The new version of Mozilla, 1.1, is released for many operating systems. Release notes here. Opinion: Check the screenshot, showing Mozilla’s slow UI (XUL) performance on a dual Celeron @ 533. Before you comment on it, please read the already published comments, because we explain more over there. Update: I added a comment with the image attachment on Mozilla’s BugZilla. There was already a bug entry for this, which suggests more people having problems with this behavior. See? I am not mad… Update2: And here is another bug submitted by someone else, with the same problem, and his shot. His bug is marked as “Verified”. But it is still not fixed.
Mozilla 1.1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Just downloaded it, and I’m actually using it to post this message. I’d have to say it’s a bit faster loading pages than before, and it seems a bit more responsive. With that said, it’s replaced 1.0.
Who uses a browser in full screen ??
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
It is not even funny anymore…
Mozilla’s HTML renderer (Gecko) is actually *decent* and indeed *fast*. But, that GUI they have built on top of Mozilla, is just unbearably slow. I want to use Mozilla on my WinXP box decently, and this slowness of its menu and generally of its GUI shell just gives on my nerves.
Oh, well, back to IE 6, until they fix either the speed of the UI. And no, K-Meleon is not developed anymore, while a rewriting of something like Galeon for Windows would take a lot of time, and I am not willing to wait 1-2 years for a good light Gecko browser.
Mozilla 1.0 should have resolved the problem of its UI speed. It is a joke.
And this is really ironic, because its Gecko engine _is_ fast.
Plenty fast for me.
Oh, come on Sean… Please.
Plenty fast for me as well!
Well, I am on dual Celerons at 533 Mhz with 256 MB of RAM. That should be enough for a browser to have a speedy GUI. I would be “ok” if their HTML engine was slow, it is something you see commonly. But to have such sluggish UI, they have no excuse.
On my AthlonXP 1600+ under Linux is naturally faster because the machine is faster, but still don’t expect miracles. My IE 6 experience on this Celeron machine is still faster than Mozilla’s experience on the Linux AthlonXP box. That GUI it has just blows…
Sean – probably speed of rendering pages and starting up.
Eugenia – speed of the UI.
So I agree with both of you. I find the UI sluggish too.
Quite honestly, I have no clue where the GUI speed complaints come from. At least on Win32, I see no speed issues whatsoever. Even when I used it last summer on a PPro 200mhz there wasn’t really any noticable difference. I think if I really looked for it, I could see the a difference, but I think it was more because that machine was low on RAM and had a lot of other stuff loaded.
Next step up I’ve tried was 366mhz, and Mozilla’s UI seemed no different than any other app. I’ve even the bookmarks menu be significantly too long to fit on screen and still come up instantly.
I’ve only worked with one WinXP machine. But on that machine, when I right clicked in IE, it took about 3 seconds before the menu appeared. Also was like that on the Win2k machines in that office. Probably was something about the machine setup.
I think that I stopped noticing any slowness in the UI around the time they switched from the original Modern theme to the new one. I do remember the original Netscape 6.0 UI feeling a little sluggish, but it wasn’t too long after that it changed.
Eugenia, could you tell us what specific part of the UI you think is slow? “general GUI slowness” doesn’t say anything, and as I said, the menus appear fine to me. I’m trying really hard here to find something in the UI that appears sluggish. The only thing I can see that can remotely be perceived as sluggish is the drawing doesn’t appear to be double buffered. Hmmmm, ok, one other thing. Dialogs seem to be loaded only when requested. So the first time you bring up a dialog pane, it takes longer than later loads will.
Also, are you talking about Windows or non-Windows Mozilla? I’ve found Windows versions to always be a little better than other OS’s.
> Eugenia, could you tell us what specific part of the UI you think is slow?
When I click to the menu of Mozilla, and then just mouse over the next menu item, I can see the previous opened menu being half drawn and the new menu item has already started drawing over the previous one, I can see its outline and about half a second to 1 second later it populates inside the outline the new menu and discards the previous one.
In other words, I can see the drawing process fully. It sucks and it feels hopelessly slow. It just isn’t smooth for Christ’s sake. Are you all blind over here?
Mozilla 1.0 on a debian stable box (500MHz CPU, 192MB RAM) runs acceptably fast. Opening new windows is sluggish though but I can live with that thanks to tabs. On the same system Opera’s UI is definitely faster though.
Mozilla 1.1beta on Win 2000 (1.8GHz CPU, 500MB RAM) is perfectly usable including creation of new windows.
New features I’m excited about:
“Distinct window icons for the different Mozilla applications (artwork contributed by Grayrest)”
About time!!!
“All Search entry points now use your default search engine”
Cool!
“The Linux File Picker has improved filtering and a new directory button”
About time!!!
“File extensions more accurately handled in downloads and we save the correct files when saving complete Web pages”
Great!
“View selection source: Context clicking on a selection now lets you view the HTML source for the selected area”
Cool!
> Also, are you talking about Windows or non-Windows Mozilla?
Yes, I am talking about WindowsXP PRO, and yes, Mozilla it seems to be better on Windows, but its GUI speed is still not good. I mean, that was one of the main reasons that drove people to do projects like Galeon, KMeleon, Chimera etc.
I mean I cant count in seconds how long it takes my little text cursor to show up in the address bar (win2k 1900+ 512).
The menus loadfast thankfully.
Im very excited someone is working on a embedded mozilla port to syllable because of how much I enjoyed kmeleon.
Eugenia, its a hopeless battle. The ‘speed is OK‘ crowd have never experienced BeOS, so they have no perception of what fast really means.
