Recently in Firefox Category

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

I can edit images all day long in the GIMP and not tap out my CPU or RAM like I do when using Firefox to hit all the Web pages and software-as-a-service type sites (heavy, heavy Javascript) to get my work done.

And this is in Linux, specifically Ubuntu at present. I've run into the same problem in Windows. You start with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and before too long your machine is running like crap.

I spent a bit of time today running most of the browser I have on my Ubuntu 9.04 system, most of which are based on the Gecko engine (Firefox, Epiphany, Galeon), one of which is not (Opera).

And I kept track of how they use CPU resources and memory via the handy Htop utility (top works just as well but isn't nearly as pretty; and you know how I like pretty).

Firefox, no surprise hogs the most CPU on my 1.3 GHz Celeron system (with 1 GB RAM). It's often at 90 percent or more of CPU and rarely dips below 40 or 50 percent. The more pages and the more Javascript and Flash (that's a really killer), the worse it is.

I'm not going to talk so much about memory because with 1 GB, I'm fairly comfortable. With Firefox running, about 400-500 MB is in use; the other browser generally use 200-300 MB.

The other Gecko browsers — the GNOME-supplied Galeon and Epiphany — also spike up to 90 percent when "intensive" things are happening — new pages being loaded, scripts executing, but they quickly "settle" down to 20 percent of CPU and sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Not surprisingly, Opera fared better. The free yet proprietary browser can still use a lot of CPU (in the 90 percent range) during heavy operations. But the difference I see in Opera (I'm running version 10 for Linux and also recommend it for Windows and Macintosh) is that once that instance of heavy use is over, Opera is very quick to give up those CPU cycles and return to a very refreshing 3 to 10 percent of CPU.

However, once the Flash plugin is invoked, all bets are off and Opera is as doggy as anything. It's really Flash that does the damage ... but damage it is. Flash is just plain evil in a box, especially in Linux.

I haven't been as smitten with the Webkit engine, or more specifically the Google Chrome Web browser, as some. In Windows XP with 3 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM, it starts out great but has quite a bit of trouble redrawing the screen in comparison to Firefox once I've been running it for awhile.

I'll certainly keep an eye on Webkit in Linux — Epiphany is supposed to be moving to that engine.

But what I'd like to say once again is that on today's Web, running a browser is quite an intensive operation that requires a whole lot of resources in order to cause as little relative pain as possible to your system — and your nerves.

And there's nothing light about it.

Coming up: One of the 63 dependencies involved in installing digiKam on my GNOME-based, previously KDE-free Ubuntu system is the Konqueror browser. I'll have to try that. And I just added the uber-minimal-GUI-browser Dillo. We'll see how that cuts said mustard.

Here's an entry that never got published for one reason or other. It was originally written May 8, 2009:

I made a big deal out of how great I thought the Google Chrome browser was when it first came out. It was so fast, blah, blah, blah ...

Well, until today I hadn't clicked the Google Chrome icon in my Windows XP dock in maybe six months, maybe longer.

After using it for awhile, I found Google Chrome to be less than stable. It would often just halt in mid-task. Screens could be slow to redraw.

And while I liked the development tools that come built into Chrome, there are better tools in Firefox (principally the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons).

But the tools didn't matter so much as my impression of Chrome's speed and stability. It could start out fast, but things would inevitably grind down after the browser was running awhile. I have nothing tangible to base this on, just that Chrome was not working well on my particular box.

So after fighting it for awhile, I just started using Firefox again.

Firefox, especially version 3 (3.0.10 for today anyway), is extremely solid. And I can work longer on this XP box without everything going to hell.

Of course I still have a single task — just one thing, but one critical thing — that requires IE but for some reason lets me use the Opera browser. You don't know pain unless you need to run IE on a regular basis. I spent the morning on a computer (not mine) with nothing but IE. You'd thing that Windows XP with 2 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM could run a Web browser, no problem.

But there was a problem. Sludgy slowness.

Anyhow, all I really wanted to say was that I threw over Firefox for Chrome, but once the shine wore off, I went back to Firefox and have been quite happy to split my time between FF and Opera.

Oh, and on my Unix/Linux machines, I'm also using Firefox (and Opera). No Chrome for those yet. I know Google keeps promising a Linux port of Chrome. I doubt that there will be native builds for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I've been wrong before (many, many times) and could be again.

Meanwhile, Firefox runs on just about everything. I can't run FF in 32-bit SPARC OpenBSD, but I can run it (barely, but it'll run) in Solaris 9 for 32-bit SPARC.

But for my i386 (Windows, Linux, OpenBSD) and PowerPC (Linux and OS X) hardware, at least there's a browser that works consistently across all of these architectures and operating environments.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1.

I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4.

But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop.

