Firefox 4 ~ anyone using it?

[C-Man]

It'll run well enough on a 500MHz K6-III. The bottleneck is usually the video card, but in your case, you've got enough video RAM to run Aero if the drivers don't kill you. :3

 

[EphesiaNZ]

I have Firefox 4.0.1, with 4 tabs open, and I'm only getting ~166MB of memory usage (and 12MB for the plugin-container). Windows XP, 512MB of PC133 SDRAM.

A lot of times I think it has more to do with page content - some sites will slow it to a crawl with few tabs open, others I can have 8 or 9 tabs open and navigate with almost no issue.

Yeah true, sites with poor CSS stylesheets and and over abundance of flash content drive the memory usage up a fair bit.

Another "lightweight" browser people can try is Midori. I have only used this in Linux but there is a Windows version too. Midori (for Windows) can be downloaded here,

Midori - Twotoasts.de

or if you have Linux then just install it from your distro's repository.

It might be worth a try on a machine with 512MB memory or less.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

The listed specs for that setup differ from mine in a few ways: they're using a 5400rpm drive and I have a 7200rpm, they've got the GeForce FX 5200 w/128MB, whereas my GeForce 6200 has 256MB, and I have less system RAM and a Celeron. But it still makes me wonder what it would be like to try and run Win7 on this thing.

I'd personally go with a lightweight Linux distro such as Crunchbang Linux or Linux Mint LXDE. I had Linux Mint LXDE booting using just 80MB on a Dell C400 laptop which has a 1.2GHz PIII with 512MB RAM and it worked a treat!

 

[Sophrosyne]

I'm waiting for my favorite theme to get updated to work with FF4 first
PitchDark is the name of it.

 

[MPaul]

I saw this thread, so a couple days ago I installed FF4. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04. I was surprised. FF4 is faster, virtually as fast as Chromium -- and the graphics, font and general layout had something I cannot describe that were such an improvement in appearance.

However, just now, Chromium updated. Now, it is much faster than FF4. Chromium also improved the graphics, font and general layout -- almost like FF4. So I'll stay with Chromium. Its interface seemed weird to me at first, but now I consider it the best for navigation. However, FF's FireFTP is the best for FTP. I love it and use it now exclusively. Chrome and Chromium do not have an FTP add-on.

 

[Qyöt27]

I'd personally go with a lightweight Linux distro such as Crunchbang Linux or Linux Mint LXDE. I had Linux Mint LXDE booting using just 80MB on a Dell C400 laptop which has a 1.2GHz PIII with 512MB RAM and it worked a treat!

True, but the part where I've been using Ubuntu on here since 5.10 gets overlooked. These days I mostly use LXDE anyway, although I used to use Fluxbox before the hiatus I took between 6.10 (I think; maybe it was actually 7.04) and 8.10.

 

[Dark_Lite]

Chrome probably uses more ram because every tab is a process. As far as I'm aware, Firefox is still using multithreading. Also, you really shouldn't care how much RAM something is using unless you find yourself with very finite resource requirements. 400mb RAM used on a system with 6gb of RAM is a drop in the bucket. Also, browsers are only going to use more RAM as time goes on. Graphically intense web apps using WebGL are the easiest example. The more advanced things you wish to do, the more RAM will be used. Keep in mind that browsers are not simple HTTP request-response clients anymore. You can build an entire offline application in a web browser using JavaScript. Of course, those apps are going to use up more RAM than a traditional website.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Also, you really shouldn't care how much RAM something is using unless you find yourself with very finite resource requirements. 400mb RAM used on a system with 6gb of RAM is a drop in the bucket.

But a lot of people have between 512MB to 3GB. Even with 3GB system running Vista/Win7 and Chrome with a couple of tabs open, you have just used approx 1.5GB or half of your memory resources. Agreed that the web and its apps are going to consume memory more than say five years back but those websites that consume memory tend to be poorly written in the first place. The sooner HTML5 gets adopted, the better - Flash content will hopefully die and we can have some of our CPU cycles back

I occasionally like to go back to the old days of the net and use the Lynx web browser - you want to see how fast a webpage can load? Just don't expect any pictures

 

[C-Man]

Dillo on a 486 or Arachne/Lynx on a 286. Web 1.0 right there.

 

[lux et lex]

I use it. The hardest thing to get used to is the button rearrangement.

 

[Qyöt27]

I use it. The hardest thing to get used to is the button rearrangement.

Although it is pretty easy to set it back to how it was before (I edited the Bookmarks on the toolbar out for privacy reasons).

 

[Dark_Lite]

But a lot of people have between 512MB to 3GB. Even with 3GB system running Vista/Win7 and Chrome with a couple of tabs open, you have just used approx 1.5GB or half of your memory resources. Agreed that the web and its apps are going to consume memory more than say five years back but those websites that consume memory tend to be poorly written in the first place. The sooner HTML5 gets adopted, the better - Flash content will hopefully die and we can have some of our CPU cycles back

I occasionally like to go back to the old days of the net and use the Lynx web browser - you want to see how fast a webpage can load? Just don't expect any pictures

Yeah and what is the other 1.5 gb doing? If it's just sitting there doing nothing, you will have no problems. RAM only becomes a problem when it starts thrashing.

 

[Feroc]

I'll stick to Chrome. There are just not enough unique features anymore, so there is no reason for me to get used to Firefox again.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Yeah and what is the other 1.5 gb doing? If it's just sitting there doing nothing, you will have no problems. RAM only becomes a problem when it starts thrashing.

True, the extra 1.5GB will be for badly coded Windows applications and API's, maybe a bit left too for dll hell and associated memory leaks.

 

[William_0]

Google Chrome > Firefox

 

[C-Man]

True, the extra 1.5GB will be for badly coded Windows applications and API's, maybe a bit left too for dll hell and associated memory leaks.

Not to mention the spyware.

 

[MrJim]

Two months later and I still haven't tried out FF4~~only my youngest son uses it and he has 10,000 bookmarks he doesn't want to lose lol.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Firefox 4 now has a synch tool which allows you to roam and take your bookmarks etc to other Firefox browsers.

 

[Dark_Lite]

True, the extra 1.5GB will be for badly coded Windows applications and API's, maybe a bit left too for dll hell and associated memory leaks.

Well personally I too prefer OSes with a small memory footprint. But that's not necessarily because I need the RAM to do other things. It's because large memory footprints tends to be correlated with slowness and craptastic security (i.e. Windows). If an OS that uses a lot of RAM is also fast, and can actually justify its use of that much RAM, I'd be fine with it.

 

[EphesiaNZ]

Yeah, love small memory footprints here too - my first computer had 0.5k user RAM! Just amazing what you could do with that.