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Re: Straw poll: What browser do you use?



On Tue, 7 Sep 2010, B. Alexander wrote:

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 09:16:26 -0400
From: B. Alexander <storm16@gmail.com>
To: Debian-user List <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Subject: Straw poll: What browser do you use?
Resent-Date: Tue,  7 Sep 2010 13:16:42 +0000 (UTC)
Resent-From: debian-user@lists.debian.org

I'm just wondering, since firefox/iceweasel seems to be getting unusable. I
have a 2.2GHz C2D box with an nvidia card at home, and a 3.0GHz C2D with a
(lame) ATI card at work. I find that firefox (or xulrunner-stub) have memory
leaks, and after a couple of days, it eats up a significant amount (10-30%)
of memory. The work box has 3GB and the home box has 4GB. It also eats up a
significant amount of CPU.

This morning, after idling all weekend, iceweasel on my work system was
chewing up between 70 and 100% of my cpus, and scrolling pages were
hesitating for several seconds.

So what do others use?
--b


Depending on what I want to do, I use Iceape or Iceweasel or konqueror or Opera. I also, sometimes, use epiphany. I had used a gnome browser, before Debian 5, but it appears to have disappeared with Debian 5, and I do not remember what it was named. I used to use Star Office 5.2, until Sun took it over and decided to destroy the functionality of Star Office.

However, opera appears to have gone wonky, with the interface having become not user-friendly, and it appears to be unsupported, as no means for feedback about the deteriorations, appears to exist. But, the earlier version that I use, appears to be more secure and stable than the other browsers that I use.

Iceape can be convenient, especially beinfg a suite, so it is easy to click on a mailto link, and open up the integrated email composer. But, iceape appears to be devoid of memory management, and it appears to have a viral use for memory, progressively increasing memory usage if the browser is left open, and it does not free up the memory that it has been using, when it is closed in an orderly manner (that is, on the odd occasion that it is deliberately closed, rather than the all too frequent crashes). Also, iceape does not have the facility for saving sessions, either deliberately, or, when the application crashes.

Iceweasel saves sessions when it crashes, but it does not have the option of saving the last session and opening a new, separate session, so, when the application crashes, to run the application again, either it has to reload the crashed session, or, a new session, losing the crashed session.

From what I understand, neither iceape nor iceweasel, nor their body of
development (I understand that they are not developed by Mozilla), have a means for users to provide feedback, to get the software working in a way that benefits users.

If iceape and iceweasel both were able to save sessions, and, to provide a means of splitting sessions into bookmark folders/sets, for each browser window open in a session, so that a user can, on opening a new session of the browser after a crash, and select options of a new, separate session, or restoring the complete old session (or, similarly, for a previous saved session that was not saved due to a crash), or, open in a browser window (the existing browser window or a new browser window), a single browser window (from a bookmakr set from a previous saveds session), it would be good.

And, if someone could fix the memory issues, it would be good.

When 2GB of RAM is insufficient to run Linux AND a web browser on top od Linux, suxh as iceape, then there is something dreadfully wrong with the memory management of the operating system and/or the web browser software.

konqueror I use mainly for accessing my gmail accounts, but it allows access to only a single gmail account at a time.

The problem with the Linux web browsers, is that, over time, the developers became so concerned with whistles and bells, and what the developers wanted to do with the applications, that the users were left behind, and the software became bloated, unstable, almost (if not) malicious, and, less and less user friendly, to the extent that it is a bad idea to update the software, as it is less and less usable.

It is a bit like doing system upgrades to the latest version of a distribution - it is generally only a good idea, if a user likes playing roulette with the user's data and system - "let's gamble everything we have - let's do a system upgrade to the latest version, and find whether anything works, and whether we have any data left, afterward".

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams,
  published by Pan Books, 1992

....................................................


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