By the time OpenBSD 4.5 is released in May, FF2 will be no more. That was another factor governing my decision to finally upgrade to FF3.

I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3. (Remember that OpenBSD doesn't generally update binary packages after each release. Unless you run -current and compile everything, it's six months between upgrades for the OS and the applications.)

I was prepared for trouble, but everything went well. It didn't hurt a bit. All of my FF2 settings and bookmarks are intact, as are my add-ons (including Web Developer). Java still works, too. And performance of FF3 seems more than a little bit snappier than FF2. I can really feel the difference with Web-based apps that use a lot of Javascript.

Yeah, I'm months late to the FF3 party (at least on this platform), but I can more than safely say that I'm damn glad I finally and painlessly made the switch.

To replace FF2 with FF3, here's what I did in an xterm window:

$ sudo pkg_delete mozilla-firefox
Password:
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.16p3: complete
Clean shared items: complete
$ sudo pkg_add -i firefox3
firefox3-3.0.1p3: complete
--- firefox3-3.0.1p3 -------------------
Please see /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/README.OpenBSD
for information about running Firefox on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD users face a similar dilemma in version 4.5, in which OpenOffice 2.4 will co-exist along with OO3. For the release after that, just like with FF, OO2.4 will be gone, and only OO3.x will remain. I'm OK with that, too. I just started using OO3 in Windows, and I think it's a pretty good release thus far.

I love it when things work. It happens more often than not in OpenBSD, and that's why I've stuck with it. If things were breaking down software-wise, I'd be sprinting back to Linux. But as long as not having Flash 9 or 10 doesn't totally harsh my proverbial mellow (OpenBSD is mired in Flash 7 due to subsequent Linux Flash Players insisting on ALSA sound, which the BSDs don't have), I'm comfortable.

And if I could manage to edit video in Blender, I would work around the lack of up-to-date Flash.

Now ... back to the OpenBSD way of keeping things up to date (or not ...).

I can't decide whether, and if so how much, I'm troubled by keeping the same version of various apps on my machine for six months at at time. At one level, I'm happy not to be constantly doing apt-get update apt-get upgrade or having the Update Manager pop up every day.

But if you want to keep current in OpenBSD, you need to either patch your box to -stable, or just run -current which is what developers and other edgy types install on their own equipment. I'll confess that if I understood a little better how to make a -release box -stable, or keep a -current box current, I'd be more game for doing it (and I might get there at some point). I do know that a lot of compiling is involved, and I'm no fan of sitting and waiting for ports to build. But if Firefox 3.0.8 is what I craved, I could get it now either in by running -current or by and building the port. Even in Ports, Firefox is stuck at 3.0.1 in my 4.4 environment.

I've seen a few users claim that keeping an OpenBSD box at -stable or running -current and updating it is no big deal. I'd love for that to be the case.

Right now, on this install, I have maybe 2.5 GB in /usr, and after my experience running out of space to build Java, I'm reluctant when it comes to bringing down the source of OpenBSD and compiling it. This is just about as close to a "production" machine as I have, and I can't risk bricking the install, so I'll be ordering my OpenBSD 4.5 CDs very soon (make that very, very soon) and upgrading that way. I've done it once, and hopefully I can do it again.

I tried quite a few OpenBSD ports during my last run on the Sparcstation 20. None of them would build (Firefox, Seamonkey, Geany).

Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn't install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn't give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that's a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box).

Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard. There are quite a few other Solaris 9 books out there, including a "Dummies" book by Dave Taylor, who wrote a general Unix book I quite liked (here's everything Amazon has that he wrote).

Back to the Sparcstation 20 after the Solaris 9 installation: With 50 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM, it's far from ideal. GNOME &mddash; which ships with Solaris 9 — is almost unusable, but the CDE desktop is pretty responsive. It reminds me quite a bit of Fvwm in OpenBSD.

StarOffice 6 is included among the many discs in the Solaris box. When I installed it as root, only root could run it, so I started over again in my user account. The answer to this mystery is probably somewhere in my "Complete Idiots" book.

I found a Firefox 2.0.0.20 package built for Solaris 8 at the great SunFreeware site. Again, installing as root meant only root could use it. Even after installing it through the user account with su didn't work all the way. I can still run Firefox as root, but I get errors relating to patches that I need to do when I try to run it as my user. I'll have to read up on Solaris admin and eventually find and install all the Solaris patches.

But I did get Firefox to run, and it's WAY faster than Netscape 4.7, which shipped with Solaris. Yes, I did just type the words "Netscape 4.7."

I could very well keep Solaris on the box, but one idea is to run OpenBSD and then try to use the Solaris binary packages for Firefox and OpenOffice (since none of the OpenBSD ports of Firefox or Seamonkey will install on the Sparc 20).