Driving my car at 120km/hour is fast, but I’m sure Michael Shumacher would yawn at how slow I was travelling. Speed is relative, I suppose 🙂
Yes, right now one of the main problems of Mozilla is its cluttered and slow UI, but the problem is not so much XUL’s fault, but its implementation. The problem has reached a point where several developers started their XUL UIs of their own, where the modules are also separate. The result? Phoenix (formerly mozilla/browser) and Minotaur, (mail/news replacement). Both of them are at least 40% faster than Mozilla according to Blake Ross’ page.
But so far the default Mozilla UI runs smoothly enough that I don’t see much of a difference on my Duron 900 (memory helps a lot too). So, until Phoenix and Minotaur become feature complete, I can survive with Mozilla pretty well as my default browser (if you see a different UA right now its because I just reinstalled Windows ^_^;;)
I agree the UI is slow, but I don’t think its *THAT* slow.
Me, sometime! 🙂
Well, I think it’s a *nice* feature, but I wonder if it’s useful.
I’m using Mozilla 1.1 now (on Linux), and the UI is more responsive than the previous version. It looks that Mozilla eats a bit less memory too. Well, it’s good.
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http://korbinus.fr.st
>In other words, I can see the drawing process fully. It sucks and it feels hopelessly slow. It just isn’t smooth for Christ’s sake. Are you all blind over here?
I quite honestly think it’s just a case of you looking for it and making a bigger deal of it than it is.
My CD-RW drive recently died. Some of the last few CDs it burned had a very small fraction of a second of silence every now and then. I happened to be listening closely when it hit one of those spots. Once I noticed that, it irritated the hell out of me and I noticed those spots every time. I gave the CD to my girlfriend, and pointed out the spots several times, yet she still can’t hear anything wrong with the CD. I tried ripping the same track off the original CD and the copy, and viewing the wavs in Cakewalk (the only program I had handy that could show the wave file), and could not see a difference between them. So, it’s really an incredibly small error, but I let it annoy the hell out of me. I think you’re doing the same thing here.
I’m trying really hard here to watch for it. I honestly just think that the lack of double buffering is playing tricks on your mind. If I place the mouse cursor over the bookmarks menu and click, it appears to come up instantly and all at once. If I slide back and forth over the menus, yes, the lack of double buffering is noticable if I’m specifically looking for it. But quite honestly, it’s very rare that I’m sliding across the menus, and when I do, I tend to be focused on the text in the menu in order to find a specific item. And the menu definately draws faster than I can read it, so I don’t notice it at all.
So I guess I’m saying if I really look for it I can see a very slight difference, but I think you have to be looking for it to see it. And that it’ll only bother you if you’re looking for something to complain about. I definately don’t think 99% of the population would notice it.
Overall it’s running rather acceptably here (doesn’t make me wanna ditch IE, but pretty decently nevertheless). Pity that Mail is still completely unusable for us IMAP users (it doesn’t correctly flag messages as “Replied” on the server–if you quit and then reload Mozilla you’ll see the problem–although if you reply to a message using Outlook Express, Mozilla correctly sees that it’s been replied to).
Nevertheless, I think Mozilla is a very important project and I have hope for the future.
> Eugenia, its a hopeless battle. The ‘speed is OK’ crowd have never experienced BeOS, so they have no perception of what fast really means.
Haha, yeah, I think that’s it Zenja. I am spoiled…
On the other hand, Sean has also experienced BeOS, but he claims that Mozilla’s UI is “plenty fast” for him,. He used to be the editor in chief at BeNews. My boss… 😉
We never agreed on anything. But I really love Sean. I guess we will never agree on anything though. 🙂
I much, much, much prefer the new icon in Windows. The other one just looked bad when it was small. Good job, guys!
I also have a BP6 – 2xCeleron 500 256MB RAM running Mandrake 8.2 and I find Mozilla 1.0’s speed fine in all departments.
I run Mozilla 1.1b in preference to IE at work on a P800 without speed problems.
I have used Moz since the 0.92 Milestone build
On my system ( Ath 1ghz/640/Win2k Pro ) something happened between the .99 build and 1.0
In terms of operation in everything except startup – Mozilla 1.0 is _VERY_ close to the speed of Opera 6.5 and more to the point is faster than MSIE6, and startup seems slightly improved too.
I was always an opera fan, it’s what I am typing this from – but I’m downloading Moz 1.1 as I type.
I think Eugenia has a good point. Mozilla’s UI is too slow. It is certainly not unusable, but the discrepancy between it and other normal Windows programs is noticable. Use IE for a while and then do some browsing in Mozilla. You can’t say you didn’t “feel” any difference. Despite the fact that Gecko is faster than IE’s rendering engine, the UI is so unresponsive that IE seems faster by comparison. (I have a 733mhz Celeron w/ 198mb RAM. Don’t BS me by saying my PC is too slow.)
The problem is only magnified when you take into account that Mozilla draws all of its own widgets and dialog boxes. They don’t look like and behave exactly like in normal Windows programs. They have their own distinct feel that separates Mozilla from any other program. To the end user this is inconsistent and constantly noticeable.
Mozilla is superior to IE in almost every technical aspect except for the UI. This is why I wish K-Meleon would continue. (The dev list is active and new betas are coming out, but no new release since last October.) Maybe when that happens I will use it instead of IE. But for now, Mozilla is nothing but a geek’s toy that will never reach any widespread acceptance until the UI problem is solved.
sure its slow .. a little unresponsive. but remember, (i think) the gui is being rendered by mozilla as well .. they are not peer widgets.
I am typing this in Mozilla on a Linux box, and – while it renders fast – it is a little sluggish rendering widgets.
It will be interesting to see what happens when AOL puts Gecko in their client. From my experience, the Gecko rendering engine is blazingly fast.
>Eugenia, its a hopeless battle. The ‘speed is OK’ crowd >have never experienced BeOS, so they have no perception of >what fast really means
Er… I just LOVE BeOS, and it’s still my main (and only) OS, but I must admit that the Start menu in win98 and win2k is indeed faster than the Deskbar menu.
