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?'"
They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Informative)
If my memory serves me well, it was going to be called "Firefox".
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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 we
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Welcome to Slashdot Mr. Gates!
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I don't care who you are, $280 is hardly "made of money" status.
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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
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I now use Konqueror for the downloading and it never gives a problem.
Xubuntu, P4 500mHz, 386MB.
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Obviously a P3 500mHz.
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So let them use lynx or links, wget and curl if they're that impatient. The can surf the web, download their pr0n, etc., all without the overhead of a gui.
You can't have everything. There was a time when 500 mhz machines were considered blindingly fast ... and they're still fast enough for firefox if you're not viewing pages with a ton of flash, etc. Stick adblock plus, remove the flash and pdf plugins, and watch firefox run a lot fastr ...
Oh, they want flash and pdf, etc? Well, then they need a better
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.
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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 someon
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The smallest hard drive you can find if you stolled into a best buy is like a 160 GB so what's the point.
Not so. Cheap laptops are still down at 40Gb (http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/store/pcw_page.j sp?BV_SessionID=@@@@1308259703.1185113161@@@@&BV_E ngineID=ccgfaddlidfjlglcflgceggdhhmdgmh.0&page=Pro duct&fm=null&sm=null&tm=null&sku=941725&category_o id=-27751 [pcworld.co.uk] -- not what I'd buy or where I'd buy it, but presumably somebody does). And as others have pointed out, even if you have the disk space, it won't be popular if it crawls on the low-end/old hardware.
Re:They've had this idea before... (Score:4, Informative)
"160go hard drive don't work under some old computers (PII, 1st or 2nd generation of celeron with old bios)."
Stick the drive in a newer linux box, and make a small boot partition (/dev/hda1) that is small enough for the current bios (I've stuck 160 gig hard drives in machines that won't see beyond 8 gigs with this trick), so it works. Make /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, etc in your preferred layout. Format each as ext3, reiserfs, fat32, whatevr your poison. This works for win9x, winnt, as well as linux.
Move the drive to the old box, boot off the cd-rom, install on the only visible partition (the small one).
Reboot, and at the end of the boot process, your other partitions are visible. On wn9x systems, your other partitions are limited to 32 gig each, so make sure you do under that. On winnt systems, you're limited to 128gig (yes, I know, its supposed to be 256 gig, but don't do it ... you might even want to stay below the 32 gig limit and stick with vfat, just to be safe), on linux systems, you're limited to ... whatever your heart desires.
Note: if you're using fat32 and are foolish enough to go over the 32 gig limit, you WILL be sorry. It will appear to format, and it will even appear to hold, say, 128 gig. However, once you try to write past the first 32 gig, it will over-write from the beginning of the partition, erasing data ... so if you're doing this with a windows box, your absolute safest bet is:
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Actually, it was called Phoenix.
</splitting hairs>
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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.
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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 hig
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When you run a base install of both Firefox and Opera (you can't get a good reading with IE7 for many reasons), Firefox is actually lighter, until you start doing things. After that, Firefox just keeps using more and more memory until I have to close it.
This is why I don't use Firefox. Of course YMMV.
Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
"Nate is CNET.co.uk's expert on digital music and portable media"
Expert? He hasn't even figured out that the Opera browser even runs on mobile phones, and using the same engine as the desktop version...
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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.
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.
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Firefox on Windows behaves differently to Firefox on Linux - but Opera stays the same.
Interesting comment. This is exactly why I stopped using Opera when I got a Mac. It behaved exactly the same way as Opera on Windows, right down to the behaviour when you click or double-click on text in a text field, and completely ignored the platform UI guidelines (Safari on Windows does the same). It's very strange, since the version of Opera on my Nokia 770 complies exactly with the platform's UI guidelines (I didn't even realise it was Opera at first), and is a joy to use (unless I go to Google Ma
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If you're running XP with only 256MB I think you have a bigger problem.
