Re: What happend to LIGHTWEIGHT in Firefox?

On Dec 12, 12:03 pm, Public Mailing Lists <[email protected]>
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?

I've run Windows XP Profession on an old Dell laptop with a 266mhz
Pentium II and 128mb of RAM and managed to run both XP and Firefox 3
without consuming many resources. Granted there were some performance
issues because of the hardware, it ran fairly well but I wouldn't
recommend anyone doing what I did unless it's their only machine. But
anything with less than the necessary amount of RAM for both the
operating system AND other applications will clearly see poor
performance in any application.

While the performance in Firefox 3 has gotten better, it's really not
intended for resource limited hardware and I wouldn't recommend it if
you're using a sub 500mhz machine. Instead you might be better off
using a mobile browser or something more lightweight for your platform.