I forgot to mention that the Mozilla version I was running was 1.0 not 1.1. Mayeb 1.1 will be a bit more responsive.
By the way, Eugenia, I like your articles, but you can be a bit picky sometimes. Mozilla, even with its slightly sluggish feel is not unbearably slow. Ever run NT 3?
let’s see… p3 500mhz, 320mb ram, 40gb 7200rpm hdd, savage4 32mb pci. gui is a little slow at start for me. but once i open about 10 tabs and load pages, it just seems normal to me. dunno. i guess my expectations are lower than some other people. or maybe i’m just less anal about things these days that i don’t complain about minor stuff when i get them for free? or maybe it’s simply that time of the month again.
I just downloaded the browser only for win32. I’m on a 1.7 GHz Celeron with 1 GB RAM and Intel 82845G chipset. I’m not having any menu issues at all like Eugenia is, but I’ve got all that extra RAM too. Right now, it does not seem sluggish to me, I wouldn’t use that term, but I was just doing some self testing with IE 6 and Opera and they are both faster. It’s a shame really. To have that engine and to bog it down with the UI. And yes…Be…
No, Mozilla is NOT unbearably slow. It *IS* the browser of my choice on Linux (interchanged sometimes with Opera6) and it is the clear winner on my MacOSX box (interchanged some times with Opera5 or iCab who also happen to be fast-ish on OSX).
But on my Windows XP box, IE is the clear winner in the web experience. While the Gecko engine might be faster than IE’s, the end result of the whole UI/browsing is that for my Windows box, IE is just THE browser to use.
Oh my, I forgot to test scrolling. My God, scrolling in Mozilla is really bad! If I drag the slider, it’s okay, but using the arrows – very choppy and slow!
What can I say, it must be a case of preferences.. or even of the apps preferring some hardware.
On my 3 boxes, ( 2 running Win2k, one on XP ) Opera has always beaten IE6 for speed and since 1.0, Mozilla has caught up with it.
hmm… scrolling is ok here… IE might be better still, but it is hardly noticably here really… 😮
My only problem with the UI is the menus and some widget drawing.
When I mouse-over fast over the menu, I can see 3 or maybe 4 of the menus all open at the same time, because Mozilla didn’t have the time to discard the previous opened menu and calculate the next one! And if I go slower, I can still see 2 menus open with my dual Celeron.
On ANY other Windows application (even on Java apps), the menu usage is instanteneous. On Mozilla is not…
I’m trying really hard here to see more than one menu open, but as far as I can tell, Mozilla completely erases the previous menu before drawing the new one. Watch really carefully.
Shrinking your bookmarks menu to a similar size as the other menus might make it more noticable. The much longer length of it tends to be *very* distracting when trying to figure out what’s going on.
Yes! I have proof!
http://www.osnews.com/img/1620/mozilla.png
In the picture that I grabbed with PaintShopPro of Mozilla 1.1, you see the Go and Bookmarks menus open at the same time. This was what the grabber grabbed at that specific time. But it is NOT just the bookmarks menu. NO. ALL the menus have the same behavior, and something that it does not show on the shot is that first I can see the outline of the menu and then it populates it, and then discards the other opened menu.
SAME goes for the URL bar, when I open it, I can see its outline and then it populates it after 1/2 of a second or so. I can SEE it drawing.
It is just slow. And it is not that I have a buggered installation. No. The same speed (and even worse) I get on my Gentoo Linux and Mandrake Cooker on that very same machine. And I have compiled Mozilla with i686 optimizations on my Gentoo partition. Still slow.
I don’t know what you guys running. You might be running faster machines than I do. The point is, that a browser should be able to be responsive enough on a dual 533 Mhz system. Come on…
On win98se the speed is really OK. Once it loads up it works almost as fast as opera. The UI is a bit slower, but the pages display faster.
The problem is Mozilla on linux, which (for me) is MUCH slower than on win. Opening new tabs and windows takes AGES in terms of UI responsivness. Not even the same league as Opera. More or less same problem as with Open Office on Linux… shame.
Michael Dominic K.
The previous message is written as a user.
When someone (me
manages to grab such a *screenshot* so easily, something is really f*cked up. Really.
This message is written as a developer.
You all seem to be forgetting that the Mozilla browser is not and never was intended as an enduser product. It is a testbed for the technologies behind such as Gecko, Rhino etc.
Whenever you use the Mozilla browser, you are test persons testdriving a developers’ version.
If you want polished UI’s, use enduser versions instead such as Galeon or Netscape.
I don’t use Mozilla at all any more since I discovered Galeon. Galeon is fast, easier to configure and still uses the latest Mozilla technologies.
As for complaining about small issues in a product like Mozilla and calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you blind… Maybe we don’t all think everything BeOS ever did was so fantastic.
Personally, I have better things to do (like writing this 🙂 than get upset about tiny things like this which has no effect on usability unless you do your darnedest to focus on it (like in flawed CD story above). Of course you could always just donate some time or money to get it changed…
What you say here is a bad excuse.
>If you want polished UI’s, use enduser versions instead such as Galeon or Netscape.
Netscape is also using XUL. It is equally slow.
There is not Galeon for Windows. K-Meleon hasn’t updated for a year.
I am using Mozilla 1.0 still, but on only a P3 800 laptop with 128MB RAM. I notice no difference in UI speed between this and IE6. There is a difference in load time, sure, but not in normal UI speed. Menus … same. Open/close windows (or tabs) … same. Open preferences/options … same.
No complaints. If only my bank accepted Mozilla, then I would never use IE.
“It is not even funny anymore…
Mozilla’s HTML renderer (Gecko) is actually *decent* and indeed *fast*. But, that GUI they have built on top of Mozilla, is just unbearably slow. I want to use Mozilla on my WinXP box decently, and this slowness of its menu and generally of its GUI shell just gives on my nerves.