When I joined the IT department at my current job a year ago we had dozens of machines running XP with 256 or even 128. I've gotten most of them to 512, but there's still a few left with 256. It's hard when you have a lot of machines and a penny-pinching CFO who doesn't have to use the crap machines to get them upgrade.
If there was a 'Firefox Life' I'd love to install it on all the computers. Even though it wouldn't fix all the problems, it would be something. And no, Opera really isn't an option be
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Re:Opera? (Score:4, Informative)
When I sat magic number, I mean the point where more memory doesn't make a difference on a default install. I have always encouraged people to raise their ram to at least this number and on more then one occasion have heard reports of "it acts like a new computer".
If you are using just 256 of ram, you probably won't know what your computer could do so you don't see it as a slow down. However, When Someone who does have enough memory, even if it is the same processor, uses the same computer, they will think it is slow. If your ever using XP with less then 512 memory, try begging, barrowing or whatever you have to do to jump it up to at least 512 and you will see the difference. You will probably wonder why you ever had less. And yes, this does effect just using it to write letters, surf the interweb, and check email. You don't need to be doing anything fancy to see the benefits.
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When they do this "lite" they better give it to me too, since on my 3 GHz machine, Firefox is the worst effin performer out of all other browsers use and test on (Safari, IE, Opera).
And consider Firefox is already *THE* "lite browser" effort by Mozilla.
I've heard people tell me "see how every
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: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.
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It certainly does. I recognize Firefox as having nearly as many security issues as IE. Opera is way better in the security area.
Firefox Starter Edition! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, Opera 9.2x is noticeably slow on yesteryear's computers, like my brother's Pentium-something-500MHz-or-so running Debian. (I just installed it for him, and expect complaints when he discoveres this.) I believe this performance drop started after the Opera 7 and/or 8 series.
But I find Firefox is even slower. I hate t
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Oh yeah, and this [howtocreate.co.uk] shows Opera 9 to be faster than Opera 6 at most things. The things Opera 6 is faster at, it's only marginally faster than Opera 9. The things Opera 9 is faster at, it absolutely kills Opera
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Just about every speed benchmark for graphical browsers will have Opera at the top.
Install both, clear any disk caches if you've got one or both installed already and then browse a few pages to see for yourself. Then, close both down, open up those pages again, do some refreshes, navigate forward and backward through a site a few times and then tell us which is faster.
The answer is going to be Opera.
Sorry if this doesn't fit into your "Firefox must be faster" view of the world b
How much extra work? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Re:Opposite effect? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it's called a default homepage. You build a local index.html that includes the links you want (you call them Favorites, but we in the non-Windows world call them Bookmarks) and load that as your default homepage in FF-Slim.
This is not an issue at all. History might be a problem, but you can always use 'about:cache' or 'about:history' to derive that.
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It's the non-IE world that calls them bookmarks, not the non-Windows world...
History might be a problem, but you can always use 'about:cache' or 'about:history' to derive that.
Do you seriously think any non-geek is going to be happy with that? Or with creating a local index.html file for that matter...
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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
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webkit (Score:3, Insightful)
old machines (Score:2)
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...
Re:Why not Lynx? (Score:5, Funny)
Bookmarks (Score:4, Interesting)
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You've never used a lightweight browser. Try something like Dillo. Pages which take seconds to load in Firefox/IE/Opera, render before you lift your finger off the mouse button, or enter key. Admittedly, it lacks many features, but disable them in other browsers, and the effect is the same.
Slow rendering of "content" is entirely the fault of a poor performing browser, or, perhaps
Hmm, (Score:2, Insightful)
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)?
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From the fine article:
My guess is the majority of home user systems out there fall into that category
And that would be called minimo? (Score:2)
Mod Parent Informative! (Score:2)
Semi-OT: OLPC, Firefox and memory (Score:2)
As for this story, I doubt that bookmarks, history and those kinds of features are the ones making Firefox run slow. It probably has more to do with the architecture itself.
