Firefox Lite And Old PCs Could Crush IE 434
Eatfrank writes "A recent CNet article suggests that Mozilla should pipe a lite version of Firefox into older PCs to further attack IE's dominance: 'Firefox supporters, take note. A bare-bones Firefox will get the browser into more houses, increasing the Fox's market share and keeps it in novice users' eyes for when they get a new PC ... a truly great super-lightweight browser would have the security of Firefox, without the add-ons, without the tabs, yes, even without favourites, history lists and customisability. The Firefox name is synonymous with security and Web-browsing vigilance. Why not give this to the processing lightweights of the PC world?'"
How much extra work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Opposite effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox without favourites? Without history? Let's just get this straight - you want people to switch to a browser which has less functionality than the one they are currently using? Again - a browser without favourites? How is this going to give people a positive experience of Firefox and make them want to do anything but work out how to uninstall it...?
Most braindead idea I have heard all week.
And, as someone else has already pointed out, originally, Firefox was supposed to be the lite version of the oh-so-slow-and-bloated Mozilla Suite. Would that they had stayed true to their original intentions...
iqu
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole idea is to create a new FF version that does the things that Opera or K-Meleon do but still carries the branding of Firefox. That name has a certain degree of reconizability and a lite version would be useful.
webkit (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not Lynx? (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me: "without the tabs" and "Firefox ... is synonymous with security"? For me Firefox is also - and actually formost - synonym with tabbed browsing.
My own windows box has IE 7 for the sake of those few sites that really need IE (Windows Update, mainly). Of course I use Mozilla (albeit Seamonkey, not Firefox) for all other browsing on Linux as well as Windows. But recently I had the misfortune of having to intensively use IE 6 for two months "at work". The one thing that I hated most was the absense of tabs, not the lesser security.
Don't get me wrong, the security argument is very valid. But the target audience is going to be much more convinced by the tabs. If not, I suggest putting Lynx on the machines. It's even more leightweight, and it even has more security advantages, since no hacker targets it (anymore) and since features that aren't there can't be abused. Now really...
It's the cult (Score:1, Insightful)
What we're seeing is a cult fanboy following. Firefox is gaining users, not because it's That Good A Browser, but because it has a large cult following of nerdy fanboys who do shit like make "crop circles" and make the media, place large "Get Firefox" banners all around and generally think of Firefox as the new god.
It is sad - and I mean really, REALLY sad - to see tons of those fanboys not even know how their browser is called. Thus they call it FireFox, with two capital "F" letters... But that doesn't stop them from spewing garbage about how darling invented tabs and is the bestest thing evar and everyone running something else than Firefox is a clueless n00b and an idiot.
There's also the issue of extensions. "Install extensions, they're what makes Firefox great!", followed by "Well, it's your fault that the browser is using 500 MB of RAM, you shouldn't have used (those) extensions."
Firefox doesn't even come with an ad blocker. It needs an extension to do that. Some other browsers *do* come with ad blockers, but then they are either convicted of being copycats (I think Opera had a crude content blocking method back in 2001), or auto-updating block lists, like, totally pwn everything else... Whereas I haven't updated any of my blocking lists for my browser(s) of choice since about three years ago, and I maybe see one ad every three months.
It took years to get really simple things in Firefox, like tab reordering and session saving in case of a crash (I've had people convince me that neither of those things are necessary, but when they appeared, they were oh-so-cool!).
Now we are slowly seeing cries for help; cries for a slimmer browser, one that would help Firefox "destroy the competition", one that would run faster and use less resources than other browsers.
An attempt has been made to create such a browser. It was called Phoenix. And it failed to do it at the start.
Re:Opposite effect? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PC-Lite? Hell, I want that on MY desktop! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:GNOME (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just how old are these machines (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Opera? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lite version not necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Less Features than IE = Market Share (Score:2, Insightful)
There already is one , for windows at least (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:2, Insightful)
Correct, but this is expense is there with your new computer too.
Old recycled hardware + $280 of accumulated connection fees = $280
$280 PC + $280 of accumulated connection fees = $560
(for example)
$280 for one. Some (most?) families have more than one internet-enabled PC in their home. Why? Because they provide content on demand. The same way people have more than one TV in the house. Also, who's the say the current Firefox will even run that well on your hypothetical $280 machine? I use it on an AMD 2200+ with 768 MB of RAM (my primary PC) and it can be incredibly sluggish, and typically can only be open for less than 6 hours before I find it chewing through everything.
Re:Lite version not necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
PS The first machine I ever browsed the net with was a 486SX 20Mhz with 6mb of RAM and an 80mb hard drive. Had Windows 3.1 and some really early versions of Netscape and Eudora. It browsed the web and checked email just fine back then, and I'm sure with a little updated software such machines are still perfectly capable of being useful to some people
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because machines are faster and have more RAM shouldn't give programmers a blank check to write programs that hog memory and CPU cycles. People should write software to take advantage of that extra performance, not penalize those who don't have it.
If we write inefficient and, honestly, dumb software, on the assumption that hardware will compensate for our bad choices, how is the new hardware an improvement at all? It's like you're purchasing upgrades every year to keep up with the increasing laziness of bad programmers.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, any sane person should assume the same three things about any news source. But the big difference between a real article and a blog entry article is that with a genuine article we can assume that the writer at least writes well enough to earn at least a partial living from writing, and someone is accountable if the article is a complete fabrication which gives it more credence.
So sorry, but calling an entry you wrote on your own blog an 'article' is like calling someone using Lulu [lulu.com] a published author. Technically true, but realistically not.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at his other suggestions. Removing tabs would probably result in people opening fewer pages at a time, but people are already free to ignore tabs if they don't want to use them. There is no point in removing the functionality. (In fact, I would be willing to bet that one window with three tabs uses less memory than three windows). The same goes for extensions; people are free to not install any and removing the functionality would likely not further reduce the memory footprint.
Yup, basically, this guy has no idea what causes memory usage in Firefox. I'm glad that the Mozilla team will undoubtedly ignore his misguided advice. Here's a hint: the main driver of Firefox memory and CPU use is web pages. Parsing, rendering, and running scripts. Web pages are huge nowadays, with tons of scripting, huge images, and even videos, and all that stuff has to be kept in memory while you have a page open. If you want to make Firefox more efficient, don't look at the UI. Look at Gecko. Unfortunately, this means you have to be a programmer to make informed comments about Firefox's memory use.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:3, Insightful)
If there was software that the only thing I could hold against it was that it is slow (CPU intensive) and bloated (memory intensive) yet in every other way stable, powerful, user-friendly and cheap, I'd be happy. Unfortunately slow usually means it's poorly designed and buggy as well, and bloated usually means it does ten things half-assed instead of doing one thing well. Unless you're in a particularly constrained environment, just make sure you do simple things like use the best algorithm, put heavy work outside loops etc. and don't bother trying to optimize unless you really really need it.