Web browsers, thoughts

Discuss software and how to tweak more performance out of your system.
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His Royal Majesty King V
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Web browsers, thoughts

Post by His Royal Majesty King V »

All,

Well, I've been using Mozilla Firefox since it was recommended here at K6Plus back I think when it was still called Phoenix, version 0.6

I've also tried Opera in versions 5 and 6 prior to that.

Opera had some issues, so I went with Firefox.

And to this day, I like it very much. Works great and fast on my olds Socket 7 systems.

But now, I don't know.

You see, I went to visit my dad. Did a wipe-and-reinstal of his computer, installed the bare minimum.

For the OS, a Win98SE Lite install.

Browser: Mozilla Firefox 1.0.

Email Client: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 - I don't know how well this does because I still use Eudora Lite 3.01, which I've been using since 1996.


And then I realized that times have changed.

My dad's computer is a NEC system, with an AMD K6-2 450. Not quite as fast as my machines, but certainly no slouch by comparision. Only 50MHz less.

It's on an SiS based board, I think SiS530, with of course the integrated graphics. That's fine, all my dad does is browse the web a little, check email, and use MS Excel.

However, I noticed that browsing with Firefox was rather slow. Probably because, while it recommends a minimum CPU of 233MHz, 64MB is the recommendation for minimum RAM.

And, yes, my dad's computer has only 64MB RAM.

So, it'll work with that, but it was slow. Annoyingly so, for me. My wife's computer is a 266MHz P2, but with 128MB RAM (and a cheesy S3 Virge PCI videocard), it was notably faster than my dad's system when using Firefox.

I haven't tried it on a system with 96MB, but I really don't think 64MB is adequate. It was noticeably slower than my system, and all he was doing was going to check stock prices at finance.yahoo.com

(on the other hand, it was MUCH faster than it was before I did the reinstall, so he was delighted. 6-7 seconds versus the previous 30 seconds to display the page . . and yes, that 30 seconds was despite having a cablemodem!)

So, I also installed Opera on his system, version 7.54 to be precise.

I'll have to admit, speedwise, it's putting Firefox to shame on an older system with less memory.

I know older versions had rendering problems, and I also was always annoyed with the placement of the banner ads. However, if you choose to use the "targeted google ads" instead of the standard banner ads, insetad of being a thick rectangle on the right side of the toolbar, it's a much thinner rectangle along the top. Much less obtrusive.

So, I told my dad to use Opera, and if he ever runs into anything that Opera won't display properly, to use Firefox.

He's happy.

I have to admit that I was impressed with Opera's rendering speed. I might give it a whirl again, especially if I put an older box together, to see if they've gotten some of their rendering problems fixed.

Anyone been using it at all? Thoughts?

Only little glitches I've found with it is that, like Firefox, CTRL-plus and CTRL-minus are supposed to increase and decrease the font size. On Opera on my dad's computer, CTRL-minus works, CTRL-plus does not.

On the other hand, there's a nifty little droplist with an icon that looks like an eye next to it, with a list of percentages, in 10% increments, to quickly select a zoom size with the mouse. Still, while my dad uses the mouse, I personally prefer the keyboard shortcuts, and wish it worked right.
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Guest

Re: Web browsers, thoughts

Post by Guest »

tried the optimized moox builds?
special builds for various cpu-instruction sets available...
http://www.moox.ws/tech/mozilla/firefox.htm

and try the inoffical servicepack for win98se...
it brings a real speed improvement... (fixes & optimizations)
http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html
His Royal Majesty King V wrote:All,

Well, I've been using Mozilla Firefox since it was recommended here at K6Plus back I think when it was still called Phoenix, version 0.6

I've also tried Opera in versions 5 and 6 prior to that.

Opera had some issues, so I went with Firefox.

And to this day, I like it very much. Works great and fast on my olds Socket 7 systems.

But now, I don't know.

You see, I went to visit my dad. Did a wipe-and-reinstal of his computer, installed the bare minimum.

For the OS, a Win98SE Lite install.

Browser: Mozilla Firefox 1.0.

Email Client: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 - I don't know how well this does because I still use Eudora Lite 3.01, which I've been using since 1996.


And then I realized that times have changed.

My dad's computer is a NEC system, with an AMD K6-2 450. Not quite as fast as my machines, but certainly no slouch by comparision. Only 50MHz less.

It's on an SiS based board, I think SiS530, with of course the integrated graphics. That's fine, all my dad does is browse the web a little, check email, and use MS Excel.

However, I noticed that browsing with Firefox was rather slow. Probably because, while it recommends a minimum CPU of 233MHz, 64MB is the recommendation for minimum RAM.

And, yes, my dad's computer has only 64MB RAM.

So, it'll work with that, but it was slow. Annoyingly so, for me. My wife's computer is a 266MHz P2, but with 128MB RAM (and a cheesy S3 Virge PCI videocard), it was notably faster than my dad's system when using Firefox.

I haven't tried it on a system with 96MB, but I really don't think 64MB is adequate. It was noticeably slower than my system, and all he was doing was going to check stock prices at finance.yahoo.com

(on the other hand, it was MUCH faster than it was before I did the reinstall, so he was delighted. 6-7 seconds versus the previous 30 seconds to display the page . . and yes, that 30 seconds was despite having a cablemodem!)

So, I also installed Opera on his system, version 7.54 to be precise.

I'll have to admit, speedwise, it's putting Firefox to shame on an older system with less memory.

I know older versions had rendering problems, and I also was always annoyed with the placement of the banner ads. However, if you choose to use the "targeted google ads" instead of the standard banner ads, insetad of being a thick rectangle on the right side of the toolbar, it's a much thinner rectangle along the top. Much less obtrusive.

So, I told my dad to use Opera, and if he ever runs into anything that Opera won't display properly, to use Firefox.

He's happy.

I have to admit that I was impressed with Opera's rendering speed. I might give it a whirl again, especially if I put an older box together, to see if they've gotten some of their rendering problems fixed.

Anyone been using it at all? Thoughts?

Only little glitches I've found with it is that, like Firefox, CTRL-plus and CTRL-minus are supposed to increase and decrease the font size. On Opera on my dad's computer, CTRL-minus works, CTRL-plus does not.

On the other hand, there's a nifty little droplist with an icon that looks like an eye next to it, with a list of percentages, in 10% increments, to quickly select a zoom size with the mouse. Still, while my dad uses the mouse, I personally prefer the keyboard shortcuts, and wish it worked right.
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