Browsers - whats your favourite?

  • Thread starter Thread starter P
  • Start date Start date
On 22 Feb 2004 22:18:37 +0800, Aaron



NO! Say it ain't so! Hehehe


I already know that.
Click to expand...

Yet you persist in comparing apples and oranges.
And the Firefox extensions are small too. If they stood alone, they
would be, er, Firefox. If my aunt had cajones, she would be my uncle.
Click to expand...

You lost me here. I'm just telling you the facts about Firefox, it will
never be as small as myie2 (though it is smaller than myie2+MSIE) , nor
will it come with every bloat crap features like in some IE shells without
the use of extensions.
And the bloat begins.
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Actually that's pretty essential feature, since many newbies have problems
upgrading Firefox due to extension breaking. Sure, It's not a super xyz tab
browsing feature, but not everyone uses that.
Firefox is only a baby and it's already 25% the
size of IE.
Click to expand...

Actually the core (less bundled extensions) will get smaller. Anyway 25%
the size of IE is a lot smaller, don't you think?
Since it's open source, I'm sure there will always be
"light" versions available from rebellious bloat fighters (such as
K-Meleon does for Mozilla).
Click to expand...

Clearly you don't understand the history and aims of the Firefox project
for you to make such a remark. Firefox IS the rebellious bloat fighter
against mozilla, that was crowned the king.

Firefox (and it's precedessors) IS a slim light weight version of Mozilla,
and began as a reaction against Seamonkey which became bloated by not only
being an application suite, but also adding dozens of "
"geek" features that bloated up the browser.

K-Meleon is an open-source browser based on Gecko, the rendering engine for
Mozilla. It is intended to be a light, fast, and customizable browse like
Firefox, yes but other than that it is no more or less a bloat fighter than
Firefox.

It's main advanatage over Firefox is that it's designed only for windows
unlike Firefox which is cross platform and is a little faster and smaller.
But it will still never be as small as a IE shell, since like Firefox it
needs the gecko engine.
I still say functionality and features add little bloat compared to
the browser engine.
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Yes, that was my point, that explains how small IE shells are. But unlike
myie2 where you just download the IE shell, most users of Firefox will have
to download the browser engine as well. For users on dialup, adding more
extensions/features that they may or may not use, might discourage them
from even trying.

Also you can define "bloat" by more than size of the download. The more
features you include that are not used, the more complicated the program,
the slower it is and the more bugs can occur.



Bob

Remove "kins" from address to reply.
Click to expand...



Aaron (my email is not munged!)
 
Yes, that was my point, that explains how small IE shells are. But unlike
myie2 where you just download the IE shell, most users of Firefox will have
to download the browser engine as well. For users on dialup, adding more
extensions/features that they may or may not use, might discourage them
from even trying.
Click to expand...

That was my ONLY point. I don't know how we got into such a heavy discussion
on things we agree upon.
Also you can define "bloat" by more than size of the download. The more
features you include that are not used, the more complicated the program,
the slower it is and the more bugs can occur.
Click to expand...


I still say that "Options and settings" add almost nothing to Windows bloat
or file size.

Plugins, OTOH can add a little more. Some of the DLL's can approach 1MB
each.

Once the Firefox application is finished, and the debug code removed, it
will be hefty... probably on the order of 15MB. This is almost half of IE's
massive download. (much of which is OS related) A large pack of extensions
would probably be no more than 1-2MB more, and will add immensely to the
bare bones of Firefox. I do not consider this bloat for all the extra
functionality you will get. I'm sure there will be pre-packaged enhanced
versions, because people expect things to work without downloading
extensions and plugins.

Bob

Remove "kins" from address to reply.
 
That was my ONLY point. I don't know how we got into such a heavy
discussion on things we agree upon.
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Because we disagree about what bloat means.
I still say that "Options and settings" add almost nothing to Windows
bloat or file size.
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Try TBE plus Firefox, versus Firefox alone and see which runs faster.
Once the Firefox application is finished, and the debug code removed,
it will be hefty... probably on the order of 15MB. This is almost half
of IE's massive download. (much of which is OS related).
Click to expand...

That's the price you pay for loading up IE so quick, in any case in terms
of size, you can no way say Firefox is bloated, though I have seen only
one browser (not shell) significantly smaller.
A large pack
of extensions would probably be no more than 1-2MB more, and will add
immensely to the bare bones of Firefox. I do not consider this bloat
for all the extra functionality you will get.
Click to expand...

Well, *you* don't consider it bloat, but I bet you are not a typical
user. I probably use way too many extensions than average firefox user
probably, and sometimes they *the extensions* can get in each others way.

I'm sure there will be
pre-packaged enhanced versions, because people expect things to work
without downloading extensions and plugins.
Click to expand...

My personal feeling is that the core of Firebird is to be compared to
MSIE. It won't feel quite so "barebones" then. If you want to get
additonal features, you get extensions, kind of like how you go out and
look for IE shells. The SUNjava plugin would be hard to add though.

The only difference between IE shells and extensions is that in the
former you get heck a lot of features at one time, rather than choose
several small ones. It's no big trick to bundle extensions with Firefox,
look for example at the following

http://blackdiamond.mozdev.org/

It's not the latest, but you get the idea, Firebird 0.7 packaged with one
theme and 7 extensions in the package,




Bob

Remove "kins" from address to reply.
Click to expand...



Aaron (my email is not munged!)
 
Aaron said:
K-Meleon is an open-source browser based on Gecko, the rendering
engine for Mozilla. It is intended to be a light, fast, and
customizable browse like Firefox, yes but other than that it is no
more or less a bloat fighter than Firefox.

It's main advanatage over Firefox is that it's designed only for
windows unlike Firefox which is cross platform and is a little faster
and smaller. But it will still never be as small as a IE shell, since
like Firefox it needs the gecko engine.
Click to expand...

In the future it will be possible to use one Mozilla "runtime" for several
"Mozilla applications".
 
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I don't know.... I really like Babya Explorer.
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Kindly quote the relevent message in its' *entirety* (see below). The way
*you've* done it, makes it appear as if *I* approve of post-v4.8.0 releases
[of] Netscape; this is certainly *not* the case.
And LOSE the/your top-posting. Top-posting makes proper-reading of [the]
message-in-question *extremely* difficult!

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I'm just curious as to what you consider to be all the "AOL crap" bolted
onto Netscape?
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Any version of Netscape post-v4.7.8 (although AOL had been been bundling
WinAmp in so early as 4.7.5, if memory serves).
I use Netscape 7.1 and it certainly does not have any AOL crap bolted to
it. However, it does run better than any of the Mozilla browsers, including
Firefox, and actually knows how to sort it's bookmarks!
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Beats me. How does one tell?
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Here's a easy way to tell. But it's very dangerous.

There's a worm that exploits this already. See
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32bizexa.html

Upon infection, it will spread by sending IMs with a url.

Any user of IE that surfs to that site will be automatically infected
(due to a recently found IE exploit), if the antivirus doesn't intervene.
And by my count, this was floating around for at least 24 hours before
the antiviruses caught on due to the nature of the worm.

It's not clear whether the updated signatures can catch a modified
variant that uses the same trick, but if you use IE that's the price you
pay.






Aaron (my email is not munged!)
 
I use Mozilla Firefox, because I can download the source code and
compile my own AMD K6-2 & Pentium 4 optimized builds for my computers
:-) + I can customize it the way I want using extra config settings.
 
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