Why the excitement? [LWN.net]

Why the excitement?

Posted May 18, 2003 22:24 UTC (Sun) by alspnost (guest, #2763)
Parent article: Mozilla Firebird 0.6 released

Sorry everyone, I don't mean to diminish the efforts of the Mozilla team, but what is all the fuss about? Maybe FlameBird is on its way towards becoming a better browser than Mozilla 1.4, but currently it's just a stripped-down tool that doesn't seem to offer anything new. I like the preferences dialog, but there's nothing else that grabs me even remotely.

Am I missing something? I regard Mozilla, in its current form, as a splendid browser, and streets ahead of anything else. As for speed, well yes, FB is faster, but it's irrelevant because they're all still slower than IE. I hate to admit it, but I simply can't deny that IE6 still blows away everything else in terms of speed. And even more distressingly, Moz 1.4b runs much faster on Win2k than it does on my ultra-optimised Linux/Gentoo installation on the same machine. Sometimes the truth hurts, not that it's going to stop me using Linux of course!

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Why the excitement?

Posted May 19, 2003 0:35 UTC (Mon) by kdebisschop (guest, #1158) [Link]

From http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/phoenix-advantages.html

Better performance

In my testing, Phoenix has a 30-40% startup improvement over Mozilla/Netscape and a 40-50% new window improvement over Mozilla/Netscape.

Smaller download size, disk footprint and memory usage

Phoenix is nearly half the download size of Mozilla (6MB download compared to 11MB for windows) and it continues to shrink while Mozilla gets bigger.

Phoenix is about half the size on disk as Mozilla (about 12.4MB on disk compared to 24MB for Mozilla.) As Phoenix developers continue to remove unused or unwanted code this number will continue to improve.
Phoenix also takes up about 15% less RAM than Mozilla (18MB runtime for Phoenix compared to 21MB for Moz on windows.)

Granted, there is a difference between goal and reality. But in my experience, they've made good strides so far. Maybe it's is not yet as fast as IE. But it's fast enough that I no longer spend my time worrying about the comparison

Plus, with Xft and the leaner interface, I just like the way it looks. Of course YMMV, but that's a pretty good thumbnail of why I am excited.