Oh, well, back to IE 6, until they fix either the speed of the UI. And no, K-Meleon is not developed anymore, while a rewriting of something like Galeon for Windows would take a lot of time, and I am not willing to wait 1-2 years for a good light Gecko browser.
Mozilla 1.0 should have resolved the problem of its UI speed. It is a joke.
And this is really ironic, because its Gecko engine _is_ fast.”
And the idea of using Opera doesn’t even enter your mind?
“Mozilla 1.1beta on Win 2000 (1.8GHz CPU, 500MB RAM) is perfectly usable including creation of new windows.”
“Mozilla 1.0 on a debian stable box (500MHz CPU, 192MB RAM) runs acceptably fast. Opening new windows is sluggish though but I can live with that thanks to tabs”
“let’s see… p3 500mhz, 320mb ram, 40gb 7200rpm hdd, savage4 32mb pci. gui is a little slow at start for me.”
“Quite honestly, I have no clue where the GUI speed complaints come from.”
1.8Ghz cpu, 500 MB ram???!!! Are you people all insane???!!! The early Apollo missions had less computing power than a pocket calculator, but we need 1.8Ghz cpu, 500 MB ram just to surf the freakin’ web???!!!
“I much, much, much prefer the new icon in Windows. The other one just looked bad when it was small. Good job, guys!”
Yay! The Icon works! Hooray!
In the meantime look at the posted system requirements. PREPOSTEROUS!!!
Perhaps Eugenia it is a problem with this ugly Luna interface of Win XP. I have a Dual Celeron 466 with XP (without Luna) and *NO* probs !!!
No matter how many enduser products using mozilla technology exists for a given OS does not change that the browser the Mozilla project releases is for testing the technologies they develop. It is _not_ meant as an enduser product and you shouldn’t expect it to be polished like an enduser product.
It is hardly surprising that IE6 is faster and more polished than Mozilla 1.1 since IE6 has been optimized and polished. Mozilla recently started optimizing the code and in my opinion hasn’t spent any time on polish (which is the correct decision in my opinion).
The Mozilla project is about creating browser technologies for embedding in other products. It is not about creating a full-featured browser fit for public use. The fact that it turned out that having a full-featured browser was the best testbed is another story. The browser is plenty fast for testing Venkman or for spotting rendering errors.
Eugenia, you wrote above that you wrote your message as a developer… Do you always polish and optimize your test scaffolding until it looks like a commercial product? Or do you concentrate on your product and build enough scaffolding to perform your tests? Focusing on the product instead of the polish of the testbed is being productive.
Sorry to reply to myself.
I meant to add that I cannot make the menus overlap like Eugenia is talking about. For me (Win98SE, computer as above) the menus are instant. No time to even see a redraw. In fact, they are faster than IE because I haven’t turned off the slide-out menus.
It seems that people are getting wildly different experiences on similar hardware. Weird.
> And the idea of using Opera doesn’t even enter your mind?
If you had read all my comments before you start your ranting, you would see that I do use Opera on OSX and Linux, because there is no better/equal alternative in these OSes than Mozilla (IE is piece of sh*t on OSX).
But on *Windows*, my main OS, there is IE. So, if Mozilla doesn’t cut it, I go back to IE.
I do not like Opera’s UI. Don’t get me wrong, Opera IS fast enough. But I don’t like its bloated UI. It takes too much screen space as well (even the registered version without the ads does). IE takes less space, Mozilla too. I like compact and up to the point UIs.
So, yes, I do use Opera. But not on Windows. I only use Opera when I want to access some FTP sites that IE does not let me, because of some weird problem of our firewall and the FTP/IE thing. No other time I would use Opera on Windows.
> Perhaps Eugenia it is a problem with this ugly Luna interface of Win XP. I have a Dual Celeron 466 with XP (without Luna) and *NO* probs !!!
And did you miss the bit that I was talking about mozilla’s slow UI performance on two *different* linux distros on the same machine? Please scroll up to read it. So, it is not that. We even have the same hardware.
Wow… if I go back and forth as quick as I can between only 2 mneu items, it really looks like it’s erasing the old one first. If I go thru the whole menubar it’s hard to tell.
At some points I had gotten the impression that the menu itself was drawn first, and then the entries in it. That’s probably how I’d do it if I was coding it.
My guess is there is some delay in the redraw of what’s underneath. If you’re going thru the menus quickly, that will result in less area being redrawn (and less cpu usage), altho it will have the visible side affects you’ve noticed. Maybe this tradeoff was a better choice for some other factor within the browser, and this just happens to be a side effect of using Gecko for the UI as well.
I think it comes down to you’ll find flaws in anything if you look hard enough.
I’d suggest submitting a bug to bugzilla and attaching that screenshot.
Um, that’s not the Go menu, that’s the Edit menu, which is two selections away. I’m confused. Did Mozilla skip rendering the menus in between, which should be overlapped as well? Is the screenshot a fake?
I have to agree that much of the UI in 1.1 is still not up to speed. One example (maybe it only does this to me) is that if it is currently loading a new page and I hit ctrl+t, nothing happens. No tab ever appears. 1.0 did the same thing.
I can live with the slow menus, they aren’t bad on my 500 mhz Pentium III. It is a small price to pay for the features I get from Mozilla (pop up blocking, tabs, gestures, etc).
And talking about compact and not bloated UIs, here is my IE window:
http://www.osnews.com/img/1620/ie6.png
This is how I run it. For Mozilla, I run the “Pinball” theme, which is pretty compact as well (not as much as IE, but still compact enough compared to the Modern or Classic theme).
The Opera UI cannot deliver this, even with the registered version.
