“In August, Mozilla’s Director of Research Andreas Gal, and one of the lead engineers for Firefox OS, Philipp von Weitershausen, gave a couple of presentations in Brazil about Firefox OS. We’re now happy to share both the videos and the slides, in various formats for you to see or use, giving your own presentations!” Lots of background on Firefox OS.
only now it’s mobile.
Is they have lost their focus and it shows. Anybody remember what the original mission statement was? it was “To build the best and most lightweight standards complaint browser by far” but ever since Chrome and the rise of the mobiles they have been all over the map and frankly quality has suffered greatly for it.
I have many customers that use low power computers, nettops, netbooks, and older office systems, and I can tell you since around FF 6 its been like a boat anchor on performance. To test products I’m gonna give to customers i have two testbeds, an AMD Sempron from 2004 that I use as a nettop at the shop, and my own netbook which is an Asus EEE with an AMD E350 APU, figuring it it runs good on these systems (even though the E350 is much better than the Atom when it comes to performance) it’ll run good on pretty much ANY systems my customers may own, what have I found?
Well at least in my own tests I’ve found that FF runs like a dog on less than a 2.8GHz P4 with HT, and on low power mobile chips like the E350 it will kill a battery dead. The reason eluded me until Giveawayoftheday had Anvir Task Manager on offer as it leaves a taskbar icon that gives you readings of all the major info, CPU, RAM, and HDD activity and I found FF slams the CPU HARD. Launch? Slam to 100%, New tab? same, Bookmarks browsing? You get the picture. In fact I ran it and Comodo Dragon (A Chromium variant) side by side and while I was able to open multiple tabs, even watch SD video comfortably on even the Sempron, of FF it truly made the system unusable, even making the entire GUI unresponsive. And this was with NO extensions which of course the extensions are what makes FF worth using. With no less than 6 extensions in Dragon its still snappy.
so while i hope they right the ship frankly what I’ve seen doesn’t give me hope and their falling numbers tells me I’m not the only one that has seen this. The nice thing is we’re not stuck on IE or FF, and there is a world of browser out there, sadly many of them do better than FF performance wise, at least from what I’ve seen. For Windows there is Chrome, Dragon, Opera, QTWeb, and Kmeleon for the really old systems, and for Linux there is Chromium and QTWeb, which is a great browser BTW if you need a nice cross platform, you can even run QTWeb on a thumbstick. But right now FF is no longer on my default install list, its just too bloated.
As does always-gratis Process Explorer BTW, the one from Mark Russinovich (well, in half-second intervals at minimum, which does the job for me)
WRT old machines – around here I have an AthlonXP 1700+ (~= 1.47 GHz …but I actually run it at 1.1 GHz & undervolted to minimum supported by mobo, to conserve the decade+ old hardware on the relatively rare occasion it’s booting). It’s still fairly usable with Chrome or Opera. FF… less so, unfortunately.
(hell, an old version of Opera, 9.27, makes a dual PentiumII 266 kinda usable ;p – with js mostly turned off of course; but I think the web in general started working better in that old Opera, during the last two years or so – might be because the web is becoming more standards-compliant)
Thank you, its so nice to get a response other than “You lie! You must hate the FOSS you shill!” even though the browsers I recommend are both Open Source.
And while I’ve used process explorer many a time (most of his tools actually, the man knows his Windows Fu) what i needed was a way to watch in real time EXACTLY what was happening with FF. remember that the UI would get totally unresponsive so it wasn’t like i could switch back and forth and last I checked it didn’t have a gauge that would give you RAM, CPU, and HDD when minimized like AnVir task manager does. With AnVir I was able to simulate an average browsing session while watching ALL the major metrics and see what was really going on, and what I found was that FF just pimpslaps the hell out of low power and older CPUs, in fact in my tests with the E350 i actually lost 45 minutes on the battery using FF over Dragon!
But I can understand hanging onto that old AthlonXP, those were good chips. Its a shame there isn’t an easy way to ship it to you as i have an Athlon 2400+ I’m gonna end up tossing because the board is toast and its a socket A and my Sempron box is a socket 754. But even with a 1.8Ghz Sempron Comodo Dragon (Chromium variant with some nice security features) can run multiple tabs, even play SD video, no problem. I can’t even fire up FF on that unit anymore, its just unusable.
Hm, in Process Explorer: Options -> Tray Icons …and there you can turn on RAM, CPU, I/O history. Also View -> Update Speed.
Yeah, good chips. Plus this is the first version of Athlon XP, 0.18 um Palomino. They were quite a something when launched; short ~half a year later also quite inexpensive already, and still very fast back then.
Too bad it didn’t help AMD as much as it should; Intel was too strong with OEMs, influence on them…
Actually, I have somewhere a faster Socket A 0.13u Athlon XP / Sempron (or maybe even a fake, a remarked Geode, as described under the photo of the green one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sempron#Models_for_Socket_A_.28Socket_…
), just didn’t bother to swap them yet.
And that K8-based Sempron might be faster than 2400+ XP, anyway.