Mozilla overhaul to throw out the kitchen sink

[mikeymike]

*Jaw drops*

/me checks the date, to make sure it's not April 1st...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Mozilla may be a bit clunky in places, but Phoenix tops the clunkiness scale, then invents a few new places of its own!  Premier league Clunky, Champions League of Clunky, and the World Cup of Clunkiness!



AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

They cannot be serious.   :-o

I just took a quick extra look at Phoenix just to re-familiarise why I stayed the hell away from it.  Oh yeah.  The bookmarks menu on the personal toolbar is exactly like IE's... BAD!  Menu appearance/disappearance is as clunky as hell, and the memory footprint is as bad or worse than Mozilla's!  I'm sorry, what was the point in Phoenix again?  Oh.  It starts a little bit faster.  And what's with the IE-like placing of stuff in the menus?  Who are the developers, high priests of IE advocacy?

If Phoenix is going to get better, they should have held off this decision until it hit at least 1.0 release... right now it is in no shape to replace Mozilla Navigator.

[mikeymike]

At the moment, I'm using Mozilla 1.3 for web and mailnews.  Because it is a bit slow when dealing with huge amounts of mail (I have large mail archives), I have Mozilla and my profile both in ramdisk.  This makes it very very fast :-)

Phoenix claims to be faster than Mozilla.  Ok, it normally has a slight edge on it when cold starting, but on my system there's no difference at all (both in ramdisk and their profiles).  Performance using both applications is nigh-on identical.

Phoenix claims to have a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla.  Who are they kidding?!?

Mozilla may be heavier generally, but I like where everything is and it is nice and snappy in general usage.  The menus in Phoenix are as clunky as hell and the bookmarks shortcut you can have on the personal toolbar is ripped straight out of IE.  And I don't appreciate the stupid positioning of stuff in the menus just to make it a bit more IE ish.  Since when are a programs preferences to be found in the 'Tools' menu?!?

If Mozilla is to be split up into smaller, faster, seperate apps, PORT THEM DIRECTLY!  I don't want to be the victim of what some little IE advocate thought would be a good idea at the time!

[mikeymike]

I've just found the nightly builds for Phoenix, I'll give it another chance :-)

[mikeymike]

@ Waccoon

Let me guess, you're a WinXP user with 1GB RAM?

You don't care about memory footprints? I really don't know what to say to that!!!

Of course getting rid of the major problems first is a good plan, and large memory footprints are down to debug libraries in memory as well, so the two are linked together, but the Phoenix team are claiming that CURRENTLY it has a smaller memory footprint than Mozilla, which is blatantly not true!

[Page loading issues?] When was the last time you tried Mozilla?  If it's pre 1.2.1, you really ought to try it again, you'll notice a big difference.

The download manager in Mozilla isn't very good, true.  But I don't use it, so it doesn't affect me

Pop-up suppression works brilliantly in 1.3, again, give it a try.

"Geeks"?

[mikeymike]

@ ikir

you don't understand what? :-)

[mikeymike]

@ ne_one

It is important that AmigaOS4 gets a Gecko-based web browser for the sake of decent website readability/compatibility.  However look and feel is almost as important.

I doubt many AmigaOS4 users want a web browser that looks and runs exactly like IE on OS4.  I also however think that most AmigaOS4 users would find Mozilla directly ported to OS4 is a bit on the heavy side, and would want  something lighter.  Me personally, I would want a straight port of Mozilla to OS4.

[mikeymike]

@ Waccoon

I started using Mozilla over IE as my primary web browser when Moz 1.0 was released (I had been downloading and checking it out for a long time before that though).  It did bother me that it takes a while to cold start, but I justified that over IE because I use Moz's more powerful features, and things are generally better placed in Moz to my liking.

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 and generally used all the time in any post-Active Desktop operating systems.  The HTML rendering engine, probably the JS/Java engines are all in memory all the time.  Of course, you're saying that "you're a user, you want benefits not excuses", so if IE works for you, fair enough.

My brand of cheating with Mozilla comes in with a ramdisk, and installing Mozilla and my Mozilla profile into that :-)  It flies.  Same startup time as IE, on cold start, and no disk I/O issues with Mozilla Mail (something I have a major problem with if I wasn't using a ramdisk... I have a lot of old mail I keep, Moz Mail isn't good when it has to actually do things with large amounts of mail).

In case anyone is interesting in the ramdisk software, it's $35 from Cenatek software (www.cenatek.com), works on any version of Windows, isn't bloatware, and is reliable, fast and stable.  No, I don't work for Cenatek :-)

Btw, I'm more concerned with "how well something works" than "how it works", but if a piece of software performs a task reasonably, but how it goes about it is badly, I'm likely to think worse of it.  OE, for example.  Where security bugs go to retire  :-)

Mozilla's memory footprint - it is large, but not 'out of control'.  NS7's is 'out of control' from what I've seen.  One minute it can steam along quite happily on 11MB (far less than Mozilla on average), then the next minute it's over 50MB (way above Mozilla on average)... very odd.  IE has a bit of a habit when it gets unhappy about something to soak memory as well, and because of its integration into Windows, worries me that it's going to hold on to that memory after the process has exited anyway, regardless of what Task Manager says (Win2k and resource usage is funny, you can have six different utilities including taskmgr tell you entirely different stories about what's going on).

If anyone is interested, I've written quite a bit about my take on Mozilla on my website (www.legolas.com), I don't advocate it as you'll see, I'm pretty critical of it.

[mikeymike]

@ Waccoon

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...

I've only noticed button delays sometimes on interfaces like the preferences menu... odd.    Scrolling issues, here's where things get funny.  I've been using a Logitech trackball for years, which means using Logitech mouse drivers to use all the mouse buttons.  Hence no mouse wheel.  I had untold problems with Win2k and mouse scrolling for ages, and in the end I've hacked up my own custom settings to control scrolling, and Mozilla, while on most systems is a bit on the jerky side is the only application that responds particularly well to the customisations I've made :-)

(IE/OE) OE's problems are more than that - bad control of security settings, no option to say "plain text only" when viewing email, and just and ignore HTML mails (the start of the iceberg that has "email-based vulnerabilities" written on it).  It would help if OE used its own, very light HTML rendering engine, Eudora does that, which has the effect of not victimising the user with awful-looking complex HTML emails and also no chance of a vulnerability getting through.

With IE, you shouldn't *have to* click "no activex/scripting please" to get a 'safe browsing experience'.  Plus the prompts to install new software like Flash really pisses me off.  IE has but one task on my system: Windows Update, and even then I only use it to get the list of updates, that I'll then use Mozilla to read up on, read the EULAs carefully to ensure that MS aren't trying to get root privs on my PC (WMP patches are a favourite for that, followed by recent Windows service packs), and download them manually if I want them.

(Netscape being crap) NS4 was ok versus IE4.  At the time it was a bit slow.  NS's problem after that was that it simply didn't improve in most of the important factors, and IE did, significantly.  And MS leveraging their monopoly does make a big difference, particularly among those who don't look further than their own nose for a decent piece of software (which must 90% of the world's online population, 5% use IE out of choice, and 5% use something else :-))

(being critical) Maybe if more people were openly (and had half a brain) critical of Windows, MS might *improve* it a bit, rather than making stupid Disney UIs.  Or at least stop trying to get root privs on people's PCs through dodgy EULAs.

(car parking habits) My dad does the same, though he does have an excuse, so it's not behaviour I've noted particularly :-)