Is there a FAST mozilla based browser for old PC ?

Message

mikeb · #81 Post by **mikeb** » Mon 23 Feb 2015, 11:08

I have more talent in my little finger than in the whole of my body....

mike

Burn_IT · #82 Post by **Burn_IT** » Mon 23 Feb 2015, 11:56

Does that mean you're spawn free?? <gurn>

mikeb · #83 Post by **mikeb** » Mon 23 Feb 2015, 13:01

It would appear from the evidence definitely not.... oh well

mike

Mike Walsh · #84 Post by **Mike Walsh** » Wed 25 Feb 2015, 12:42

I can see this turning into another one of those silly threads.....

Mike to Mike.

mikeb · #85 Post by **mikeb** » Wed 25 Feb 2015, 13:02

Are you suggesting that other threads on this forum are not silly???

mike

8Geee · #86 Post by **8Geee** » Thu 26 Feb 2015, 01:12

No, not silly.

I'd like to trim some of these modern browsers that keep using SQL. Some of these DB'S grow, and some seem "size-stable". FF27 is showing about 77Mb... almost as big as /lib.

mikeb · #87 Post by **mikeb** » Thu 26 Feb 2015, 09:14

sqlite databases are even acknowledged by mozilla as a bad move.... perhaps in time they will get a grip on them...json was suggested as an alternative.... flat files worked fine in my experience though perhaps the instabilities that crept in pushed a move for a more robust method.... treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Actually plugin wrapper was supposed to be the fix for those problems.

As an example of silliness, places.sqlite not only keeps bookmarks but your entire browsing history until you deselect that option. (do you really need to remember what page you were on 4 years ago...why not erm use a bookmark ..and the massive number of returns when you type a name make the system unusable to my mind anyway...erm search engines are good for this and you can have that daft option if you want with them)
For such huge crud handling they had to up the default size to 10MB and increase in 10MB chunks...hence the size. FF3.6 my huge pile of bookmarks takes one 534Kb sqlite file.

The logical way would be to keep bookmarks and history crud separate but that would be too sensible.

Actually with all these cutting edge features...form history has been broken since ff 1.5...shame that WAS useful.

urlclassifier may also be bloating... pretty pointless for non IE browsers anyway....can be deleted and disabled though.

Cookies...actually there are so many of them so this one is a little more in proportion but still has a 5MB minimum.

plugins and addons sqlites...absolute overkill for the job... total waste of profile space.

Note systems admins for such as colleges and so on pull their hair out with such large profiles since in their case the problem is mutiplied by thousands jamming up the server and lan and filling up users allocated space.

Best I can do is limit growth...reducing chunk size means recompiling.

seamonkey 2.9.1 has around 25MB compared to 5MB for firefox 3.6 to do the same thing ... ah webapps is 5mb again...more crud lol
Even those startup caches to me make no difference, take up space and often hang on to problems if there was a browser crash due to a bad website.

Actually its imap folders total 80MB...thought the idea was NOT to download mail until opened or am I missing something

Another one to chase up...I would like to simply use a browser/email without wondering if there is enough room for it today....

fun and games and plenty of geek siliness....why are some in this world hell bent on making it more complicated than it needs to be???
Actually cannot entirely blame mozilla for that one...horrible websites out there and you either cater for the shite or fall out of use.

mike

greengeek · #88 Post by **greengeek** » Thu 26 Feb 2015, 18:42

mikeb wrote:why are some in this world hell bent on making it more complicated than it needs to be???
Actually cannot entirely blame mozilla for that one...horrible websites out there and you either cater for the shite or fall out of use.

Making things more complicated puts control back into the hands of the mighty rather than into the hands of the little people. If you release a new codec, or replacement for Flash, and make it a dependency for access to a desirable resource, then you have put a nice shiny ring through the nose of those you want to lead and they have no choice to follow, or as you say we fall by the wayside.

In the end it creates an attitude of dependency amongst the users - an acceptance of the loss of personal control and a willingness to accept continuous updates and intrusions on the basis that "they know best..."

(Actually that is starting to happen with the Linux OS itself now - we are being encouraged to accept the latest version of wget, or bash, or whatever else it may be, always assuming the "bad" code we leave behind is worse than the "shiny new code" we are running to. But who really checks the shiny new code to see if it is any better in the long run? I just have to trust that "they" know better.)

Bring back the text web!!

mikeb · #89 Post by **mikeb** » Thu 26 Feb 2015, 19:00

Its a fun battle...it was fun to play with an android tablet.... One thing that stood out was you tube was dead easy...using webm ...google all the way..... on the other hand adding flash was a complete pig and using it on ANY other site for media watching was painful and unstable.

These games are being played all the time...its tiresome and i try to steer a course through it all that works... I also hang onto what works and don;t respond to paranoia. Sometime I have to capitulate to a certain degree but I do try and keep an element of CHOICE in what I do...seems important.

I also hate the gummy bear dumbing down of computing...I feels its of no benefit to anyone except to those as you say pulling the ropes.

