[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Matthew Thomas) wrote in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>"David W. Fenton" wrote: >> >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Matthew Thomas) wrote in >>... >> > I don't like Mozilla. From a user's point of view, Mozilla is >> > worse in every respect -- except page rendering speed -- than >> > 4.x, MSIE, or iCab. The installation process is worse, the >> > footprint is worse, the UI is worse, the responsiveness is >> > worse, the feature set is worse, the configurability is worse, >> > and the platform integration is worse. >> >> I don't know what Mozilla version you are using, but the one I'm >> using (0.9.6) is: >> >> 1. faster than IE 5.5 > >The figures in ><http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3BBB359B.1BF08A01%40mailandne ><ws.com> >are still largely accurate. Mozilla is now a bit faster than it >was then, but MSIE 5.1 is also a bit faster than MSIE 5.0 was >then. Mozilla renders pages faster. It gets them onscreen in a readable form sooner than either IE or NS4.x. This is my experience with Mozilla on a number of computers, from my slow one to my fast one to faster ones that I've used at clients while working onsite. >> 2. renders pages more reliably and more attractively than NS 4.x > >Mozilla's current style sheet support is certainly more reliable >and attractive than that of 4.x (that's an understatement). >However, a large majority of the Web pages about which Tech >Evangelism bugs filed in Bugzilla, where the pages don't work in >current Mozilla builds, the same pages work fine in 4.x, making >Mozilla's rendering seem less reliable now than it was then. And >the increased attractiveness brought about by Mozilla's improved >style sheet support is largely counteracted by its incredibly ugly >HTML form controls. I'm not talking about stylesheet support, I'm speaking of the basic font rendering. NS3 had good, attractive font spacing and leading, but they mucked it up in NS4. IE was not as good as NS3, but it was better than NS4. Now Mozilla is better than all of them. And in terms of pages that don't render, I encountered far more problems with NS4.x than I've ever encountered with Mozilla. That's one of the reasons it became my default browser, because more pages came out looking right. >> 3. not made by Microsoft > >That's something which (alas) matters to perhaps five percent of >the computer-using population. It's a real plus for me. >> 4. more stable than NS 4.x by a long shot > >I can't comment on that, since I use daily builds rather than >milestones. I used 0.9.3 first and then after I heard about the tabs, installed 0.9.6. I'm never looking back. Mozilla has crashed maybe a dozen times. NS used to crash that many times a day. And NS was very sensitive on my system to how quickly I opened new browser windows. Mozilla seems to have no limits in this regard. >> 5. has the tabbed UI that is far, far superior than anything IE >> or NS 4.x have to offer > >MSIE does a devilishly clever thing: it uses the window manager >provided by the operating system. That way it manages to behave >consistently with most other apps on your computer, except >Mozilla. Well, I don't *like* the basic look and feel of IE and I never have, not when it was new, and not when it reached maturity with IE5. For a while I used IE5 as my default browser at work, choosing it over NS4.x, but when I left that job, I just didn't feel like continuing with it, mostly because of the insecurity of it. >> 6. fast enough on my ancient Win95 P120 with 128MBs to be my >> default browser (though it is definitely not fast in many ways). > >For a laugh, a couple of months ago I ran the Windows versions of >MSIE 5.0 and Mozilla 0.9.6 on a 486 with 24 MB RAM. MSIE was just >about bearable, with pages rendering in about 40 seconds on >average. Mozilla, on the other hand, took about two and a half >minutes per page. (Turning on Quick Launch hardly made any >difference to Mozilla's startup time, but it did make MSIE's >startup take twice as long, which I found extremely funny.) If it runs usably on a P120 with 128MBs of RAM, it really ought to run just fine on any hardware that is not completely ancient (my computer was 6 years old in January; I also have a PIII 500 with 256MBs running NT4, but it's not my daily workstation; this guarantees that my programs run really nicely on my clients' equipment -- that is, if I can stand it on my old clunker, it will be great on their machines). >> One of the false speed tests that IE wins is load time. IE puts >> up a window a lot faster during loading than Mozilla, but YOU >> CAN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THAT WINDOW for a very long time after it >> loads. I can type into the Mozilla URL text box as soon as I can >> see it. > >But you don't see it until Mozilla is well into loading your home >page. That's only initial load. Once it's started up, Mozilla is just as fast to load as IE, and on pages with complex tables, Mozilla beats IE. Both beat NS4.x with complex tables. >Ceteris paribus, if actual speed is the same in each browser, then >the browser with the greatest *perceived* speed will win. So it is >better to put up a window more quickly, even if the user can't do >anything with it. I'm speaking of actual speed of rendering individual pages, side-by -side comparisons. Mozilla is just as fast. >>... >> Maybe Mozilla is unacceptable on the Mac, but on Windows, it's >> the best browser available. >>... > >Oh, right. That would explain why so many millions of people have >downloaded it, like they downloaded Netscape 3.0 (which really >*was* the best browser available). I don't know what world you live in, but in my world, my clients all *love* Mozilla. Of course, they all preferred Netscape for years, but have gotten really tired of it crashing and not rendering pages properly (and most of them never really liked IE). With Mozilla, the web is fun for them again. Who am I to tell them that they are wrong to prefer Mozilla? -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton dfenton at bway dot net http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
