On using Mozilla instead of Firefox (was: Re: Disappearing text in Mozilla)

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Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 19:13:30 -0300
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

Hi, and I see that I am starting a (potential) flamewear, but this is
something that I feel that must be (rationally) discussed and addressed.

On Jul 18 2005, Leonid Grinberg wrote:
> I do not have this problem. In any case, I suggest you use Firefox as
> opposed to the old mozilla.

Well, calling it "old mozilla" is ignoring some facts, in my humble
opinion.

When I first used Mozilla in the Mxx milestones era, I thought that it was
way too heavy for my own computer, compared to, at the time, Opera.

I wouldn't like to use it as my default browser and even survived the ads
of Opera (which never really annoyed me, actually) just for the sake of
being able to use a browser that would not make my computer crawl.

As I perceive both in mailing lists and in sites like Slashdot, it seems
that people in the US or Europe are much more frequently upgrading their
computers than people in other parts of the world can (which is my case).
The fastest computer that I had access to recently had a Duron 600MHz and
now I just got a "new" (used) processor that is a Duron 1100MHz. Quite an
upgrade, but still not as much as people changing the whole system at a
time.

Anyway, back to Mozilla, at that time, the suite was slower than the
alternatives and I just wished that it did one thing and did it right, in
the good old Unix fashion.

One year ago (more, perhaps), with the same computer (modulo processor), I
decided to use only Free Software and was excited with Firefox (which was
obviously not even named this, as most can recall).

Excited with the promise that it would "shrink" in size in comparison to
the suite/Seamonkey (which was one of the main arguments that they were
using in the Phoenix 0.4 or so days), I started to use it as my main
browser and also advocating its use for fellow people and to my students.

And then came Thunderbird. I also tried it, but was a bit puzzled at first
to see that it was a bigger download than Firefox. I thought "well, they
may reduce the size of it in the future".

But now, here we stand, with Thunderbird and Firefox being two excellent
pieces of software (and also the suite) and with Firefox being the primary
focus of the Mozilla project, but something strange is easily noticed:
their size for Windows is about the half of the size for Linux.

Point 1 here: perhaps some components between Firefox and Thunderbird could
be shared so that the sum of their binary sizes would be approximately the
same as that of the suite.

Furthermore, once loaded, Firefox uses about the same amount of virtual
memory (in my, admittedly, non-scientific tests) as the suite, after
browsing some pages. And that's not even counting having Thunderbird
launched, which uses a bit more memory (as expected).

Point 2 here: Here I think that some components/libraries being shared
between Firefox and Thunderbird would decrease the amount of memory needed
by them (and since shared libraries under Unix systems are put in read-only
pages, they can be actually used among multiple software, but only if the
software actually declares this to the library loader).

For saving space, I actually came back to using the suite rather than
Firefox and Thunderbird.

Point 3 here: Another thing that is slightly disturbing is that, under the
very same hardware, running Firefox under Windows 2k and Debian to visit
www.macslash.org one notices a dramatic slower scroll speed of that site.
Something must clearly be different between the "same application" to have
this behaviour (hint: you'll likely to be annoyed at this if you have a
slower computer).

So, if anybody could help with further observations, I would love to know
how your experiences relate to mine.

Just my 2 cents, Rogério.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/
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• Previous message: Jim Ottaway: "Re: default info browser"
• In reply to: Leonid Grinberg: "Re: Disappearing text in Mozilla"
• Next in thread: Adam Hardy: "Re: On using Mozilla instead of Firefox"
• Reply: Adam Hardy: "Re: On using Mozilla instead of Firefox"
• Reply: Jochen Schulz: "Re: On using Mozilla instead of Firefox (was: Re: Disappearing text in Mozilla)"
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