Recently in Firefox Category

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

I can edit images all day long in the GIMP and not tap out my CPU or RAM like I do when using Firefox to hit all the Web pages and software-as-a-service type sites (heavy, heavy Javascript) to get my work done.

And this is in Linux, specifically Ubuntu at present. I've run into the same problem in Windows. You start with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and before too long your machine is running like crap.

I spent a bit of time today running most of the browser I have on my Ubuntu 9.04 system, most of which are based on the Gecko engine (Firefox, Epiphany, Galeon), one of which is not (Opera).

And I kept track of how they use CPU resources and memory via the handy Htop utility (top works just as well but isn't nearly as pretty; and you know how I like pretty).

Firefox, no surprise hogs the most CPU on my 1.3 GHz Celeron system (with 1 GB RAM). It's often at 90 percent or more of CPU and rarely dips below 40 or 50 percent. The more pages and the more Javascript and Flash (that's a really killer), the worse it is.

I'm not going to talk so much about memory because with 1 GB, I'm fairly comfortable. With Firefox running, about 400-500 MB is in use; the other browser generally use 200-300 MB.

The other Gecko browsers — the GNOME-supplied Galeon and Epiphany — also spike up to 90 percent when "intensive" things are happening — new pages being loaded, scripts executing, but they quickly "settle" down to 20 percent of CPU and sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Not surprisingly, Opera fared better. The free yet proprietary browser can still use a lot of CPU (in the 90 percent range) during heavy operations. But the difference I see in Opera (I'm running version 10 for Linux and also recommend it for Windows and Macintosh) is that once that instance of heavy use is over, Opera is very quick to give up those CPU cycles and return to a very refreshing 3 to 10 percent of CPU.

However, once the Flash plugin is invoked, all bets are off and Opera is as doggy as anything. It's really Flash that does the damage ... but damage it is. Flash is just plain evil in a box, especially in Linux.

I haven't been as smitten with the Webkit engine, or more specifically the Google Chrome Web browser, as some. In Windows XP with 3 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM, it starts out great but has quite a bit of trouble redrawing the screen in comparison to Firefox once I've been running it for awhile.

I'll certainly keep an eye on Webkit in Linux — Epiphany is supposed to be moving to that engine.

But what I'd like to say once again is that on today's Web, running a browser is quite an intensive operation that requires a whole lot of resources in order to cause as little relative pain as possible to your system — and your nerves.

And there's nothing light about it.

Coming up: One of the 63 dependencies involved in installing digiKam on my GNOME-based, previously KDE-free Ubuntu system is the Konqueror browser. I'll have to try that. And I just added the uber-minimal-GUI-browser Dillo. We'll see how that cuts said mustard.

Here's an entry that never got published for one reason or other. It was originally written May 8, 2009:

I made a big deal out of how great I thought the Google Chrome browser was when it first came out. It was so fast, blah, blah, blah ...

Well, until today I hadn't clicked the Google Chrome icon in my Windows XP dock in maybe six months, maybe longer.

After using it for awhile, I found Google Chrome to be less than stable. It would often just halt in mid-task. Screens could be slow to redraw.

And while I liked the development tools that come built into Chrome, there are better tools in Firefox (principally the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons).

But the tools didn't matter so much as my impression of Chrome's speed and stability. It could start out fast, but things would inevitably grind down after the browser was running awhile. I have nothing tangible to base this on, just that Chrome was not working well on my particular box.

So after fighting it for awhile, I just started using Firefox again.

Firefox, especially version 3 (3.0.10 for today anyway), is extremely solid. And I can work longer on this XP box without everything going to hell.

Of course I still have a single task — just one thing, but one critical thing — that requires IE but for some reason lets me use the Opera browser. You don't know pain unless you need to run IE on a regular basis. I spent the morning on a computer (not mine) with nothing but IE. You'd thing that Windows XP with 2 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM could run a Web browser, no problem.

