This is going to be controversial, and to a few inflammatory, but I think it
needs to be said. Although, if past efforts to generate useful conversations
go, I'll get two replies, and everyone will forget about it.
I frequently see people with 200 MHz Pentiums (and even the occasional 486)
complain about Mozilla (among other apps) running slowly on their machine.
Ditto with people who have 16 or 32 megs of RAM. I don't mean to offend, but
expecting modern apps to run on hardware that is 5 years old is unreasonable.
Yes yes, 5 years isn't that long, but that's in the real world. In the computer
technology world, it IS a long time. Relating to the Internet it's FOREVER to
most people. When the net hit the mainstream public, it was 1995. Netscape was
king, Yahoo was a college dorm side project, Amazon.com wasn't even around to
lose money, and MS was touting Win95 and the CDROM as the future of computing.
This is the end of 2000. We have retail CPUs running significantly in excess of
1,000 MHz. In 1995, MMX technology was the latest buzzword, Intel was still
reeling from the FDIV bug, and 200 MHz was all you could get. 128 MB or RAM
costs $45 (at Pricewatch), while in 1995 you'd have to mortgage your house to
buy that much RAM (fitting it in your computer was another matter). HDD
companies are selling 80GB hard drives for $250 (Pricewatch again), while in
1995 Seagate had a HUGE 9GB drive for a mere $10,000. Things have change QUITE
a lot.
I'm not unsympathetic to people with slower PCs. I know not everyone can afford
to buy that new $3,000 PC every year. I sure can't. I was running a Pentium MMX
at 233 MHz with 64 MB of RAM in my machine, which could accept no more due to
chipset limitations. I have an Athlon 700 now, with 196 MB, and already I'm
thinking of upgrading some.
But to expect a 5 year old PC to run today's top of the line apps IS
unreasonable. I ran Photoshop and Dreamweaver on my 233 MHz chip, and it was
sloooooooow, but I knew I was using old tech. It wasn't the app's fault I had
crappy hardware. And it's not Mozilla's fault that currently it doesn't run
well in bargain basement PCs. Hell, for a few hundred, you can get a 400 MHz PC
these days. I just upgraded a client's old machine to 500 MHz for a hundred
bucks.
So, to the developers, I suggest the target market machine not be these lowly
machines, and to the users, I suggest you recognize the shortcomings of your
own machine, and learn to deal with it like an adult. I think a reasonable low
end target should be about 350 to 400 MHz and 64 MB of RAM minimum for the
Mozilla application. For the embedded market, a lot of work would need done
anyway, so further memory optimizations being taken into account would not
significantly slow development time for those small platforms.
Let the flames begin.
Grey Hodge
--
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web [ http://www.burntelectrons.com/ ] [ Updated: December 2, 2000 ]
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