weirdami wrote:
I started using Mozilla Firefox on a Pentium (one) windows box with 48 megs RAM and <2GB total HD space (about 150 MB left on each of the two HD's). I've gone and reduced the colors to 256 in hopes of gaining some system resources and the monitor is 640x480 only. Firefox takes like 30 seconds to load, which is bad, but my post is inspired by a good thing thats kinda bad.
Only 30 seconds? *Memories of trying to run Mozilla 0.9 on a DX4-100.*
I'd not be so sure that 256 color setting is saving you anything. It means 1. a dithering routine has to run somewhere, and 2. PC memory isn't unified like that... I really doubt however Moz/FireFox use libjpeg, for instance, gives any thought to the output requirements, throwing away insignificant bits, etc, though I could always be wrong.
...
Firefox does take forever to load, but so does everything else on the computer, so really, I bet it loads much faster on the new fancy super GHz machines. IE loads fast, though, but it has the added, cheating advantage of being already technically loaded when you boot windows. I guess I'll go with IE :-(, but only because I'm tired of waiting forever for things to load.... and maybe because I want a stupidprogram so my mistakes can be seen easier. :-D
If you want something *really* lightweight to keep around, "Links" is pretty okay. Goofy interface, but it's standards compliant, and I occasionally use it for some pages with Javascript bugs in my old version of Moz! (I *thiiink* the graphical build of Links is available for Win32, anyway.) Dillo's also in the "1MB" browser category, but that might be *NIX-only. ... And Opera, for all the whining, is reasonable, but the problem is that it's roughly the heft of "old Netscape," and even "old Netscape" would crawl on vintage hardware. (My opinion is, for the most part, anything that Opera won't fall down on will also render in something as 'lightweight' as Links if you can live without Flash, so...)
