Browsers of Despair.
It is fairly obvious to occasional readers that I get a bit annoyed on political themes, but more recently I have nearly despaired at the piss poor quality of some released open sourced software.
I’m talking about browsers, not my first one, NCSA’s Mosaic. It used to run on a machine with about 2-3 MIPS, that’s probably 1/1000th of today’s processing power. Yet it was functional and did the job. Oh and the memory usage was probably about 2-6 Mbytes.
How we have advanced, machines with the processing power of Cray Super Computers and browsers that grind to a halt, if six plus tabs are open.
Firefox 3.0.7 is a prime example. In my experience, if used for too long, under Debian, and with too many pages open it will often start to consume 97% of the processor, as the machine grinds to a halt.
It’s not as bad as Internet Explorer, but very frustrating when it is fairly easy for developers to profile the code and find these rather conspicuous bugs. Flock have done it.
Granted, Firefox 3.1 beta 2 was much better, but beta 3 had a way of forgetting personal settings and passwords, an incredibly annoying bug.
Chrome looks very good and the Crossover version is usable, but not, in my view, for long and complicated sessions. I look forward to the native Linux version of Chrome.
I seem to have tried all the available browsers, that Debian offers and then some. Not with much success either, they were either resource hungry, as with Firefox, couldn’t display pages correctly, kept crashing or just too crude.
I’m giving Flock a whirl at the moment and it seems fairly good, opening 16 tabs didn’t faze it. Opera or Firefox would have ground to a halt.
I hope that Flock lives up to these expectations. I wrote that 3 weeks ago and Flock is fairly good, light on the machine, but it has a habit of losing the password settings, which might just be me as I am not running under my normal setup.
OK, it wasn’t really despair just annoyance.
My OS is Ubuntu, and lately I’ve settled on Epiphany. I gather it’s a simplified version of Firefox … every once in awhile it just shuts down, but for the most part it performs pretty well.
It doesn’t (as far as I can tell) have as much facility for encorporating add-ins, etc as Firefox does. But it will accomodate youtube, subjectively seems a little less vulnerable (in terms of “do-loops”) to bad Java code than is Mozilla, and handles multiple open tabs without bogging down the OS.
Regards
Rob in Madison
rob
01/05/2009 at 22:37
Yeah me too, I liked Epiphany, but I thought that the bookmark management was primitive and I was sure how often they updated with security fixes either.
modernityblog
01/05/2009 at 23:35
[...] have found various Gecko based browsers have a bad habit of taking 99% of the CPU, [...]
Chrome Of The Brave. « ModernityBlog
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