Talk:Mozilla Firefox

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Firefox is an excellent Mozilla project. However on a pc with 32 MB RAM and windows 98, Firefox takes minutes to load even with the cache at just 8 MB. Once its running browsing pages occurs as fast as IE so I will probably have to turn the cache off for any improvement. - ABliss

Yeah, at that level you're pretty much stuck for a variety of "speedy" software. I've had some luck on systems as low as a p166 with 64 RAM, however. Negatively, it seems to take up a lot more system memory after only a few windows are opened (I'm not sure why this is). Like I'm using it right now and it's taking up 20 megs of system memory where it took 4 megs at startup. I don't know if that qualifies as a memory leak or what but I've only had the browser itself crash twice in the last month or so of use. Webfork

That's (perhaps partly) because parts of MSIE are started when Windows boots up. Late versions of Netscape had an option like this too, and IIRC Mozilla had/has it too in their Windows versions. If you don't want to use MSIE anymore, there are programs which kick it off your computer so you can replace it with an alternative, or not have a browser on your computer at all. As if everyone needs one. I replaced MSIE (with LiteStep) on my laptop which ran Windows 98 at some time. I don't want such features at all on any of my computers and if they're there i want to be able to put them off.

I'm not sure wether that's would solve the whole problem. You could check how much RAM is used before and after Firefox is started and wether it uses much swap space. How fast is the harddisk? Why not stick in a few more RAM; it is pretty cheap these days. And finally, perhaps tweaking settings at about:config will increase performance eventually together with some advice from the Firefox forums or mailing list. Oh and maybe Opera is a better alternative... - dpi

In my experience Opera behaves much better than Firefox on systems with 64mb ram. Firefox is ok too, but takes too long to start - with Opera on my laptop which is a celeron 266 with 64 mb ram its only a few seconds from I start Opera until my startpage shows up. This is with the newest 7.5x Opera - must say I was impressed first time I tried it. jib

I like firefox. There is a bug somewhere in the combination of firefox 0.1.3 and flashblock that makes it crashes on some sites. I havn't got around to tracking it down yet. ziv