Mozilla overhaul to throw out the kitchen sink

[Waccoon]

Who cares about memory footprints?  Why don't they take care of real design problems first?

The reason I dumped Mozilla and went back to IE is because Mozilla is the least responsive browser I've ever used.  Visit a page, and it has to download the whole thing before it refreshes the display.  At least with IE, you can read the top of the page while the rest is downloading.  A better download manager would be nice, too.

Mozilla has some strong points here and there, like the ability to display partially corrupt image files (instead of blocking them like IE), and, of course, pop-up supression, but on the whole it's not very well designed at all.

Sheesh.  Geeks.

[Waccoon]

Actually, at work I use Celeron 500 systems with 128 megs running WinNT, and IE seems responsive enough on those systems.  At home, I have a 2.6Ghz Athlon with half a gig of RAM, and I think Mozilla is too slow.  To each his own, I guess.

I think there are more important problems to fix in Mozilla before getting to memory issues.  Besides, it uses so much memory because the dev team wants to support SO MUCH stuff.  Most every Windoze user has a pretty hefty system these days, so naturally they just program the browser to suit most people's hardware.  It'd be nice if Mozilla was lighter, but if that was a priority it wouldn't be so big in the first place.  I doubt they'll ever fix that.

I'm not saying big memory footprints are a good thing.  I *AM* a 6Meg A1200 user, after all.   :-D

I'm using version 1.3 now.  It's faster than 1.1, but not by much.  Maybe there's just something screwy with my system.  You never know with Windows.

It'd be nice if I could run Mozilla and IE5.5 side-by-side on my 200Mhz Mac at work to see how they compare, but Mozilla doesn't run on MacOS 8.1 as far as I can tell.

"Geeks"?

I define a geek as someone who is way too concerned about the technology and not enough with the functionality or practicality.  You know, the kind of people who will spend five hours trying to download something from the Internet when they can instead buy it at a store for $20.  My dad is pure geek, and instead of parking his car at the back of the lot and walking 3 minutes to the mall entrance, he drives around for 20 minutes looking for a closer parking space.   ;-)

[Waccoon]

One thing to remember when comparing IE to other web browsers is that MS severely cheats with the amount of IE that is cached on start-up...

I'm aware of that, which is why I really wanted to see IE and Moilla running side-by-side on my Mac.  To me, cold starts mean nothing.  I'm talking about scrolling issues, button delays, screen refreshes...

My brand of cheating with Mozilla comes in with a ramdisk

HAHA!  I do the same thing with my Photoshop swap file.  Photoshop likes to swap everything out to disk no matter how small a file you're working on (like, a tiny button for your website).  Putting the primary swap file on a RAM disk helps a lot.  Irony sucks.

OE, for example. Where security bugs go to retire

Yes, but a mail client shouldn't be running ActiveX controls in the first place.  That's bad design, and has nothing to do with the technology itself.  How something works IS how well it works.

I have ActiveX controls set to "prompt" in IE.  It causes real headaches when visting media-rich websties, but it stops all scripts before they run.  I've heard of the dreaded script viruses, but I've never gotten one since I turn off ActiveX.  Since I CAN turn off ActiveX and scripting in OE, I feel no reason to put up with the unbearably slow performance of Mozilla Mail.  If they sharpen up the performance, I'd love to switch.  OE6 is starting to run into a lot of crashing problems on my machine when I repeatedly delete and create lines with the backspace and return keys.  And, of course, I can't downgrade to an older version, since Microsoft really doesn't want you to do that!

NS7's is 'out of control' from what I've seen.

Since when was any version of Netscape good?   ;-)  I used to be a Netscape 4 deevotee, but when IE5 was released, I realized Netscape was losing market share because it was crap, not because of anti-competitive behavior on Microsoft's part.

I don't advocate it as you'll see, I'm pretty critical of it.

Well, I'm pretty critical of everything.  It's not like I really LIKE Windows and IE.   ;-)

BTW, I wasn't joking about my dad's car parking habits.  He really does that!