But there was a problem. Sludgy slowness.

Anyhow, all I really wanted to say was that I threw over Firefox for Chrome, but once the shine wore off, I went back to Firefox and have been quite happy to split my time between FF and Opera.

Oh, and on my Unix/Linux machines, I'm also using Firefox (and Opera). No Chrome for those yet. I know Google keeps promising a Linux port of Chrome. I doubt that there will be native builds for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I've been wrong before (many, many times) and could be again.

Meanwhile, Firefox runs on just about everything. I can't run FF in 32-bit SPARC OpenBSD, but I can run it (barely, but it'll run) in Solaris 9 for 32-bit SPARC.

But for my i386 (Windows, Linux, OpenBSD) and PowerPC (Linux and OS X) hardware, at least there's a browser that works consistently across all of these architectures and operating environments.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1.

I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4.

But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop.

By the time OpenBSD 4.5 is released in May, FF2 will be no more. That was another factor governing my decision to finally upgrade to FF3.

I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3. (Remember that OpenBSD doesn't generally update binary packages after each release. Unless you run -current and compile everything, it's six months between upgrades for the OS and the applications.)

I was prepared for trouble, but everything went well. It didn't hurt a bit. All of my FF2 settings and bookmarks are intact, as are my add-ons (including Web Developer). Java still works, too. And performance of FF3 seems more than a little bit snappier than FF2. I can really feel the difference with Web-based apps that use a lot of Javascript.

Yeah, I'm months late to the FF3 party (at least on this platform), but I can more than safely say that I'm damn glad I finally and painlessly made the switch.

To replace FF2 with FF3, here's what I did in an xterm window:

$ sudo pkg_delete mozilla-firefox
Password:
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.16p3: complete
Clean shared items: complete
$ sudo pkg_add -i firefox3
firefox3-3.0.1p3: complete
--- firefox3-3.0.1p3 -------------------
Please see /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/README.OpenBSD
for information about running Firefox on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD users face a similar dilemma in version 4.5, in which OpenOffice 2.4 will co-exist along with OO3. For the release after that, just like with FF, OO2.4 will be gone, and only OO3.x will remain. I'm OK with that, too. I just started using OO3 in Windows, and I think it's a pretty good release thus far.

I love it when things work. It happens more often than not in OpenBSD, and that's why I've stuck with it. If things were breaking down software-wise, I'd be sprinting back to Linux. But as long as not having Flash 9 or 10 doesn't totally harsh my proverbial mellow (OpenBSD is mired in Flash 7 due to subsequent Linux Flash Players insisting on ALSA sound, which the BSDs don't have), I'm comfortable.

And if I could manage to edit video in Blender, I would work around the lack of up-to-date Flash.

Now ... back to the OpenBSD way of keeping things up to date (or not ...).

I can't decide whether, and if so how much, I'm troubled by keeping the same version of various apps on my machine for six months at at time. At one level, I'm happy not to be constantly doing apt-get update apt-get upgrade or having the Update Manager pop up every day.

But if you want to keep current in OpenBSD, you need to either patch your box to -stable, or just run -current which is what developers and other edgy types install on their own equipment. I'll confess that if I understood a little better how to make a -release box -stable, or keep a -current box current, I'd be more game for doing it (and I might get there at some point). I do know that a lot of compiling is involved, and I'm no fan of sitting and waiting for ports to build. But if Firefox 3.0.8 is what I craved, I could get it now either in by running -current or by and building the port. Even in Ports, Firefox is stuck at 3.0.1 in my 4.4 environment.

I've seen a few users claim that keeping an OpenBSD box at -stable or running -current and updating it is no big deal. I'd love for that to be the case.

Right now, on this install, I have maybe 2.5 GB in /usr, and after my experience running out of space to build Java, I'm reluctant when it comes to bringing down the source of OpenBSD and compiling it. This is just about as close to a "production" machine as I have, and I can't risk bricking the install, so I'll be ordering my OpenBSD 4.5 CDs very soon (make that very, very soon) and upgrading that way. I've done it once, and hopefully I can do it again.

