RoxxSoft Development Blog
Posts tagged review
Small Firefox 3.6 Non Review
Jan 27th
Small Firefox 3.6 Non Review
A couple days ago, after installing Firefox 3.6, i noticed it went from bad to worse on resource usage, at least on my test computer it seems to have gone really bad, why? take a look at this pic:
So what’s wrong here? i just had three open tabs, none of them on heavy flash or java sites, just a couple simple forums and one blog, my test machine is not a top model, but this is not what’s wrong, i have a test PC with a 2.8 Ghz processor, 2 GB of ram and a 500 GB SATA II drive, NVIDIA FX5500 video card with 256MB of video memory, Windows XP SP2, this should be more than enough for web browsing, specially when nothing else is open but Firefox, and yet the computer gets so slow that opening something like Windows Live Mail or Messenger took some minutes, and switching between both Firefox and Mail/Messenger took several seconds, there were drawing issues, eventually Firefox took about 94 % of the CPU, and memory usage went up to 1 GB, crashing the computer, i was not able to save a screen shot or do anything but to reset the machine, the thing is, i had an older Firefox version installed on this same hardware with no issues at all, well, not like these at least, and i had Chrome and other software like Visual Studio which still works at top speed, by this i mean, it works very well on this hardware, is usable, given that Firefox is not running of course..
Yesterday i went on the net and noticed a couple of very nice reviews:
Here’s one at ArsTechnica
And another one at TechRadar
I’ll quote from the last link (emphasis mine):
There’s a brand new Firefox in town: Firefox 3.6. It’s not a huge update, but it does offer improved performance and stability
I guess we all do live in different worlds, could it be maybe that what we have here is a classical example of developers forgetting about all of those who do not have/can’t afford top of the line hardware? and that they are developing this software on their high end computers, where they can’t see the end result as seen by people with old hardware, really, who cares about them, let them buy new modern hardware for once right? have we fallen into the ‘hardware is cheap/fast so don’t waste time optimizing and writing small/fast code” trap?
I’m a little saddened by this, since one of the top reasons to use open source used to be that open source software is smaller, faster, light, and a ton of other things, everything but bloated (as in MS software), but lately, seems they have fallen for the same mistakes we’ve been seeing for decades now in those MS-like companies (even them seem to be going small and fast, just look at the VS Express Editions and even Windows 7 against Vista), it could be interesting maybe to go look up who is working on Firefox right now, and see if the people who used to work on it a few years ago are still working on it today, i wonder about that..
(yeah, i know working on a software piece this big is no child play, but Mozilla used to have very good developers)
What happened?
No joy here, just complaining you know :P
A little Yahoo’s Meme review
Sep 17th
A little Yahoo’s Meme review
So i decided to have a look at Meme, i received my account invitation days ago, I’ve mostly just looked around and have not posted anything yet though, i noticed a few things:
- Only can post videos from YouTube and Vimeo, what about Yahoo’s own video services?
- I don’t like how the Popular page works, it is kind of limited, the Trending topics from twitter works a lot better i think.
- I like it how there are clearly defined options to post text, pics, music and videos
- It lacks several things such as posting from your mobile and similars
- Statistics are not grouped in a single place, i want to look at a small panel and see followers, following etc, this is easy to do in Twitter
- It is alpha, so i should stop criticizing it until it is ready for prime time :P
At the end, i like it, but it does feel lacking in some aspects, but again, it is alpha code so i expect things to improve later on, i hope so, and it seems to have a lot of potential specially when considering it is not just a text service, you can post whatever you like, something i thought was a very good idea is the ability to post videos/music/podcasts or whatever your product is and just let it go to the public, very handy idea for marketing purposes, and it is way to easy to do so with Meme.
There are already tons of people with Meme accounts, but when looking around, lots of them are simply not posting anything yet, i guess it is difficult for people to decide on which site they will post, and since there is no way to post something on Twitter and have it automatically posted on Meme, at least i am not aware of something like that, people seem to do the same as i do, just have the account for for now, i won’t do anything with it, maybe later, maybe not? i think this also has to do with Meme being a very new service, but i get the feeling that people is afraid to commit to Meme, they just need to figure out that they don’t need to give up on Twitter or whatever else they are using, but this will take time for sure, and when desktop tools or other services get to add support for Meme, it will easy that step.
There are a lot of people that says Meme is just a Twitter wannabe, but i think not, from what i have seen, this service has a lot of potential, the fact that you can post videos, music and photos is more than enough from marketing purposes, Twitter won’t allow you to do that, and sometimes, a video or a picture can grab the reader’s attention faster than any phrase you can come up with to try and make people go to your site, i think that will be a very strong point in Meme’s success in the near future.
All in all, i did like it and i will be keeping a close watch on it, now let’s see how Twitter will react…
Oh yeah, and i still have 5 invitations left in case anyone is interested, just drop me a line :)
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