If there are parallels...how many car/automobile owners would have a clue now about even basic servicing compared to say 40 years ago. It also means forced obsolescence goes on all the time.
Might keep the money rolling in but at what cost?

mike

8Geee · #90 Post by **8Geee** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 00:46

I seemed to have limited FF-db's to the extent that all I "see" growing is the start-up cache. Generally 800K --> 2Mb. Storing an original copy of dot cache (where the FF start-up cache exists) from the last remaster can replace the impending bloat.

mikeb · #91 Post by **mikeb** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 08:58

ah goodly....

by the way those start up caches can simply be deleted when not running.
Older firefox could be configured to not make one of them.

We used to do tricks like make the bookmarkbackups folder read only....funny if these sqlite are so solid why the need for 10 backups !!!

I made a thread about IMAP mail in the HOW TO section if you happen to use that.

mike

Moat · #92 Post by **Moat** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 10:04

mikeb wrote: Older firefox could be configured to not make one of them.
We used to do tricks like make the bookmarkbackups folder read only....funny if these sqlite are so solid why the need for 10 backups !!!

Oooh... neat. Firefox 25 - I just searched the word "backup" in about:config and up pops "browser.bookmarks.max_backups" - which was set default to 10. I bumped it down to 1. Should be plenty!

According to Mozilla, setting to 0 will disable backups.

Thanks for bringing that one up, Mike - I've entirely missed it 'til now.

Bob

mikeb · #93 Post by **mikeb** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 10:51

See in answer to the topic I find its up to us to make the browsers faster and lighter rather than chasing the holy grail of the ultimate browser.

Those json type files have been suggested as a replacement for the sqlites..... they are like a robust text file archive...I suppose akin to squash.

mike

Burn_IT · #94 Post by **Burn_IT** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 11:56

If there are parallels...how many car/automobile owners would have a clue now about even basic servicing compared to say 40 years ago.

It is not just servicing. How many know how to drive a manual car??

Burn_IT · #95 Post by **Burn_IT** » Mon 02 Mar 2015, 12:13

If there are parallels...how many car/automobile owners would have a clue now about even basic servicing

Or even a manual drive.

8Geee · #96 Post by **8Geee** » Wed 04 Mar 2015, 20:20

mike
Already limited bkmk-backup to 2
AdBlock Edge went from 5 to 2 (10Mb savings ! )
Those two are in the slacko5.7-2015 iso (eeepc veersion)

Now about that 'little' ahem cache...
my solution is to rename as zip, then FF does not see it
If FF crashes/refuses to behave delta to little again.
In the meantime, little rewrites itself and zip goes bye-bye.
Having an ext3 (or 4) journalled save file will show in increase in
room availible once the zip gets tossed. Ext2... my condolences.

Pelo · #97 Post by **Pelo** » Sun 13 Mar 2016, 08:48

in my opinion browser speed will depend on free space in RAM. and controls , the safer, the slower... Seamonkey was the default browser in Puppy Linux, you can trust their choice.
Don' load to much your puppy to let it enough space in RAM to move...
as soon as a swap is needed, Puppy has lost interest for surfing the web (not for type-writing, or programming)
and old Seamonkey is what i use on my old laptop.. SWiftfox is slow, very slow, on my Medion four processors with 4GB Ram, and Swiftfox

however is slow...

TyroBGinner · #98 Post by **TyroBGinner** » Thu 31 Mar 2016, 21:51

I am so impressed by the great info that has been put into this sequence. Mikeb, in particular, has been great. So, I don't feel so bad about reviving/bumping a conversation which occurred over a year ago. Besides, Pelo already bumped it.

If Mikeb, or others, could respond...what is the suggested browser for me to use that is fast, lightweight, and can block all the invisible crap that burns up my data plan? I would like to use maybe a 5.x pup so my new tethered phone can be recognized readily. I assume that Mikeb is staying with his suggestion of Firefox 3.6. Can this be used with extensions to carry out the blocking I need? It would seem that the new extensions would not be compatible with the old browser. Would older versions of the extensions would sufficiently well?

I know this is a lot of questions...but I hope to begin something of an exchange on this such that it may help others also.

Thanks...

watchdog · #99 Post by **watchdog** » Fri 01 Apr 2016, 06:14

For a 5.x pup I would switch to palemoon browser. I run the latest palemoon even in wary with glibc upgrade but a 5.x pup lucid-based does not need upgrade. You can set palemoon to not load images for a text only browsing. I use ublock and noscript extensions and pup-advert-blocker.

TyroBGinner · #100 Post by **TyroBGinner** » Tue 05 Apr 2016, 22:36

Thanks for the response, Watchdog. I should have mentioned that I am trying to run all of this on a vintage 2000 Pentium III computer with 256 megs of ram. Yes, seriously. I doubt that any recent version of a browser will run worth anything. I appreciate your mention of the blocking extensions.

A question for all of you...you mention these older browsers, but you hardly mention their sources. Where do you get them? Items such as Firefox 3.6 and so on seem to be so dated as to be hard to find. Also, the particular form of the browser must align with the OS version, processor architecture, bit width, code base, etc.

Thanks...

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(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Is there a FAST mozilla based browser for old PC ?

in my opinion browser speed will depend on free space in RAM