I tried quite a few OpenBSD ports during my last run on the Sparcstation 20. None of them would build (Firefox, Seamonkey, Geany).

Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn't install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn't give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that's a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box).

Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard. There are quite a few other Solaris 9 books out there, including a "Dummies" book by Dave Taylor, who wrote a general Unix book I quite liked (here's everything Amazon has that he wrote).

Back to the Sparcstation 20 after the Solaris 9 installation: With 50 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM, it's far from ideal. GNOME &mddash; which ships with Solaris 9 — is almost unusable, but the CDE desktop is pretty responsive. It reminds me quite a bit of Fvwm in OpenBSD.

StarOffice 6 is included among the many discs in the Solaris box. When I installed it as root, only root could run it, so I started over again in my user account. The answer to this mystery is probably somewhere in my "Complete Idiots" book.

I found a Firefox 2.0.0.20 package built for Solaris 8 at the great SunFreeware site. Again, installing as root meant only root could use it. Even after installing it through the user account with su didn't work all the way. I can still run Firefox as root, but I get errors relating to patches that I need to do when I try to run it as my user. I'll have to read up on Solaris admin and eventually find and install all the Solaris patches.

But I did get Firefox to run, and it's WAY faster than Netscape 4.7, which shipped with Solaris. Yes, I did just type the words "Netscape 4.7."

I could very well keep Solaris on the box, but one idea is to run OpenBSD and then try to use the Solaris binary packages for Firefox and OpenOffice (since none of the OpenBSD ports of Firefox or Seamonkey will install on the Sparc 20).

Running Solaris binaries in OpenBSD is supposed to work. And yes, OpenBSD is a better, faster OS, for my use anyway, than Solaris on this platform.

Sun Sparcstation 5 image from the OSIAH: Online Sun Information ArcHive.

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

This post began its life as a comment on the previous Sparcstation 20 entry, and true to the way I overwrite even a comment, it works well enough as a standalone entry.

And thus, here it is in that form:

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved.

But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Thus far, that direction is a reinstall of OpenBSD. I haven't tried any ports yet, but all the packages I have installed — a few GUI editors (nedit, which I quite like, and another I can't remember), plus the Dillo browser, which in all fairness ran great in NetBSD, too — did work.

Now that I'm running not the box's original, jet-plane-noisy 2 GB Seagate hard drive but a super-cheap-on-eBay 35 GB Hitachi SCSI drive that's pleasantly quiet, maybe the installation of an OpenBSD port of a "modern" Web browser will work. Maybe not. I'll also try to roll Abiword onto the box, as well as Geany (for comparison's sake, if anything else).

And there's always Solaris.

I know there are Solaris-compatible packages for just about everything, so if I can't manage to get Seamonkey or Firefox installed from OpenBSD's ports with the extra disk space, my next move will be installing Solaris 9 (I got an unopened box of the software for $1 — yep, that little, plus shipping — on eBay) and see how that OS runs on the box.

One thing: Sound on the 32-bit Sparc platform doesn't work in OpenBSD. It does in NetBSD. Of course it does in Solaris, since Sun's OS was written with the Sparc in mind.

It may be that Solaris is the best OS for desktop use on the Sparc 20. Probably the best thing to do is get a CPU module faster then the current 50 MHz processor I'm now running, and also upping the memory to the max of 512 MB (right now I have the 128 MB the box had when I got it).

But make no mistake, for sheer out-of-the-box configuration on a Sparcstation 20 (sound nothwithstanding), OpenBSD is way ahead of NetBSD.

My next line of attack is trying a few (or more) OpenBSD ports. Even if this experiment goes well, I'll have to roll Solaris 9 onto the Sparc 20 before I decide on any long-term OS for the box.

