Re: Web browsers for Linux (was: Re: Netscape Bus Error)
On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 05:19:29PM -0300, Rogerio Brito wrote:
> Interestingly enough, the most common machines nowadays in my country
> seem to be Celeron or K6-2 machines with 32MB of RAM. This makes
> surfing the web with Linux almost a nightmare (even if you turn on
> UDMA/66 so that swapping is 2 or 3 times faster).
I understand that this is a money issue, but 64MB of RAM is considered
standard these days, and that requirement is unlikely to shrink. Buying
32MB of RAM when your other hardware is K6-2 and UDMA/66 harddrive
doesn't make much sense IMHO.
> I recognize that not everybody should be developing for embedded
> systems, but expecting people to change their computers so that they
> can run the newer software is an absurd.
While I partly agree with this I also think that if you expect to be
able to run the latest sofware you will have to expect to sometimes also
upgrade your hardware. If a person can't do that he's going to have to
stick to what he's using now.
> I will get in the next month a new Athlon with 128MB and a good
> motherboard. I hope that Mozilla runs on my new machine. :-)
I'm gonna buy myself an Althlon soon too, I just want to wait a little
longer so that USB v2 gets supported on motherboards. Bluetooth would be
nice too, but that would be too long of a wait:-)
> Well, I also think that Netscape 4.x is slow. But it is not as slow as
> Mozilla (and it is acceptably stable here on my machine).
But the problem with Netscape 4.x isn't just that it's buggy beyond
words, it also has really poor standards compliance.
> Well, optimizing has its limits. I don't hold that much of a faith
> until I see the size of the program decrease a lot.
The source is out there, you can always jump in and help fix it.
> Ok. I'll try one of the nightly builds and then I'll post my analisys
> here, as soon as I have some time.
Great, I'm looking forward to hearing your experience with it. Let me
also know what kernel you're doing your tests on, the VM can have quiet
a big impact on these things.
> So, if you have other applications using those libraries, then the
> increase in memory occupation won't be as noticeable as if you
> increase the size of your binary (which will only be shared by
> different instances of your program and not by other programs as
> well).
Yes, that's obviously the point with gnome and similair projects, but if
you don't normally use gnome, which isn't very likely if we are talking
about a low-end system, you don't gain much from this.
> I'm not complaining about the slowness of the project. I'm just
> fearing that it may not be as successful as it could be.
Just remember that you can always step in and give those guys some help.
> Ok. Let's wait a little bit more about it. And hope it gets
> smaller. :-)
Mozilla 1.0 will bring peace to earth, I just know it:-)
--
// André
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