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Firefox is already fast (Score:2)
At about 5 megs, size wise Firefox is quite small to, compared to modern apps that often come on multiple CDs or DVDs bundled with gigs of junk.
Firefox does have a few performance issues. Try loading a page with a dropdown that has 100,000 or so items. Firefox will sit ther
Lite version not necessary (Score:3, Insightful)
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Get Firefox installed by OEM vendors (Score:2)
Depoyment.... (Score:2)
If people are on older PCs, and they haven't upgraded to IE7 through automatic updates, what are the chances that they are going to be downloading a lite version of Firefox and installing it?? Effectively, zero.
So could "Firefox Lite And Old PCs Could Crush IE"? Nope.
Less Features than IE = Market Share (Score:2, Insightful)
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 IE
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I've NEVER had the huge memory leaks everyone reports... biggest it has ever grown 98MB,
Most people consider that to be inefficient use of resources - especially on a notebook with 512MB Ram. While Firefox alone doesn't cause problems, I usually need to run it alongside another application (e.g. MSVC).
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.
For quite a long time under Win98/ME, I've been able to open enough Netscape or Mozilla windows to exceed the maximum number of GDI handles with other applications not encountering performance issues right up until the handles were exhausted. Unless I had moderator access to Slashdot (those
There already is one , for windows at least (Score:3, Insightful)
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That being said, it is almost too stripped down and I've switched to using Opera on the office computer (actually Ive switched to not using the office computer whenever poss
What Firefox probably needs (Score:2)
So my thoughts to whoever may be in charge of directing Firefox development, it's time to freeze the code addit
Tabs heavy? I'd suggest the opposite... (Score:3, Informative)
Flash and Javascript make the web slow (Score:2)
Living in Grandma's basement since 1995 (Score:2)
Fun with numbers: W3Schools shows Vista with a 3.0% share in June. Up from 0% in January 2007. Linux at 3.4%. Up 0.4% from January 2004. OS Platform Statistics [w3schools.com]
It is worth taking a look at W3Schools Display Statistics [w3schools.com]
While surfing the content-rich web - the media-rich web - in 2007 is fundamentally a middle-class experience, the demands of the brows
And by "pipe"... (Score:2)
"Pipe" not mentioned in the original article, FWIW.
Frankly, the article is useless... (Score:2)
The author seems to live in a "fanboi la-la land" world where there are only two web browsers, Firefox and MSIE, and his whole article is based upon that ignorance of alternatives.
There are, as others have pointed out, smaller, faster browsers than Firefox. Opera consistently beats all its rivals in speed tests, on older as well as newer hardware.
I appreciate that everybody has their personal preferences but the author is clearly blind if he can't see the alternatives availab
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.
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Getting rid of bookmarks,add-ons,tabs,history lists and customisability will not make firefox smaller.
The real problem is that gecko is a huge beast and XUL is resource intensive. But this too is difficult to solve. A native graphical toolkit could be used instead of XUL but solve the beast of gecko is more difficult. Gecko is the attempt at a solution for the broken nature of the web.
Browsering the web is amazingly resource intensive. I remember brow
Re:mozilla firefox ??? (Score:5, Informative)
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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.)
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NOT prejudice, experience. I want INFORMATION from the web. Flash add-ons do not provide more information, just eye-candy (like the Monster Configurator, which is a toy, oh, and I like the "bubble wrap" Flash
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Just curious, how is having a history search available through the address bar immensely useful?
What I do is to make extensive use of keywords for bookmarks. Thus, typing 'slash' takes me to http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] typing 'g' followed by a search string performs a Google search on that string, 'news' takes me to h [google.com]
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I have yet to find the "config" item that will absolutely prevent Firefox or Seamonkey from using tabs, which I despise...and I HATE Flash...
And stay off my lawn!!!
Punks. ;)
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Opera for Palm? You mean Opera Mini? That's something completely different. Opera Mini is just a thin client. You are comparing apples and oranges.
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-Lasse