[plug] Are we at 'war' with Microsoft?

Cameron Patrick cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au
Fri Nov 7 16:30:12 WST 2003


On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 04:10:18PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| True. I should've been clearer - I was referring more to the mail 
| component of Mozilla than the browser. Maybe thunderbird will be better, 
| but I have never managed to get it to run - it's always segfaulted on me 
| no matter what I do, on both my home and work systems. A build from 
| source hasn't helped.

I've never really used Mozilla's mail client, so can't comment on that.
Once again, I expect it compares favourably to Outlook Express though :)

| >It's speed (or lack thereof) is pretty atrocious,
| >though
| 
| It is? Hadn't noticed - seriously. The only speed issues I have with 
| Mozilla are related to unaccelerated RENDER on XFree86, and that's every 
| text-heavy app not just Mozilla.

I haven't noticed it so much after upgrading to a multi-GHz machine, but
the UI used to feel noticeably sluggish.  Things like dropping down the
bookmarks menu (with hundreds of bookmarks in it) took a couple of
seconds.  Likewise opening the Preferences box.

Even on a fast machine, it often seems to take a couple of CPU seconds
doing apparently bugger-all when it loses focus, and flicking between
tabs often takes the better part of a second or so when there are many
tabs open.  I'm not sure whether these latter two are due to RENDER or
not, though.

| >but I don't think anyone has any plans on improving it since CPU
| >speeds and memory capacities just keep growing.
| 
| Nobody with the skills can be bothered, I expect.

Could be a bit of that.  There's also an aspect of diminishing returns,
too - how many people are going to care about a few micro-optimisations
that can only be noticed on a 300MHz machine?

Cameron.

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