Yesterday I upgraded my Blade 100 (Hundred) to SXCE snv_101. I want to use this box as save-electricity 24x7 general-purpose lightweight www-client, to read pdf's, lern, keep gmail's chat and email open, perform small compiles. I don't expect a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe machine to run very quickly, although the RAM is maxed out to the IIe's maximum addressable limit of 2GB (the IIe+ aka IIi 550MHz/650MHz can handle up to 4GB). And I'm really patient. But FF3 makes this box totally and completely UNusable. It feels as if you would be running in a virtual Bochs-Emulator environment. Or maybe on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM.
At first I wanted to throw the Blade 100 into the waste bin, I was short before. In one last attempt to rescue the system I have installed a motif based version of the newest stable seamonkey (from the mozilla.org site). Result: The Blade 100 behaves like a usable machine now (slow, but with some patience and understanding USE-able. Now I can save money (can keep the Blade 2000 switched off, except for heavy compiles from time to time), run a SPARC, and work ... - and all this at once. FF3 will never be a success. Sun should have been more careful before adopting it. FF3 needs a Dual Opteron 2.5GHz And crashes on some sites on which FF1 and FF2 ran well (e.g. when logging out of gmail's "standard view" webmail interface) . And is sluggish like hell. (with its annoying "fancy" animated "features" which you cannot seem to disable, e.g. the topmost-bars when you are in fullscreen disappear when you move the mouse pointer away and re-appear when you return). So much for that. FF2 has been a bit slow already (but very stable), so has FF1 at its time. But FF3's CPU- and mem- hungriness goes over the top. Enough is enough. IMO they will lose market share. Solaris has become so sluggish meanwhile (on "older" hardware), I sometimes miss the slim Solaris 8's motif based responsiveness. I'm not a performance analyst, but something is (or at least "feels") wrong with Gtk's efficiency. In the old days qt2.x was known as a performance killer, but what is Gtk now? Sun: In your own interest, please don't forget, that many of your target'ed end users (around all parts of the world) don't always have a quad core 2.5GHz machine with 4GB or more of RAM. I very much appreciate the work that has been achieved by the BeleniX and MilaX developers to reduce minimum system requirements during boot. But shipping FF3 as default browser undermines efforts like this (in your own distros SXCE and Indiana), because on this end you waste 10 times the resources that others are trying to save piece for piece (in their distros). Why don't you more try to listen to / learn from the external contributors? For what it is worth. Cheers, Martin