Please note that I have aplenty resolution, I am running 1280×1024 here on my 19″ monitor. But I always have two windows open side by side. OE and IE at 800×600 (which is the resolution that most webmasters are developing for today). So, I like compactness. And don’t forget that documents are long, not wide. This is why vertical compactness is important for me. Opera has it all wrong on the specific issue. If I remove its panes/bars, it loses way too much functionality, so removing stuff is out of the question. Therefore, Opera is out of the question. No matter how fast it might or might not be.
> Um, that’s not the Go menu, that’s the Edit menu, which is two selections away. I’m confused
Yeah, whatever that is, I did not put thought of what it is. I just grabbed the freaking thing and posted it.
> Did Mozilla skip rendering the menus in between, which should be overlapped as well? Is the screenshot a fake?
The screenshot IS NOT fake. I do not lie, and I do not fake stuff. Ask people who know me better. Truth is my middle name.
And if you live in the Bay Area (and I have said this many times) you are welcome to come to my home and see it with your own eyes. Beer and food is on me.
Maybe the content of the websites you are browsing (flash, java, large images, etc), or the amount of tabs open affects the speed of the menus/scrolling, etc? Or maybe the apps running in the background. Or maybe xp just sucks.
Never had problems here on a Duron 1.3GHz, 512M DDR using 1.0 on Windows 2000. Gonna try 1.1 soon. Never had Mozilla crash either. (haven’t tried anything but the browser tho).
>The screenshot IS NOT fake. I do not lie, and I do not fake >stuff.
Fair enough, I’m just trying to figure out why the middle two menus aren’t showing. Any thoughts on that?
Why do you develop for a specific resolution instead of letting the browser flow the the elements of the page. Letting the browser do the job, you give the user the power to user whatever line length she is most comfortable with simply by resizing the window.
Is there some benefit to targetting a specific resolution apart from purely aesthetical reasons?
That’s weird. I’m currently running 1.0rc3 on a dirty old 700mhz Win98 box. The speed is great. Later today I’m testing out 1.1 on Win2k and WinXP.
Anyway, tabbed browsing, popup killing, and less chance for virii beats UI speed anyday for me. Maybe there are IE plugins for these, but I don’t like to rely on plugins.
Not really. Possibly because the mouse gone faster and then a bit slower, so the engine had time to only think about where the mouse was and where is now that it goes slower, so it would only draw the two specific locations and not the intermediate ones.
>Is there some benefit to targetting a specific resolution apart from purely aesthetical reasons?
The 800×600 is not just the “target”. It is the minimux required. So, if you have 1600×1200, a page would still flow. But if you have 800×600, it would still fit. But not if you have less.
So the 800×600 is not a specific res, it is just the minimum required.
Okay, there’s Bugzilla, but as everyone else is apt to voice their disappointment in this thread, my meager contribution won’t look to pedantic…
Mozilla made me scream at my screen. Several times. I think I’m quite patient most of the time, past my adolescent outbursts and generally have no problem when gcc ambles through C++ code with the speed of a sedated pachyderm. But when it takes _seconds_ for the location drop-down to appear or text entries can’t keep up with my typing speed, then _there’s something wrong_. Several expletitives got deleted from this paragraph…
Well, UIs should have a pretty low latency anyway and part of my outrage seems to come from the fact that this is a open source project and I somehow expect the developers to care more for humble users like me. Psychological fallacy…
Other pet peeves: The middle mouse button does unexpected things. If you have something in your X selection and click _anywhere_ on a page, it tries to use the selection as an URL. Even if it’s just a plain paragraph. You miss a link with a middle-click -> off to never never land. You try to close a tab with a single click of your second mouse button -> bye bye birdy. This ‘feature’ isn’t very intuitive anyway and isn’t really needed. If I want to quickly change to a selected URL I’ll just clear the location field. Or Ctrl+L…
And delenda mailus compositus textus widgetus.
(Come on, spurious newlines, messed up colours…)
Hmm. My mp3 player chose to play “Be quick or be dead” at this very moment. Go tell it to ’em, Bruce!
<posted from Mozilla 1.1, but still loyal Opera fan> One thing I miss (which I adore from Opera) is the smooth vertical scrolling. If you have a 3 button mouse, click the middle button in Opera and use the mouse to scroll up/down. You can adjust the scrolling in sub-pixel increments. Even IE allows this, but not as smooth as Opera. Once you get used to this method of browsing, you scoff at jerky vertical scrolls implemented elsewhere (including Mozilla). In a later release, maybe. Oh well, back to Opera.
> And did you miss the bit that I was talking about mozilla’s >slow UI performance on two *different* linux distros on the >same machine? Please scroll up to read it. So, it is not that. >We even have the same hardware.
Saying that it is slow on Linux has nothing to do with the fact that i really cant figuere out how you made this screenshot. I can move between the menus as fast as I want, but this….
Do you have this with Mozilla 1.0, too ?? What about the BeOS port ??
Very well said Michael. Thank you.
BTW, I have submitted more than 5-6 bugs for Mozilla. It is the only project that I have an account with for bug submission. (I don’t even have a SourceForge account)
And as for the middle mouse thingie, I submitted it a few months ago! And you know what they replied? That it is a feature, because this is what Netscape 4 was doing too.
So, if Netscape 4 had buggered UI, they still keep its “tradition”.
And please note, that I have seen that behaviour on Linux version of Mozilla only. It does not happen on my Windows.
Which suggest that this is a bug, and not what this guy replied to me via the Bugzilla… Is it still not fixed?
>Do you have this with Mozilla 1.0, too ??
I have this with all the Mozilla versions. Under all OSes. Under different machines, even. So, it’s not me. It is rather all you who haven’t seen fast UIs, or you can’t distinguish them.
>What about the BeOS port ??
Are you kidding me? The BeOS port is incomplete. It is the slowest and worse of all. Unusable. It even crashes EVERY TIME I send a message via Hotmail too.
