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?'"
Just how old are these machines (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were to want a stripped down Firefox, it would probably be for embedded devices where resources are often quite limited.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:2, Interesting)
What would/could they lose in a lite Firefox; Transformiix, SVG? What for, it's js and flash consume more cpu time and RAM.
Lite-weight? I'd prefer to see them improve their cache so Fx doesn't eat up 600MB.
PC-Lite? Hell, I want that on MY desktop! (Score:1, Interesting)
The only plug-in I use is a JRE, and many mobile devices have that (I'd rather download PDFs, since I usually end up doing that anyway, and I HATE Flash, except for the Ducati Monster Configurator, which I downloaded for off-line use).
I do use "Bookmarks" (favorites, in IE-speak), but could do that nearly as easily from a text file in another desktop window, which would be much easier to manage.
Bookmarks (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox runs fine on that hardware (Score:1, Interesting)
However, using some extensions may slow it down noticeably. Eg with Firebug it takes a few seconds to open a new tab (yes, even if it's empty). NoScript adds another albeit smaller slowdown etc.
But the basic browser runs already fine. There is no need to strip features, which don't take much CPU anyways. Rendering a page creates a heavy usage load for 1-2 seconds, but thats it.
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Firefox and Opera were evaluated - and the latter won. It appeared Firefox was not only 'compatible' with IE and rendered all IE-only pages, it was bloated and clumsy like IE as well. The development team seems to have gotten hijacked by a few misguided elements, probably under influence from Microsoft. Firefox on Windows behaves differently to Firefox on Linux - but Opera stays the same.
The only plus for Firefox is the numerous plug-ins, but what we like to see is pluck-outs that would ensure no memory leaks and lesser footprint. Until those things happen, Firefox will be a product that never reached it's potential.
Ok I have some old 486's and up.... (Score:5, Interesting)
But I get the impression that what is referred to as old here is system produced 5 -7 years ago.
Hell I'm running off an overclocked to just over 500Mhz box right now using Ubuntu. Its my main internet system. It does just fine.
Having been screwed badly by the computer industry during the commodore fall and its thieving aftermath I haven't found a good enough reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest but rather wait for perfectly good hardware to be tossed out. I'll make smaller purchases in fixing or upgrading some tossed out systems but that's not very often. Getting to be just DVD R/W drives anymore. And that is so I can run live Linux CDs such as Dynebolic.
But this doesn't work for the older systems.
So to me old system fall in the category of 486's to Pentium I, and I have quite a few of those that will either make it into next years Decatur High free electronics recycling mine (yes, electronic based hardware has more mineral value in it than its weight in raw dirt based ore and such... And to think some places want to charge you to recycle) or I'll find an easy way to make them useful again which is the preferred method even with recyclers.
So if the software industry got back to lean and mean OSs and small but very usable internet applications and put together a package that could be test run via CD (or floppy/cd combo for those old system that just can't boot from CD) there could possible be an extension to the usable life of systems that otherwise make it to the landfill or recycling mine.
I'd been hoping that AROS would fit here but unless someone take on dev for old 486 systems, its not going to happen.
Anyone know of any such a package easy to test on old systems (live cd or floppy/cd bootable)?
Re:mozilla firefox ??? (Score:1, Interesting)
This whole article is a troll.
Firefox 1.0 was 4.7MB
The latest version is a 5.7MB download.
Opera is 4.7MB.
IE7 is 17MB.
Safari is a 7MB download.
Firefox is at the compact end of current web browsers. It has grown by 1MB in the past three years. To put that in perspective, Adobe Acrobat reader has grown from 8.7MB to 30.7 in the same period.
There's an agenda here, and it's not to promote the idea of a slim Firefox. Somebody wants to plant the meme that Firefox is bloated when it is clearly not. The whole thing stinks of a smear campaign from somebody's marketing department.
Re:PC-Lite? Hell, I want that on MY desktop! (Score:4, Interesting)
But yeah, he's trolling... The Flash comment proved that. There's nothing wrong with Flash itself, only how people use it. He then goes on to prove that at least 1 person did it well by his own standards, but he refuses to look at any other Flash. If we were talking about humans, this would commonly be called 'prejudice' and people would be up in arms. It's still prejudice (but without the human connotation), but this is Slashdot and tech-prejudice is expected here. (Call that flamebait if you want, but the lines here are clearly drawn and accepted.)
