[geeks] WTF - Linux on a laptop...

[Mike F]

Phil Stracchino wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 11:55:43PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 11:18:02PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>
>>>I'm running RH Linux 8 on a PII laptop, and with *only* 256 Meg of RAM,
>>>the Mozilla browser seems to use about 110% of available RAM... WTF is
>>>this thing doing with all that RAM?
>>
>>Try FireFox instead of Mozilla.  Much less bloat.
> 
> 
> True, but the downside of that is, at the moment Firefox 0.8 appears to
> be very usable on Windows but not ready for prime time on Linux.  On my
> machine at least (Athlon XP1800+ with half a gig of DDR333 RAM running a
> Slackware-based custom install), Firefox becomes unresponsive (and the
> mouse becomes unresponsive when in Firefox's window) for up to about 30
> seconds when loading URLs.

I'll second that - FireFox (and previously Firebird) is good on
Windows, but doesn't seem "quite right" on Linux and FreeBSD.
I use plain old Mozilla on my Linux desktop machine, and it
seems much more coherent than FireFox/Firebird. It might be me,
but it actually seems faster at page loading than FireFox,
and browser startup time doesn't seem to be any worse. The
one nice thing that I do like about FireFox is extensions,
which mainstream Mozilla will probably never have :(