I enjoy that particular feature a lot. In Galeon there is a preference for what clicking the middle button does. I always have it on ‘Load selection as URL’ (or whatever it is called). It’s very handy for copying URL’s.
Again, if you want it different, use an enduser product which either does it differently or lets you configure it.
Eugenia, if you enjoy minimum screen real-estate taken by navigation-bars, title-bars etc, then you cannot dismiss Opera’s F11 full screen mode. The entire view, without any buttons or title bars, and only the view is shown. True full screen. With Opera’s advanced keyboard only navigation (and mouse gestures), you have a very usable 100% full screen browser. Its great for presentations, or even viewing desktop screenshots, since you can zoom to full screen and actually see what the desktop looks like. Mozilla/IE still leave a horizontal bar on top, enough to ruin the suspension of disbelief.
Back to your regularly scheduled thread.
You say the page is flowed if my resolution is greater than 800×600, but this site still doesn’t use my full browser width. I’ve always believed it to be a fundamental design flaw when the webdesigner thinks he is somehow more capable of deciding how long lines I prefer to read.
Hahahahahaha…
HAHAHAHA….
I just grabed a better screnshot.
ENJOY
http://www.osnews.com/img/1620/mozilla2.png
And yes, the same (slow) UI behavior happens on all my machines, on all my OSes, including the Mac.
Exactly who are you laughing at? The developers? THe people who don’t agree with you that it is a problem? Yourself?
> Eugenia, if you enjoy minimum screen real-estate taken by navigation-bars, title-bars etc, then you cannot dismiss Opera’s F11 full screen mode.
Zenja, you missed the part that I always browse on 800×600-ish, and I have always two windows open: OE and browser. I really need both open at the same time. These are my needs.
I do not want full screen. I do not want a workaround for my need. I want the real-deal solution. Opera cannot offer that to me today. Everyone has different needs…
Back to IE.
> Exactly who are you laughing at?
At all. At people who don’t get it, at developers who created a Frankstein monster, at the zealots who released a 1.0 version and they hope to dethrone IE.
Get a clue. Wake up. IE is the king. I wish Mozilla was the king. But it ain’t. Not as of August 27th 2002.
This is the reality. I WISH that Mozilla was better. But it does not give me the web experience I need. End of story.
Speaking as a developer, that screenshot over there, is just LAUGHABLE. It just IS.
It is not that I mean. I am a very sensitive person (my JBQ can tell you more about it
But this speed UI performance there, is just plainly bad.
Even JBQ was laughing at it earlier when I showed it to him. And he has nothing to do with OSes and open source and stuff. He is is just a regular Windows user, working as an engineer. But when he saw that, he nearly puked.
Come on guys…
>It is rather all you who haven’t seen fast UIs, or you can’t distinguish them.
Perhaps you are on the “BeOS was all better and I want my opinion to be the only one” train again-
no MODERN OS has a really fast UI because the users whant them to do all and everything. Granted Mozilla has a slow UI.
But on my WinXP Box I cant see this. Point.
> Are you kidding me? The BeOS port is incomplete. It is the slowest and worse of all. Unusable. It even crashes EVERY TIME I send a message via Hotmail too.
Perhaps you should change your e-mail account. I can browse with BeOS and Mozilla
>I can browse with BeOS and Mozilla
Not on hotmail. It dies EVERY TIME you submit a form on their site. I have seen the bug on two different BeOS machines. Totally reproducible.
>Perhaps you should change your e-mail account.
Give me a break and stop your politic underminng. That shit doesn’t work on me. I won’t stop my primary home account that I have for 5 years just because the BeZilla port just doesn’t work.
chimera, once feature complete will become my browser of choice, fast ui, fast page rendering though the icon’s are a bit cartoonish.
It must be nice to always think you are right. I wish I had enough confidence to be able to discard every argument sent in my direction.
I agree that the screenshot looks bad. But using mozilla on either Windows or Linux hasn’t given me reason to think about the speed of it sometime since they revised their version numbering scheme. And I generally use pretty shoddy hardware.
There is no doubt in my mind that at the current time IE is the fastest browser on Windows. It is hardly surprising.
But there is also no doubt in my mind that the Mozilla people have created great technologies which can be used (and are being used) to create superior browsers. Please note: I am not saying the Mozilla browser is superior, but some of their technologies are. I’ll take Galeon over IE any day of the week. Tough luck for the Windows users.
Berating the hard work which is largely done by volunteers in their spare time is rather uncalled for and unnecessary. I dare you to do better.
> Berating the hard work which is largely done by volunteers in their spare time is rather uncalled for and unnecessary. I dare you to do better.
I don’t have to. Microsoft did it already for me.
They want to compete with IE and they ask for my gratitude? Well, they have to do better. I am sorry, but that’s the reality. I am ruthless when it comes to code/project/product quality.
i notice no problems with the menus.. i got a P3@933/256Mo on win2OOO
>> Berating the hard work which is largely done by volunteers in their spare time is rather uncalled for and unnecessary.
It does not matter to me, as a user, if this piece of software was created by volunteers or by engineers at $500/per hour. What it matters, is how well it works. Same thing I said on the similar Gnome/KDE discussions.
What matters is the *end result* for the *user*. Politicalities and other blah-blah, do not matter.
And at the end of the day, AOL distributes the thing as “Netscape”. They send me spam CDs and they BEG me to try it. At this point, it is more than “some volunteers” doing some coding on their free time. It is AOL, a huge corporation, trying to compete with IE and they ask me to use the software.
So, if it ain’t good, they are going to get smacked by me. If it is good, I am going to use it and even promote it via OSNews.
Again, the Gecko HTML engine IS GOOD. That freaking XUL UI sh*t, is just that: shit.
And if that ain’t fixed, I won’t be leaving the other’s evil corporation’s browser, IE.
