Firefox has won...

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Guest

I'm all for a 99% Microsoft domain and I enjoy working with Microsoft
products and I'm one of the few that doesn't complain all the time about
something that MS is doing....but I have to say, I really like IE 7 and
Windows Defender, but the amount of system memory they take up is not
acceptable.

For instance, if I have 15 tabs, spread of 3 taskbar tabs of IE 7, it takes
up more than 300MB of system memory. This is insane.

It calls to attention the label of bloatware even more so. I hate burning
MS (unlike most people) but this is quite unacceptable for most of the
general population. We will all 'learn to live with it' because we simply
don't have much of a choice--I can use firefox and plenty of others will
too--but the general population that I deal with on a constant daily basis
wil never fully adopt firefox...why? They just won't...they are too used to
always having IE available, no matter what...IF firefox was always available
NO MATTER the situation, like installed on XP or Vista on the cheapest and
lightest OS installation, then the general population may adopt it. And I'm
talking about the 65 year old lady who just lost her husband and lives in a
stylish condo and lives nicely...she has a new computer...she is never going
to use firefox unless someone really really tutors her on it and that's just
not realistic most of the time (imo).

So we're stuck with having to upgrade everything again...and then the T-Rex
names Vista is running behind us and is about to bite into us all!

I would appreciate Microsoft trying to minimize the size of their software
setup files, total amount of size of final installation, and the amount of
system memory and resources of the computer their products take up....even
the Optical mouse software (if installed) takes up something like 5mb of
system memory...is this really necessary? Remember Gates saying a computer
will never need more than .... of memory. What was that #, wasn't it
something like 64kb or something like that? In 20 years, the MS Brain Chip
(the upgrade from an MS Optical Mouse) is going to need 2 terabytes of system
memory in order to run on a computer. Windows Pluto Professional is going to
need 4,382,120 thousand terabytes, or approximately something like that.

Have a good day, and drink a cup of coffee,

~Dog
 
Strange on your end. I just opened 10 web pages and show 82,216K being used
for I.E. 7 final.

These are all major sites with a lot of graphics and flash running.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Richard said:
Strange on your end. I just opened 10 web pages and show 82,216K being used
for I.E. 7 final.

These are all major sites with a lot of graphics and flash running.
Click to expand...

YMMV (Your Memory May Vary)

Not to gripe about MS or Firefox, but I've been using Firefox since it
was 1.0, mainly because IE was targeted for most of the hacker exploits
and Firefox supported tabbed browsing. I only used IE for running
windows update.

I can understand the theoretically bigger footprint for IE7, given that
it supports a wider range of functions, out-of-the box (the default
install). I'd guess that if you made a fair comparison with Firefox
configured with its required plug-ins to equal IE7 (take RSS support, as
just a single aspect), you'd find that Firefox isn't as slim as it may seem.

There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft is/was "lazy" about
upgrading IE's features, probably because they had > 90% of the browser
market. Firefox is the reason they made a move to keep up - if there are
no "Joneses", there is no inspiration to keep up. Microsoft could have
offered us tabbed browsing faster than IE, in theory, because they have
resources to think about new features that save time, and expertise to
do it. But the fact is that they did not. They simply imitated features
that other companies innovated. It works well for their economic model,
but it the reason why anti-trust people fight so hard - it's unfair to
the end-user.

Such a track record gives ammunition to those who argue that monopolies
are bad things for consumers - in the end, we're stuck with inferior
technology, because there's no motivation (competition) to improve. It's
shameful that it took such a huge company so long to come up with
something comparable. I doubt that Firefox is *far* superior to IE7, but
I'm glad that despite Microsoft's hugeness, something was able to get
Microsoft off their lazy butts. I have upgraded to IE7 and tried it out,
but I'm sticking with Firefox for now. Nothing has changed my mind that
it's superior, and given the security and targeting history, I'd rather
stick with a less-known browser.

Now we're seeing the a similar anti-trust squabble in the Anti-Virus
market with respect to the "lazy" monopolies such as McAfee and
Symantec. Microsoft is the one that's apparently raising the bar. We'll
have to wait and see how Vista works with MS anti-virus tools, once it
has some significant install base. I sincerely believe that had
Microsoft done security correctly in Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, Symantec
would still be doing only financial software and maybe McAfee would not
exist at all...

The bottom line - complex software development is still hard. Big
companies get slow and doggy, and it takes a competent, agile newbie in
the market to keep the game honest.

As consumers, we should be happy to see this competition, because where
there's fighting amongst competing companies, there are (theoretically)
better features (and lower costs) for the consumers.
 
SpamFighter said:
YMMV (Your Memory May Vary)
Click to expand...

Here's a test I did:

1. I opened IE7 and Firefox, both with their default search page as
google.com

2. I googled the words water buffalo in the first page of each browser.

3. In each browser, I ctrl-clicked the first 7 links on the Google
results, so that they open in tabbed panes.

4. I compared memory footprint of each browser in Windows Task Manager:

firefox.exe 36,264K
iexplore.exe 37,344K

Conclusion: no significant difference. My test is very simple, and is
not proof that the original poster doesn't have a point. But we should
get more information on how to repeat it.

For the record, I use Firefox for my personal reasons, which I claim to
be more based on features than dogma. Information technology evolves too
fast for us to be dogmatic about any one company's philosophy.
 
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