Re: What happend to LIGHTWEIGHT in Firefox?

Public Mailing Lists wrote:
> Hi Firefox-developers,
> 
> in the project description of Firefox, it says "Firefox, a lightweight
> browser built on the Mozilla platform". What happend with LEIGHTWEIGHT?
> 
> The reason why I'm writing this is because I've noticed a gradual but
> massive deterioration of performance in Firefox over the last couple of
> years. I mean, new features are kind of nice. But does the whole thing
> really need to become so big and bloated that it is not usable any more?
> 
> I've just got an eeePC, installed eee Ubuntu on it, and Firefox really
> sucks on it. I have to kill firefox twice a day because it completely
> gets out of whack eating up all available memory and all available CPU
> time. I like leightwight computers, and I also have a PC with a VIA C7,
> a Qnap NAS (with an ARM CPU and 256MB memory), and an NSLU2 (also with
> ARM, 32 MB memory). These devices are nice to my ears because they are
> quit. They are also nice to the environment (and my electrical bill)
> since they consume little electrical power.
> 
> Unfortunately, I can't really use Firefox on any of these devices :-(.
> This is some kind of sad. And I don't really see why: then years ago I
> used to work with a Linux notebook a lot. It was a 300 MHz Pentium and
> 64 MB memory, ran with a 2.2 kernel and Netscape 4.x. So, this is
> roughly comparable if not much slower than the devices I'm talking about
> above. And it ran Netscape well. With this system, I adopted an internet
> browsing style with keeping dozens (sic!) of browser windows open at the
> same time (back then with virtual desktops as there was no tabbed
> browsing yet). And it used to be so fast and responsive.
> 
> Really, seriously, if it would run on current hardware, and there were
> still security patches, I'd immediately switch back to Netscape 4.x. For
> me, it's more important that the system is resonsive, fast, not bloated,
> and runs well even on lightweight hardware.
> 
> Why can't I do that any more? Why does Firefox eat up 256MB for
> displaying a blank web page? What does it do that makes it so slow?
> Isn't there anything that can be done to bring back good-old Netscape
> 4.x's lightweightedness?
> 
> Cheers,
> G.
> 
> 
> P.S.: Mozilla isn't sponsored by hardware manufacturers to make it suck
> on lighter hardware, is it?
> 
> 


Faster for me with each version.