Hm, I can’t understand the complaints. The XUL UI is acceptably fast for me.
Eugenia: “When I click to the menu of Mozilla, and then just mouse over the next menu item, I can see the previous opened menu being half drawn and the new menu item has already started drawing over the previous one, I can see its outline and about half a second to 1 second later it populates inside the outline the new menu and discards the previous one.”
That does not happen here. PIII 800 Mhz, 384 MB Ram. Windows XP. Perfectly smooth.
Also, please don’t get too upset with me. If you read my previous comments, I do write there that Mozilla is the only project that I have account to submit bugs and help as much as I can.
But it is MY JOB here on osnews to PROMOTE whatever is good and KILL DOWN WITHOUT MERCY whatever does not work well. I have to inform people.
I like Mozilla. I WANT it to be better. But that is Eugenia talking. That OSNews editor has other responsibilities and have to put away any feelings and write things as raw as they are.
If something sucks (XUL) it will be written on this site. If something rocks (Gecko), it will also be written and promoted on this site. As it already has.
That is the deal with OSNews and with me.
I write things the way I see them and in this case, I even have proof. I do not sugar-coat my words. I do not lie, I do not hide behind my own finger.
I was brought up like that from my father. He is a proud man. VERY TOUGH man to live with, but also very firm on his beliefs and his principles. But also certainly fair and proud. He does not play tricks behind the backs of other people. Whatever he has to say, he’ll say it.
I am the same way. Sorry for not being the “geek doll” that everyone would love to have on the web and chat with her and have fun. I am not all that. I mean business.
At first I though Eugenia was mad so I set out to prove her so and found out she was telling the truth
Even though it is not visible on my box to the user, doing screenshots shows that Mozilla does not draw as fast or neatly as Internet Explorer.
2GHz P4 512MB Memory Intel 845GR
OS Windows 98SE
IE 6.0
Mozilla Build 20020825 1.1b
If you don’t believe it try it yourself and find out
Uhm, I so don’t care whether or not screenshots show that MoZilla draws its menus slower than IE. You say “Even though it is not visible on my box to the user” – where’s the problem?
Currently using a Pentium II 333MHz w/ 128Mb RAM which is running on Windows 2000 SP3 – the Mozilla 1.1 GUI is as smooth as IE 6 on the same machine.
<p>
The only thing I can think of is that Celeron CPUs have a crippled L2 cache… I wonder if that has anything to do with it ?
I must say I somehow just lost a bit of my respect for OS news.
In the main section:
Opinion: Check the screenshot, showing Mozilla’s slow UI (XUL) performance on a dual Celeron @ 533.
Oh well. Not to go into troll-debate, I will just say, that this discussion became too much personal. As most of the people, I don’t experience the problems you mention, and I do not understand why OSNEWS should present personal feelings (not to confuse with subjective opinions) instead of common facts.
If you don’t like mozilla, delete it from your harddrive. There are lots of people who use it. Everything is all right as long as developers write webpages having standards in mind.
Michael Dominic K.
>where’s the problem?
The problem is that this will be MANY times more visible on slower machines. The guy has a fast P4 at 2 Ghz. Try that on a Celeron at ~500 Mhz and you should be able to see the difference just fine.
And the real problem is that a UI should be able to draw equally fast as IE on a 500 Mhz PC. If it doesn’t, it means that something is really wrong.
And that’s where the problem is my friend.
“I must say I somehow just lost a bit of my respect for OS news.”
Ditto. No mention in the original bulletin that most users are pretty satisfied with MoZilla’s UI performance. No line like “Granted, most users are satisfied it, but according to my experiences, there’s room for improvement left.” And, wait a moment, if so many users say it’s fine for them, why not test on several PCs before claiming MoZilla’s UI speed sucks in general? That’d be good journalism, trying to be objective and investigative.
> I do not understand why OSNEWS should present personal feelings (not to confuse with subjective opinions) instead of common facts.
THIS IS A **FACT** FOR ME. IT IS FREAKING SLOW. How much more FACTUAL I have to freaking make it?? I even submitted TWO screenshots.
READ HERE WHY:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1620&offset=75&rows=84#33…
Right my ass.
Have you read all the discussion?
Have you read that I have 9 freaking machines here and that I experience the same slowness ON ALL OF THEM?
I DID FREAKING TESTED with more than 1 machine. HELLO??
>”Granted, most users are satisfied it, but according to my experiences, there’s room for improvement left.”
That’s freaking sugar coating. I am not interesting in licking asses. This is not what I do.
FACT: XUL is slow here. I tested on many machines, on many OSes, SAME RESULT.
That’s a good reason for me to have a well founded result. Thank you very much.
Hm, I’m going to test it on a PII-450 now. Let’s see.
> That’d be good journalism, trying to be objective and investigative.
No, that would be a way to not make YOU, the readers, angry. I do not care if you are getting angry and if you do not like the kind I write.
I passed the point where I got to be “investigative”. I have results, and I have proof. I need nothing more.
And IF this is _only_ happening on my machine(s) (very unlikely), then it has to be a bug anyway. So, in no way I am a bad reporter or journalist. I wrote exactly what I see in front of my eyes.
I can see exactly the same artefacts as Eugenia, using a dual 533 Celeron, Win2k. It’s horrible – what do you have to do wrong to make simple menus draw that slow on a machine that can play full-screen DVD and DivX without hitches?
> I can see exactly the same artefacts as Eugenia, using a dual 533 Celeron, Win2k. It’s horrible – what do you have to do wrong to make simple menus draw that slow on a machine that can play full-screen DVD and DivX without hitches?
Thank you Stew.