Before I finish this entry, it's worth pointing out that Debian Etch for Sparc boots but won't install. It hangs when trying to load the CD driver. I don't know if the Sparc port of Debian is broken for EVERY 32-bit Sparc model, but it sure doesn't work for the Sparcstation 20.

Image above right: This isn't my Sparc; it's a Sparcstation 5 from http://www.computermuseum.org.uk. They look exactly alike (and in many ways are).

Time's short, so I'll hit the high points:

• The fix for all the problems I was having in Opera 9.51 (the Linux version) in OpenBSD was easy. All I had to do was change from asynchronous DNS lookup to synchronous. I even reinstalled Flash for Opera. Regarding the fix, l'll elaborate later.

• Now that I can run Opera, I've been using this circa-2002-03 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron) for just about all of my daily work. The laptop's running great, with excellent performance from OpenBSD 4.4 itself and its default Fvwm window manager.

• I wanted to change from IMAP to POP for one of my main e-mail accounts. I had been using Thunderbird in Windows with IMAP. That worked pretty well, but in OpenBSD, I wanted to use POP and have all the mail on the hard drive.

  Either Thunderbird itself, or the entire POP protocol, won't go into nested folders on an IMAP server and grab everything. At least it didn't in my case. So I tried to bring all those IMAP folders onto the local drive en masse. That didn't work so well. I suspect the server won't stay connected long enough to move many hundreds of messages at a time.

  I'm sure I lost quite a few messages, but I also have many hundred that I'll try to move from one Thunderbird installation to the other.

  Knowing what I know now, it would have been better to get EVERYTHING in order on the first Thunderbird installation and then move the entire "profile" over to the second PC. As it stands now, I'll have to figure out how to tap those exact folders/directories and move them over individually. The Thunderbird menus aren't much help with this. Thunderbird needs a robust backup utility built into it.

• In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

• Before I figured out how to fix Opera, I rolled out an identical Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu 8.04. That installation went perfectly fine. No problems at all. That laptop has 256 MB of RAM at the moment, and during the 300+ package update after the initial install, there was a whole lot of swapping. Have you noticed in Debian and Ubuntu that the package management uses as many resources as you can throw at them? The machine was unusable during the long update (for which I ran the Update Manager in GNOME).

  You don't have to roll in 300 packages every day, month ... or just about ever, so that's an unusual circumstance.

  I'll keep the Ubuntu laptop at the ready in case I need it for video editing (a task I'm not sure can be done in OpenBSD; if anybody can point me to a package or port, I'd be grateful).

  But for now, the OpenBSD Toshiba is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power.

Here's the deal. I've been using one of my two nearly identical Toshiba 1100-S101 laptops for a growing share of my day-to-day work, and not just at home.

The degradation of my Windows XP-running Dell box over the course of the day (OK, it's not that great in the morning after a fresh boot, either) has driven me to use my older, slower laptops, which under non-Windows OSes actually do things better and faster.

I basically resurrected both Toshibas from death in the form of recycling, which is what would have happened to them had I not pulled them from the haul-me-away pile. Both had XP installed. Until this point, I didn't have any personal machines running XP, and if you don't count the Windows 2000-running Pentium II box I rarely turn on, these are really my only Windows-running PCs I use besides my main work box — the one that barely works.

Think of that last paragraph as somewhat of an explanation for why I'm dual-booting both laptops, the first into OpenBSD 4.4 and the second, as of this afternoon, into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I really have little use for Windows, but in the course of whatever it is that I do in these blog entries and my print column, I just might need a Windows machine. Or not. Since I can't reinstall Windows XP whenever I wish due to not having an install CD, I'm leaving those now-shrunken NTFS partitions intact until I decide a) I really need the disk space or b) figure out how to get the hard drives out of the Toshibas and put them aside in the unlikely event that I absolutely need to run XP some time in the far future.

