Mozilla M13

[Scott <pope@ossuary.net>]

     Since this is an official alpha release, I thought it
was time to give Mozilla another run.  My last binary
release was M10, and cvs mozilla always had compile errors
at different points.  I guess I'll start with stuff I don't
like because I'm a negative and cynical person.
     Right out of the box, it's a memory pig.  Without being
stripped it chews up around 26mb at startup.  When a page
loads, you can't instantly scroll with the up & down arrows,
you have to click in the page widget first.  Having done
that and scrolled a bit, it screws up scrolling for about a
minute afterwards.  It just plain doesn't work, then begins
jerking wildly, then finally you can use the scrollbar with
the pointer again.  This seems to be caused by it not
"throwing away" the extra keypresses when you old an
arrow button down.  Hold it for 5 seconds, you're locked
in for 20 seconds of scrolling.  
     The toolkit used for the primary menu system and it's
windows is one of the ugliest I've ever seen; it makes QT
look good.  Adding antialiasing would be a nice touch to
clean that up, bold text and radio buttons are just too
blocky and gross.  Then there's the rendering speed for said
menu windows.  It's so slow to render, on my 266 & 350, I
can literally *watch* it draw them.  Then the biggest
annoyance of all.  If you click "okay" in the preferences,
it then causes the fonts to shrink to 6pt. size.  Go and try
to change them back, and it segfaults.  Minor annoyance:  It
doesn't remember that I like my window sized at 800x600 to
start.  Having just been forced to restart, I stripped
everything first.  Now it only takes 25mb upon initial
startup. :P
     Now for stuff I like.  Text rendering is really fast,
it might just beat IE5 on that, or at least tie.  It renders
tables *really* fast, the best I've ever seen.  Unlike old
Netscape, Mozilla uses a readable font size to begin with.
After that preferences issue is fixed, linux newcomers can
read the web without squinting themselves to early blindess.
It's dl & rendering timer is a great idea, hopefully
something to help remind web designers that not everyone has
an OC48 at their disposal.  On a machine with pc100 64mb
memory, it's speedy enough to be usable by someone who can
put up with it's other deficiencies for now (my 266 w/32mb
of 66hz is another story...). 
     There is less wasted space at the top now, giving you a
Big Ass Window(TM) for the loaded site.  If they cut the
size of the forward & back button group in half you would
gain another quarter inch at the top.  Integrating the
bookmarks with the primary program menu would add another
eighth.  Moving the buttons for the other programs like mail
into the side panel would gain another quarter as well.  At
that point it would be the best I've seen for the amount of
space dedicated to the actual page.
     Overall, it's an improvement, and since it's alpha I'll
cut it some slack on things not working quite right.  The
fact remains however that it is still a major resource pig.
It's better than Netscape 4.61 (37mb between netscape & dns
helper), but 26mb is still unacceptable.  The moment a
browser is available that dedicates 98% of the viewing space
to the page, renders text right away so I can start reading 
and not waiting, handles tables with no problem, and doesn't
make me hit swap, I'll switch to that instantly.  
     So long as it's GPL'd.

Scott
-- 
I love you more than anything in this world.
I don't expect that will last.
 -Elvis Costello