Free and Open Source blogger with an attitude
This is the first day that I have the mood to blog since Eidul Fitr (Hari Raya).
What really caught my attention since the last few days I was away-from-keyboard is the startup time of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 browser on my 7 years old pc (Pentium 4 1.8 GHz) running Ubuntu 7.10, it was noticeably slow, giving me the impression it’s bloated. Was it only me? or does anybody else notice it too?
Currently I use Epiphany to write this post…
The Ubuntu project has released Hardy Heron 8.04.1, as the release number implies, it is a bugfix release which contains all the security updates and bug fixes for the last 2 months since the first release of 8.04. The release can be downloaded from Ubunty Hardy download page in the form of ISO files.
Current users need not to download the new CD as they are most likely have all the security patches applied via the built-in Automatic Update feature in Ubuntu.
As a bonus, the CD also includes the production release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0 compared to 3.0 Beta in 8.04.
Back few years ago, there are a bunch of dude released a lightweight browser named Phoenix (way back in 2001-2002) as an alternative to the current Mozilla browser release.
This lightweight browser which contains no more than bare component (Gecko) to enable web browsing was a major attraction by itself. Then they changed the name to Firebird and finally to Mozilla Firefox because of legal issues. Its not about the naming problem though, a rose by another name is still a rose.
Mozilla Firefox gain the fame of being a lean and mean web browser, as in its original vision. But then things started to change. As the user grew, they started to add features that make the browser become more complicated. Bugs and usability problem begins to rear its ugly head. One of the things people might notice is it began to eat up much of valueable resources. CPU usage starts to shoot up, memory leaks being the norm since 1.5.x release. It does not feel like a “lean and mean” browser anymore.
What matter most is not the bell and whistle, if people want that, they would just download Seamonkey, because why else it is being offered in the first place? Fix memory and CPU resource problem because it is so damn obvious it failed to act as lightweight browser there. We dont need all the bell and whistle, a “simple lightweight” browser would suffice.
Perhaps we need another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox, this time for real…