I've sung the praises of the Opera Web browser many a time. It's a great deal lighter than Firefox, it renders most Web pages well, and most importantly for me, it enables me to use a critical Web-based application that is designed to only work with Internet Explorer, which I try to run as little as possible (and which isn't an option in OpenBSD).

In OpenBSD, Opera is run with the Linux compatibility layer, so it's basically a Linux binary when it comes into the system from ports.

And up until now, I've had no problems with it.

But lately, Opera has been either crashing itself or crashing X.

I can see in top in an xterm window that processes with the name operapluginw (or some other letter after "plugin") can eat 90 percent of CPU and bring the whole laptop to its knees.

Most of the time I can kill the processes in a terminal and then restart Opera right away. Sometimes I can restart the Fvwm window manager from the menu. Other times I have to kill X with ctrl-alt-backspace.

I don't know if the problem is with this specific build of Opera (version 9.51, build 2061), the many packages that allow OpenBSD to run Linux binaries in i386 (including fedora_base and fedora_motif), or something inherent to this hunk of hardware, a 2002-era Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop. It could even be something specific to the software-as-a-service type application I'm primarily accessing with the Opera browser.

Right now the problem is manageable, and I will be testing Opera again in Linux (preferably Debian) very soon.

Due to the inherently quirky nature of our particular development environment, many of my co-workers have been using Opera heavily. The problem I'm reporting here is in OpenBSD only. I haven't seen it in Windows (or previously in Linux). Again, it could be something with the Linux compatibility portion of OpenBSD (this is the only Linux app I'm running), or Opera itself.

In all likelihood, I'll continue running Opera in OpenBSD and see if the problem clears up in the next version of the OS.

And I didn't mention it until now, but my other "main" browsers on this OpenBSD laptop is Firefox 2. In OpenBSD 4.4 for i386, there are packages for both Firefox 2 and 3, but I chose FF 2 for no other reason than that it was still available, and in Unix-like environments I haven't really seen the need to go from FF 2 to 3 if I don't have to.

And Firefox 2 has been extremely solid in OpenBSD 4.4. If I could use it for everything (or could figure out what's ailing Opera), I'd be very happy indeed.

Frustration with my Windows XP box at the office has prompted me to do more and more work at the office on this Toshiba laptop, which happens to have OpenBSD as its primary OS. (I didn't remove Windows XP from the laptop, but I don't use it, either.)

I've never previously used/abused this hardware and OS to the same extent, and in a sense it's a test of the Toshiba, OpenBSD and the applications.

As I recently reported, the whole thing has the potential to run great. If I really needed constant access to Flash video and other such nastiness as Microsoft .NET (which unfortunately I sometimes do), I'd be in a bit of trouble using this platform. I don't even really need Java all that much, but I could install it from ports if things change.

Before I close out this rambly entry, let me remind the reader that one of the things that prompted me to run OpenBSD on this laptop was the balky CD/DVD drive that hates 9 out of 10 CDs I burn for it (and yes, those CDs work fine on other PCs). Even OpenBSD's install CD wouldn't work, so I was able to use the floppy image to boot the system and install over the network.

When I first installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba 1101-S101 laptop (Celeron 1.3 GHz), I kept the stock 256 MB of RAM.

Everything was running so well that I didn't hurry to add RAM.

But since I do have spare PC133 SODIMMs, I could've bumped it up to 512 MB, 768 MB or 1 GB.

I decided to go with 768 MB for now, which meant adding a 512 MB SODIMM.

Opening up the bottom of the Toshiba, installing the module, closing it up and booting all went fine.

And now I'm starting to look at how the system is using memory. Right now I'm running the Opera and Firefox Web browsers, the Geany text editor, the GIMP image editor and an xterm window. This is all in fvwm, OpenBSD's default window manager.

The top utility reports that I still have 289 MB of free memory, and I'm not using any swap at all.