(BTW, time is 2:47 AM here, I need to sleep)
I understand that there is no Galeon on Windows. In fact, on Windows, nothing matches IE. Still, if you want IE and features of Mozilla (tabbed browsing, popup killer) then try crazy browser:
http://www.crazybrowser.com/
On Linux, I use Galeon. I have to say, if someone asks me for a strong reason why they should move to Linux instead of other OSes, I would say Galeon. With integrated Download Manager, tabbed browsing, smart bookmarks and features like Google, Dictionary, Freshmeat and rpmfind search bars it is leaps ahead of any other browser I’ve seen. Plus, important options (enable/disbale java, javascript, popups…) are 2 clicks away. You can add bookmarks on the top toolbar for quick access and it has a neat Bookmarklet feature (e.g. Browse older version of this page). It is also freaking fast even on my Duron 750 + 256MB Ram + Geforce2 Pro (Mandrake 8.2). And there is a zillion configuration options for you control freaks.
Opera is cool, but I personally never liked the UI (plus, it’s not free).
My $0.03 CDN ($0.02 USD)
Rizo
> Oh, well, back to IE 6, until they fix either the speed of
> the UI. And no, K-Meleon is not developed anymore, while a
> rewriting of something like Galeon for Windows would take a
> lot of time, and I am not
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=1954673
It’s a pretty recent K-Meleon with some very nice new features using the 1.x engine.
mozilla.org is one of the most often updated open source project, the programmers even made daily build to iron out the bugs and improve features/performance. Still something puzzled me since after 1.0 release.
1. mozilla.org 1.0 is very stable, and relatively bug free. Since then there are 1.1 alpha, 1.1 beta, and now 1.1 release. Usually one will suppose features that work doesn’t break in later version. In my experience, however, this is not true.
a) In 1.1 beta, I find that I can’t export my bookmark – exporting bookmark will save nothing. I report this to bugzilla, and they have replied of a fix within couple hours. Strangely, this function _works_ in 1.0 release.
b) All through the 1.1 branch (including 1.1 release), I found that there are some webpage rendering with garbage shown up, check out this website: http://www.bluesnews.com/ , scroll down the page and you can see garbage somewhere. However again this bug does _not_ exist in 1.0 release. Again I reported this to bugzilla and they have the record this bug is filed back when 2002 March (before 1.0 release on June), so I wonder, did someone fix it in 1.0 release but others managed to break it in 1.1, or 1.1 is simply not based on 1.0… or some magic is not working here?
I understand though mozilla.org is a very big and ambitious project, but these phenomenon concerned me. Perhaps it happened a lot with other open source projects, anyway, I hope they can get it fixed eventually.
As for performance I found 1.1 release is more smooth in page rendering.
> It’s a pretty recent K-Meleon with some very nice new features using the 1.x engine.
Now, your are talking. Not finished (it redraws too much when resizing), but CERTAINLY faster and lighter overall. And the native Windows menus are truly fly. Yes, this is something that I could certainly use once finished.
The main reason behind this is that it is XML-based. And there is a lot of negative speed impacts as a result of its usage.
But XUL had served in more ways than making a potentially pretty looking UI. It makes porting much more easier between platforms so that Mozilla for Windows and Mozilla or Linux won’t differ too much.
When I said “redraws too much”, I am talking about the iFrames. It does not redraw the whole page, only the iFrames. The first Ad on osnews is an iFrame, so when resizing KMeleon on that page, the ad redraws a lot. If you have an account with them, please submit a bug.
Otherwise, it is a nice light browser. Yes.
Opera can be as graphically compact as IE, actually Opera can be even more compact. I have both browsers occupying exactly the same space on the screen:
-One toolbar with text labelled menus
-The address bar
Apps like this have many GUI settings, use them.
Unlike IE, you can set Opera to show the rendering progress inside the address bar. In IE that pogress is shown inside that status bar, that is one more bar —> less compact. And IE doesn’t have tabs by itself (that is unless you use some of those lame addons), so it is even less less compact.
Opera is faster, it’s tabbed (since years before any other Internet browser), and compact (graphically, and also as binary). IE is king of bloat. I do 99% of brosiwng inside Opera.
As for Mozilla, I only care enough about it when I’m in BeOS. The ideal future would be one where the file manager is always the Internet browser too (‘everything is a file’ guideline), so in that near future it should be either Mozilla or Nautilus, not both of them. Check out how they have embedded the GStreamer in Nautilus, who will need another browser two years from now? I guess that as someone pointed out, the Mozilla project is a complex one with many
features beside just a browsing app, the Gecko engine and XUL and XML related technologies are the Mozilla project’s future, not the standalone browser imho.
but in my PIII 400Mhz with NT4 and my Athlon 1.2Gh with W2k there is no problem with menu redrawing.
Please belive me. I’m pretty expert with graphic problems so I’m not easily fooled.
Probably there is a problem with WinXP or with double CPU or with graphic card drivers.
“No, that would be a way to not make YOU, the readers, angry. I do not care if you are getting angry and if you do not like the kind I write.”
That’s a point to argue about. Of course you don’t have to (shouldn’t!) tailor to single readers, but your audience is certainly a larger testing facility than your home. And yes, I understand that “filtering” not-so-biased from biased comments is difficult to impossible.
Anyway, my complaints were/are mostly about the bulletin on the front page. I actually believe it should display some sugar coating; “both sides” of the story. Yes, you recommend reading the comments in there, but you can’t expect all casual readers to do that. I believe journalists have a responsibility there. You use a different approach, you report what you have experienced and polarize all you want. I can accept that, I understand why – I just don’t like it very much, personally. For some it’s the line between “boring” and “compelling” journalism, I guess.
Back to business. I just tested MoZilla 1.1 on a PII-450, 256 MB Ram, Windows XP Pro. And yes, MoZilla’s UI feels less responsive than IE6’s. While I don’t experience those drawing glitches with the top menus (they’re slower, but “old” menus vanish fast enough), the context menus are pretty much broken. 🙁