Mozilla overhaul to throw out the kitchen sink

[ne_one]

People, the browser application itself is practically irrelevant here -- it's the rendering engine that's critical. By componentizing the suite it definitely makes an Amiga port more realistic.

Everyone has their favourites, but right now none of these are available as alternatives. We desperately need this.

[ikir]

I don't understand :-?

[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.

[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.   ;-)

[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.

[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!

[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 :-)