On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 1:00 PM, dos386 <dos...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Want to browse the web with support for current standards? Use a >> browser under Windows or a flavor of *nix. (I'm in Firefox > > FireFox 1 -> 4 MiO > FireFox 48 -> 50 MiO > > The bloat increase is just incredible :-D and sure RAM and CPU > consumption grows too
One man's bloat is another's feature. I've been running Mozilla code since it was still an internal Netscape project to build the follow on to Netscape Communicator, and ran Netscape 6 (or tried to - way too buggy), Netscape 7, the Mozilla Suite, and finally Firefox. FF 1-4 do *not* support current standards, and are likely to fail in odd ways if you try to use them now, I find it worth while to stay current. (My desktop is a quad code 2.4 ghz Xeon box with 8GB RAM, dual booting Windows and Linux. It's low end as such things go these days, but I have the resources to throw at things like Firefox, and largely don't *care* how much RAM is uses. I've got various older kit I play with for fun, but *don't* try to do actual work on it. Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper, so I don't have a reason to try to restrict myself to the sort of stuff used a decade ago.) > I had FireFox pretty well working on my great Pentium 1 laptop with 64 MiO RAM > some years ago ... nowadays the Internet is on the limit of usability with > Pentium 3 and 256 MiO. When are they going to drop Pentium 3 and XP? Depending upon who *they* is, the likely answer is "They already have". XP hasn't been supported by MS (where "support"="gets critical patches") in years, and I doubt current browser code will successfully compile for a P3 target. It all wants stuff like SSE2. > Also the Opera development after version 9 is shameful ... bloat, many > new "features" > (most of them useless), the absurd JavaScript "performance" race, notoriously > bad quality of releases (the infamous NO-SCRIPT-BUG ...) ... and killing their > native engine after version 12. Opera killed the Presto rendering engine they were using in favor of Webkit used by Chrome. Google later forked Webkit to produce Bling, and Opera went along for the ride. It made sense in various ways. Web standards are a moving target, and keeping the rendering engine you use updated is increasingly more complex and expensive. Opera decided the money and resources they had available could be better applied elsewhere, and they could piggyback on an open source rendering engine others also used and contributed code to. If I were them, I might have made the same call. > The world doesn't need "fastest" JavaScript engines needing > several 100 MiO RAM, and even less Adobe Flu$h. Unfortunately, it *does*. But assume the days of Flash are numbered. Adobe has already dropped support for Flash on mobile, and desktop support is bug fixes and plugging security vulnerabilities. Adobe also has a tool in beta to aid migration from Flash to HTML5 based code. These days, browser devs are all moving to HTML5/CSS3 as fast as they can. A major reason it to make Flash go away. The principal use for Flash is displaying video. But HTML5 has a <video> keyword that can let you embed/display video without Flash. You still need a codec to handle the video encoding, but that will be bundled as a component of the browser. In general, browser development now starts with the assumption "Plugins are bad. The user should be able to do what they want without requiring them." The big step towards that came from Cisco. The defacto standard encoding for video these days is H_264, but it's a proprietary spec that requires a license. This meant IE and Chrome could display HTML5 video, because MS and Google paid for a license and could include the codec binary, but FF could not. FF is entirely open source, and needed to be able to offer source as well as binary for the codec. Cisco paid for a license that would let them offer a reference implementation as open source, and that's what everyone is currently using. Meanwhile, just about everything uses JavaScript now, and JS speed *is* an issue. Firefox is a good example. It's written in C++, but the Gecko rendering engine under the hood renders the browser itself as well as the content you are viewing, and when you click an icon in the browser or select a menu choice, JS is actually doing the work. One major architectural change to Firefox was shift to a JIT compiler that compiled JS to native code for execution to get more speed. Chrome does something similar, and AFAIK so do IE/MS Edge. > The "current standards" are just absurdly increasing cost for essentially same > functionality (we could use mail, post in forums, upload and download files, > use > CVS/SVN/GIT, Bugzilla, online maps, timetables, ...) already 10 or 15 years > ago. The "new great user experience" means just that Internet more and > more sucks. That depends upon who you are and how you like things presented, You are *not* representative of the mass user base, and what works for you will not work for 99% of the rest of the world. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