Running Solaris binaries in OpenBSD is supposed to work. And yes, OpenBSD is a better, faster OS, for my use anyway, than Solaris on this platform.

Sun Sparcstation 5 image from the OSIAH: Online Sun Information ArcHive.

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

This post began its life as a comment on the previous Sparcstation 20 entry, and true to the way I overwrite even a comment, it works well enough as a standalone entry.

And thus, here it is in that form:

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved.

But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Thus far, that direction is a reinstall of OpenBSD. I haven't tried any ports yet, but all the packages I have installed — a few GUI editors (nedit, which I quite like, and another I can't remember), plus the Dillo browser, which in all fairness ran great in NetBSD, too — did work.

Now that I'm running not the box's original, jet-plane-noisy 2 GB Seagate hard drive but a super-cheap-on-eBay 35 GB Hitachi SCSI drive that's pleasantly quiet, maybe the installation of an OpenBSD port of a "modern" Web browser will work. Maybe not. I'll also try to roll Abiword onto the box, as well as Geany (for comparison's sake, if anything else).

And there's always Solaris.

I know there are Solaris-compatible packages for just about everything, so if I can't manage to get Seamonkey or Firefox installed from OpenBSD's ports with the extra disk space, my next move will be installing Solaris 9 (I got an unopened box of the software for $1 — yep, that little, plus shipping — on eBay) and see how that OS runs on the box.

One thing: Sound on the 32-bit Sparc platform doesn't work in OpenBSD. It does in NetBSD. Of course it does in Solaris, since Sun's OS was written with the Sparc in mind.

It may be that Solaris is the best OS for desktop use on the Sparc 20. Probably the best thing to do is get a CPU module faster then the current 50 MHz processor I'm now running, and also upping the memory to the max of 512 MB (right now I have the 128 MB the box had when I got it).

But make no mistake, for sheer out-of-the-box configuration on a Sparcstation 20 (sound nothwithstanding), OpenBSD is way ahead of NetBSD.

My next line of attack is trying a few (or more) OpenBSD ports. Even if this experiment goes well, I'll have to roll Solaris 9 onto the Sparc 20 before I decide on any long-term OS for the box.

Before I finish this entry, it's worth pointing out that Debian Etch for Sparc boots but won't install. It hangs when trying to load the CD driver. I don't know if the Sparc port of Debian is broken for EVERY 32-bit Sparc model, but it sure doesn't work for the Sparcstation 20.

Image above right: This isn't my Sparc; it's a Sparcstation 5 from http://www.computermuseum.org.uk. They look exactly alike (and in many ways are).

Time's short, so I'll hit the high points:

• The fix for all the problems I was having in Opera 9.51 (the Linux version) in OpenBSD was easy. All I had to do was change from asynchronous DNS lookup to synchronous. I even reinstalled Flash for Opera. Regarding the fix, l'll elaborate later.

• Now that I can run Opera, I've been using this circa-2002-03 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron) for just about all of my daily work. The laptop's running great, with excellent performance from OpenBSD 4.4 itself and its default Fvwm window manager.

• I wanted to change from IMAP to POP for one of my main e-mail accounts. I had been using Thunderbird in Windows with IMAP. That worked pretty well, but in OpenBSD, I wanted to use POP and have all the mail on the hard drive.

  Either Thunderbird itself, or the entire POP protocol, won't go into nested folders on an IMAP server and grab everything. At least it didn't in my case. So I tried to bring all those IMAP folders onto the local drive en masse. That didn't work so well. I suspect the server won't stay connected long enough to move many hundreds of messages at a time.

  I'm sure I lost quite a few messages, but I also have many hundred that I'll try to move from one Thunderbird installation to the other.

  Knowing what I know now, it would have been better to get EVERYTHING in order on the first Thunderbird installation and then move the entire "profile" over to the second PC. As it stands now, I'll have to figure out how to tap those exact folders/directories and move them over individually. The Thunderbird menus aren't much help with this. Thunderbird needs a robust backup utility built into it.

• In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

• Before I figured out how to fix Opera, I rolled out an identical Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu 8.04. That installation went perfectly fine. No problems at all. That laptop has 256 MB of RAM at the moment, and during the 300+ package update after the initial install, there was a whole lot of swapping. Have you noticed in Debian and Ubuntu that the package management uses as many resources as you can throw at them? The machine was unusable during the long update (for which I ran the Update Manager in GNOME).

  You don't have to roll in 300 packages every day, month ... or just about ever, so that's an unusual circumstance.

  I'll keep the Ubuntu laptop at the ready in case I need it for video editing (a task I'm not sure can be done in OpenBSD; if anybody can point me to a package or port, I'd be grateful).

  But for now, the OpenBSD Toshiba is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power.