A few responses [LWN.net]

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 19:31 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
Parent article: A grumpy user's browser review

I didn't look at mozilla (1) for space and time reasons, and (2) because it is supposed to be an end-of-life project. If somebody is looking to switch browsers now, going to mozilla doesn't seem like the right idea.

With regard to Konqueror: I have never succeeded it making it work if KDE is not running. I may get as far as a window on screen, but with no active buttons. For me, at least, it clearly is not happy outside of the KDE environment. I'm looking for a browser, not a whole new desktop, so I didn't review it here. Konqueror is a nice application.

I had forgotten about about:config, frankly. That is not the friendliest interface, though. Add just a bit of documentation, however, and it's getting closer to what a serious user might want.

Can somebody post where you find the "gtk2+xfs" version of Firefox? I dug around for it for a while, but no joy.

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A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 19:33 UTC (Wed) by euvitudo (subscriber, #98) [Link]

You should poke around the FTP site. You'll find it in the same directory as the other version.

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 19:36 UTC (Wed) by euvitudo (subscriber, #98) [Link]

More specifically: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.8/ (sorry for the reply to the reply)

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 20:27 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

It's also on the Mozilla disc. Mine showed up in my (snail) mailbox the same day the new version was announced. The subscription disc is well worth the money if you a) have a job, and b) suffer with a dial-up connection to your ISP.

Dependency problem?

Posted Feb 11, 2004 19:54 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

You may have a problem with your distribution. In Debian unstable, "apt-get konqueror" gets konqueror and the needed parts of KDE, which is enough to make Konqueror work. If you have all the dependencies resolved and Konqueror isn't working, your distribution may have broken packages with incorrect dependencies. This should be reported to the distribution maintainers. You may also want to remove ~/.kde just in case it has some old garbage.

Konqueror is great if you have to deal with many forms. It has large form controls that are easy to select by the mouse. Unlike Firefox, you cannot accidentally "focus" a radiobutton or a checkbox by the mouse without selecting it. I use Konqueror to manage Mailman moderation queues. It's worth the the disk space, the memory and the load time even if Firefox is already running.

Dependency problem?

Posted Feb 12, 2004 11:05 UTC (Thu) by kreutzm (subscriber, #4700) [Link]

Unfortunately, you also need to (manually) install the IO-Slaves, see this bug report for details.

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 20:52 UTC (Wed) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

(2) is no longer correct, I think. In some recent mozilla news item (I forgot where, frankly), it was mentioned that the monolithic suite would stay around indefinitely after all, just that the Mozilla Foundation itself would rather expend its energy on the Bird & Fox.

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 20:54 UTC (Wed) by wes0472 (subscriber, #7541) [Link]

I'd strongly recommend you invest some time into getting Konqueror to
work with your current setup. If it isn't, something is broken with your
installation, I have been running Konqueror under GNOME or even remotely
on a CDE desktop for a year (or maybe two?) now. I'm running the latest
released version of Konqueror (3.2) from the official rpms on ftp.kde.org
on Fedora Core 1.

1) 98MB for a browser instance? That's crazy. I have SEVEN konqueror
processes running right now, and the total memory obtained from ps
-o'pid,rss,args' is 186MB. That's an average of 26MB/instance. I always
thought that was too much :)

2) Your example render takes a little over 5 seconds for Konqueror to
render the page *remotely*! I'm timing from when I click 'refresh' to
when the page is complete. I saved the page to my hard drive, repeated
the test from there - local render time is approximately 2.5 seconds.

3) I'm not even sure what you're talking about with this 'typeahead find
death grip'. I don't think this is a problem in Konqueror. You can
disable animations (or even set it to 'only animate once'). Fonts are
pretty. Bookmark editing works. It doesn't suffer from the 'users are
stupid don't let them configure anything' syndrome.

A long-satisfied Konqueror user.

About rendering times

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:01 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I should have pointed out that my rendering time tests were not done on the fastest machine on the planet. I'm still using the Penguin Computing box that I reviewed in LWN back in 1999... Time to do something about that.

About rendering times

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:07 UTC (Wed) by wes0472 (subscriber, #7541) [Link]

Ah, good point. I'm running on a 1Ghz P4 with 512MB ram.

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:03 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

I have SEVEN konqueror processes running right now, and the total memory obtained from ps -o'pid,rss,args' is 186MB. That's an average of 26MB/instance.

That really doesn't tell us much. How much memory does it take to run a single instance?

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:08 UTC (Wed) by wes0472 (subscriber, #7541) [Link]

$ ps -eo'pid,rss,args' | grep konqueror

24917 26756 kdeinit: konqueror --preload
7947 20236 kdeinit: konqueror --preload
9453 22636 kdeinit: konqueror --preload
9468 27124 kdeinit: konqueror --preload
14103 32228 kdeinit: konqueror --preload
14242 28172 konqueror http://www.google.com
14476 36300 kdeinit: konqueror --preload

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:22 UTC (Wed) by wes0472 (subscriber, #7541) [Link]

Actually, I suppose you want to know konqueror + all the KDE support
processes. Hmm. Another good point. Plus I should have counted the IO
slaves in with my original number.

sysadm 22680 konqueror
sysadm 4600 kdeinit: Running...
sysadm 8312 kdeinit: dcopserver --nosid --suicide
sysadm 8624 kdeinit: klauncher
sysadm 12848 kdeinit: kded
sysadm 7960 kdeinit: kio_file
sysadm 7940 kdeinit: kio_file
sysadm 7944 kdeinit: kio_file
sysadm 7948 kdeinit: kio_file
sysadm 7952 kdeinit: kio_file
sysadm 8712 kdeinit: kio_http
sysadm 8708 kdeinit: kio_http

Total: 114288. A bit higher, unfortunately.

FYI, the 'kio_file' and 'kio_http' are slave processes shared among all
konqueror instances, even on my account with 7 instances, I still have
the same number. I believe the number of io slaves is configurable,
somewhere.

A few responses

Posted Feb 11, 2004 22:13 UTC (Wed) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

--Thanks for that ps command example; I used it to see the RSS on Opera 6.12 with (27) windows open tabbed, and got this:

1234 1088 /bin/sh /usr/bin/opera
1236 58092 /usr/lib/opera/6.12-20030305.1/opera

--56MB for 27 windows ain't bad.

A few responses

Posted Feb 12, 2004 1:02 UTC (Thu) by tseaver (subscriber, #1544) [Link]

> Can somebody post where you find the "gtk2+xfs" version of Firefox? I dug
> around for it for a while, but no joy.

I found it linked on the "Release Notes" page:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/

as:

"GTK2 + XFT", http://ftp.mozilla.org/.../firefox-0.8-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz

A few responses

Posted Feb 12, 2004 11:57 UTC (Thu) by fjalvingh (subscriber, #4803) [Link]

It can be found here when you follow the download links:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/#download

But they seem to have listened: the default download for Linux now returns the xft version ;-)