Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace

[Andrej Marjan]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:

>Well firefox leaks memory like a sieve, and at elast the windows version
>will spin on the cpu if you leave it open while suspending a laptop and
>then resuming it later causing the resume step to take many minutes
>instead of seconds, and then you still have to close firefox and start
>ig again to let the cpu go back to normal load.  Maybe some of it is the
>GUI code in windows, but I suspect the majority is that firefox just
>contains a lot of very crappy code.  It was based on the descendant of
>netscape 4, which has to be one of the most awful browsers ever written.
>I think sometimes you have to rewrite your code from scratch to clean it
>up, except that isn't exciting so most people don't want to volunteer to
>do that.  I could be wrong, but I don't think the mozilla project is
>attracting the worlds best coders, certainly not the ones that carefully
>test every function they write to make sure it has no memory leaks or
>bad pointer calculations or anything else that could deteriorate the
>quality of the overall project.
>  
>

The Gecko rendering engine *is* a ground-up rewrite.

I won't comment on the quality of the code, but I will say that Mozilla 
and Firefox seem to interact really poorly with NT's craptacular 
scheduler and VM system. If you have enough RAM, the following config 
setting is a must under Windows:

// keep browser from releasing its working set to NT when minimized -- 
so it doesn't have to get paged in later
user_pref("config.trim_on_minimize", false);

Actually that's a general point: I have no less than 20 settings in 
user.js on any platform to make Firefox bearable. Mozilla is the Emacs 
of web browsers! :D

And I don't find it leaks much RAM. I've found that memory usage on 
Windows is very stable -- I leave it running for weeks at a time at 
work, and with the above config option and my extensions, Firefox 1.0.x 
was stable at 105MB and 1.5 is stable at 130MB.  (I use other browsers 
on Linux.)

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