Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 14:45:25 +0800 (WST)
From: Bret Busby <bret@busby.net>
To: Debian-user List <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Subject: 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".