As for 'Firefox Lite'... My immediate thought was 'who the fsck would want a browser without bookmarks/favorites?' But then I remembered Del.icio.us and how much better it does the bookmarks, and that I never actually use them on my browser now, except for a single bar below my address bar. And that could be done away with using a good homepage. (Maybe modeled after Opera's Speed Dial.)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chasing after a declining marketshare is a poor business strategy. Windows 98 and ME boxes will be replaced as the years go on.
Current security bugs often require completely different patches to fix the security flaw. The code base that was used to develop Firefox 2, Gecko 1.8, became largely static in August of 2005. This means that security patches for Firefox 2 start taking significantly more developer time as code bases diverge. The Gecko 1.8 and 1.9 have already have significant differences in the code base different graphics rendering platform, text layout and html processing just to name a few.
Firefox 3 and Gecko 1.9 will not run on any version of Windows earlier than 2000. This means that the project he suggests would need to be build off the Gecko 1.8 code base. This code base is too old for new projects to be developed on it. The last security patch on the Gecko 1.8 code base will be about a year from now. This leaves any code using this open to any security issues discovered.
I like my Firefox just the way it is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay so it's not a few... but yet I never have these memory leaks. Whenever it grows in memory, it's because I have 20+ tabs open. I use it on quite a few P3s at the office, on lab boxes, however IE6 runs just as well on these boxes, and security is not so much of an issue. Those fall more under the ID 10 T errors.
So I don't understand the need for an even lighterweight version of Firefox? Are there REALLY that many sub P3 computers still out there, that are also being used as web boxes?
Re:Opposite effect? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been using Firefox as my main browser for at least 4 years now, but I only introduced it to my family about 1-2 years ago. NONE of them use tabs. No matter how many times I show them, they can't seem to remember to open new tabs. I don't think anyone but my brother even knows the browser history even exists, but he does use it when he needs to. Nobody but me has ever set a bookmark for anything in any browser on any computer in my family (except on accident). And the bookmarks that are there rarely get used. Everyone insists on just typing the address into the address bar.
It seems like the more options and tools they have, the less enjoyable the computing experience is for them...
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:3, Interesting)
With the 2.0 release, the requirements and resource use have become so huge that quite a few Firefox-users stay at 1.5 level, or use Seamonkey "barebones" (i.e. without the non-browser components installed).
An oft heard argument for the exceptionally high memory use is that only used memory is good memory, and that using all the free memory increases the user experience. This might have been true if Firefox had been the only app running on a system, but it seldom is. The operating system was already utilising the "unused" memory for file system caching, and Firefox' grab of that memory reduces the OS caching capabities, slowing other apps down, at the expense of Firefox. This does not count as a feature in my book.
Another oft heard argument is that you can tweak down the memory usage by various options in the about:config interface. Good luck talking my mother-in-law through that!
It's hard to speculate on why the bloat happened. One reason might be all the layers of virtualisation, which make it easier to extend the program, but inevitable causes "bloat". And part of it is, of course, due to the belief that using all the "free" memory on the system was a bright idea.
Firefox 2 is a great browser, but unfortunately it brings my old laptop to its knees. It's simply not an option, whereas Firefox 1.5 and Seamonkey 1.1 run much better (still quite bloated, though -- I miss the speed of "standalone" Netscape 4.08).
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean something like K-Meleon [sourceforge.net]? Please try it and see if you find it any faster -- I didn't.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:3, Interesting)
I now use Konqueror for the downloading and it never gives a problem.
Xubuntu, P4 500mHz, 386MB.
My P-3 550 with W2K and NS7.2 ran fine (Score:4, Interesting)
Seamonkey is a bit lighter and quicker than FF, it handles multiuser profiles a bit better than FF and most of the useful xpi extensions run on it.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:2, Interesting)
So sorry, the distinction you attempt to draw exists only in your head. This attempt to be disparaging to anything published on someone's personal blog is nothing more than high horsism, by a people who apparently want to be able to tell themselves that they are above blogging. Just because the majority of blogs are of a low quality does not mean that the medium itself is worthless. There's some good stuff being published in blogs.
Paul Graham? Blogger? Perhaps. But nobody in their right mind should call his work a "bunch of blog entries". That'd be like calling the writings of Dostoevsky a "bunch of stories". True? Technically, yes in both cases. Sensible? No, in both cases.