, running Firefox under Windows 2k and Debian to visit www.macslash.org one notices a dramatic slower scroll speed of that site. Something must clearly be different between the "same application" to have this behaviour (hint: you'll likely to be annoyed at this if you have a slower computer). So, if anybody could help with further observations, I would love to know how your experiences relate to mine. Just my 2 cents, Rogério. -- Rogério Brito : [EMAIL PROTECTED] : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de Homepage on freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
