Not using Netscape (was Re: [techtalk] Re: SMP on Linux (lock ups))

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 09:57:58PM +0100 or thereabouts, Chris J/#6 wrote:
> 
> > The new builds of Mozilla are getting very good.  I've switched to it as my
> > standard browser now.  Check out a new nightly build.  It also has a full
> > featured IMAP mail client.
> > 
> > Jason
> 
> I've found Mozilla to run dog slow on my machine (P200MMX; 64MB RAM) ... has 
> its speed improved in the newer builds?

Depends what 'slow' you mean. We have just graduated from a 28.8k modem
to cablemodem (woo!). So everything on the net seems incredibly fast now!
(Except sourceforge, but that's now usable rather than impossible.) 
It now takes me a few minutes to download a nightly mozilla instead of
a few hours (I jest not) so I have been doing so.

I can't comment on speed of 'getting info and turning it into something
visible' because I have no comparisons: since getting the cable modem
I've been using mozilla, and mozilla-on-cablemodem versus netscape-on-28.8
is not really useful :) 

I also don't use it as a mailer or newsreader, only as a browser.

It seems a little slow to redraw when it has spawned a few new
windows and I start moving them around on top of each other or when
I flip to the workspace that has mozilla on it -- but that could
have been the twenty dialogue boxes underneath it from something
else that were getting redrawn with it :) And if you have that
sidebar thing switched on so that all the google results for something
are listed in it and you start bouncing back and forth between google
and sites it found, the cursor stays slightly different (the "resize this
window" sort of cursor?) for an annoying period of time before you 
can click on things. 

Other than that, it seems entirely usable to me. Definitely compared
with earlier versions. The most recent milestone I used was M14 or M15, 
I think. And it would eventually (over a few hours) leak a lot of 
memory even if I wasn't doing much with it. It's not doing that now.
In fact, it's being extremely reasonable. (No nice numbers here,
this is my considered "just feels that way and top tells me nice
things" opinion, that's all.) general impression.) I imagine they've 
been cleaning up memory leaks a lot or something.

It works with my proxy, it hasn't garbled my preferences. The
log produced by running "./mozilla 2>&1 > moz-log" shows far fewer
surreal messages. And it's coping with almost all sites (including
some the most recent milestone allegedly couldn't show) except for
the evil www.dyson.com, which appears designed to send all browsers
into a frenzy of thrashing: I pointed mozilla there and suddenly
I was wading through treacle to get to 'top' and kill it before
it killed everything else. It got up to 20MB in about a minute
before I armed myself with the 'k' key and did something about it. 

This is a K6 with 64MB RAM, RH 6.1, GNOME almost-1.2, with lots of
gnome-terminals and lynx sessions (don't laugh, I like it still)
and the occasional game; but no file manager or pixmap themes or
anything. 

So: if you have a fast link, it's worth grabbing a nightly build 
and checking it out. If not, well: it's certainly worth a two minute 
download. I am not convinced it's worth a two-hour download when
a milestone must be coming out soon -- but the next milestone 
might be :)

Telsa