I then opened a spreadsheet and document in OpenOffice (which happens mighty slowly, by the way). Free memory dropped to 190 MB. I realized that while I had the GIMP running, I didn't have any files opened. I cranked up one of the .jpgs I worked on earlier in the day, and free memory was now at 186 MB.

I still could pull the 256 MB module and replace it with another 512 MB SODIMM, but for now this is pretty good performance. I can imagine things going to hell if I started streaming video (on the sites that Opera's Flash plugin support), but in terms of getting work done on this laptop, OpenBSD and 768 MB of memory are doing very well.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light.

Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble.

I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon.

Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with.

The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings).

If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

Don't get me wrong. Searching for free software for Windows computers is something I do, too. Not often, but I do it. That's how I found some of my very favorite applications on any platform, including the terrific image viewer/editor IrfanView, the fast AbiWord word processor and Notepad++, the best Windows-native text editor ever.

Even though I do a lot of work in Firefox, where Chris Pedrick's excellent Web Developer add-on helps me code, whenever I'm doing "casual browsing," working in Movable Type, Google Docs, Gmail or any of the various Web-based programs I rely on that allow it, I use the Google Chrome browser.

Why? Speed.

Even though I think a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM is adequate for Windows XP, there's no denying that Chrome is faster to load and run than Firefox (and Firefox leaves Internet Explorer 7 way back in the dust). Chrome is right up there with the Opera browser when it comes to speed, but already Chrome does better in terms of rendering pages.

And basically Google Chrome is a nice, lean, uncomplicated browser.

I made it my default browser because every time I click on a link in an e-mail (usually in Thunderbird, by the way), the machine would open that link in Firefox. And on this box, while I am using Firefox for development, I'm happier doing the rest of my browsing in Chrome.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to run Firefox 3.1, which is supposed to be much faster than 3.0.x.

So what if Chrome had a tool like Web Developer? And what if Chrome ran (and ran well) in non-Windows environments (Linux, BSDs, Mac OS)? Just more world domination for Google (and a faster box for me).

Web Developer or Firebug?: I should probably try to familiarize myself with the Firebug extension for Firefox. Having more than one tool to help with Web development (and I need all the help I can get), isn't a bad thing. I guess I use Web Developer because it was the first of the two that I was able to get working the way I needed it.

Related:

Google Chrome: What does it offer developers?
Chromium Developer Documentation

The Self-Reliant Thin Client — my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — which has been running Debian Etch now for:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
11:47:52 up 35 days, 19:55, 2 users, load average: 2.79, 1.74, 0.79

with the OS and all files stored on an 8 GB Compact Flash module, and backing up the /home files via rsync to a 1 GB USB Flash drive just received two Iceweasel (aka unbranded Firefox) updates:

iceweasel
Iceweasel-gnome-support

That brings the system's version of the Mozilla-powered browser to 2.0.0.18.

Unless I've failed to hear about it, Debian Lenny hasn't yet been declared Stable, so Etch — first made Stable in April 2007 — remains the Debian distro of record for those who like things to stay predictable (and not break).

And now for an editorial: I know that the Debian Project does things the way it wants, but I'd sure like to see them decide to give each Stable distribution a defined life span of, say, three years. Yep, just like Ubuntu does with its LTS.

At the current pace, I imagine that Etch will get three years of security patches anyway. That's because once Lenny is declared Stable, Etch becomes Old Stable and at that point gets an additional year of bug fixes and security patches from the Debian Project.

The ability for sysadmins to plan and know how long they can ride a given release is something I find very valuable. Red Hat wouldn't do it if customers didn't want it. And while I think the 7-year-life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is probably more than a little too long for most uses (not that a print server or internal file server needs to be all that cutting-edge). But three years for Debian (I think at this point that two years of support is pretty much a given) is something that its users — including me — could really get behind.

Note: Ever notice how these entries start off so innocuous and then somehow morph into a diatribe? Yep, me too.