>> If Firefox linux is bigger because of included dependencies, what are the dependencies?

linux ??

>> Also, why is it suffering these horrible bugs?

buggy dependencies ??


ok ... just kidding ...
be serious a bit ...

i suspect that if without free softwares like FireFox and gimp and probably oo , probably there wont be that much linux and free software users as what we are witnessing right now and most importantly these users , most of them , they stay ...

opera doesnt contribute much(if any at all) to this free software advocacy effort ...


// TRIPLE


REASON EDIT :: after some carefull peanuts counting arithmetics , probably it should be a triple instead of a double ...

.

I honestly don't know, probably something obvious that we are all overlooking.
Well the particular bug mentioned above is iffy. Galeon uses Gecko for rendering I think which comes from the Mozilla team so it could just as easily be a Gecko bug or a GTK bug or something else. You'd need to do some more research on that one.

I don't know but personally I have had issue with past issues of Firefox and Linux where it would randomly close on me. So I stopped using it. The Windows version runs fine most of the time for me.

I agree with you Megaman X. Firefox has too many problems. Opera is the way to go.
Firefox in recent weeks has been devoloping more and more problems. Like it's pop up blocker which is no longer blocking pop ups. Opera has no problems with this.
Just one of the reasons I'm seeing with Firefox lately. There's more but I'm far to tired to list them.

I thought of another theory on Firefox's size:
It probably has something to do with the fact that on the Linux version you don't have to install it (just simply run it).

As far as the plugins are concerned: Firefox merely scans the filesystem plugin directories and takes advantage of what is installed. It comes only with a couple of very basic plugins. It doesn't even come with flash.

Or perhaps you mean extensions? If you don't want extensions, don't install them. I happen to install about 7 plugins for development work. I don't see any problem with Firefox as it is very lightweight out of the box.

As far as the file size: If you really want to fairly compare the file size of Firefox on Windows to something, compare it to the size of Internet Exploiter. Do you think MSIE consists solely of iexplore.exe? Think again - install it on wine sometime, cd to /wine/drive_c (or wherever you define the C drive) and do a du -h. THAT will be a fair comparison, on essentially the same OS.

As far as stability and taking down the desktop is concerned: it sounds like you are running low on memory - perhaps you do not have enough RAM, or you installed all the usual services many newbies installed (postfix, mysql, apache, etc.) and have them all needlessly enabled, taking up memory, and don't have any swap configured. If so, then yep! Processes can just die without warning in that case. However the same is also true on Windows, but where it comes preconfigured with an automatically growing swap file, you won't see that kind of behavior unless you explicitly disable or limit swap.

I have never otherwise seen Firefox take down a desktop environment in Linux aside from intentionally limiting memory and not enabling swap.

Nice attempt at a troll though. I'll give you thumbs up for this one because it's a unique approach to trolling this messageboard!

--Kim

Firefox having many problems?, well that's a surprise for me. As far as I can tell you, I think Firefox is very stable, I use it heavily each day and works ok.

Being fair, I remembered that I had a problem with Firefox in my Suse box, but that was because I was playing with KDE themes. Ah, the other problem that I remember is in my Debian Sid box, Firefox was consuming a lot of CPU cycles, I think it was related with having a lot of tabs opened, I closed it opened again, and back in business.

I must say that I upgrade/install Firefox only using apt-get or yum or YaST and I don't use many plugins also. It's clear that if you install Firefox from other sources rather than the repositories of your distro and install a lot of plugins the chances of something going wrong increases a lot. That's why I still haven't use the last release, I'm waiting patiently until it is available on the repositories.

If most of you prefer Opera it's your choice, I think that even Konqueror is a good choice. Use the one that you like, but don't blame all your problems to Firefox unless you are sure that it is causing them. That's a rule that I apply to all programs not just browsers.

@ Mirari

Wow, somebody actually agrees with me. That's new . Thanks, I appreciate it.

@ KimVette

I'm not sure if your entery post was directed at me, so before I reply to all you wrote, I need to be sure if you were calling me a troll or not. If you were, I won't even waste my time replying. Calling me a troll because I dislike Firefox and have 4000+ messages is a little... well... Still, my PC has 1 GB of RAM and all others, including my Sparc, has between 256 and 512 MB. At school, The Sparc's we use have 2 GB and Firefox has the same crashing for no reason behavior, so everybody dropped it and went mozilla. I stick with Opera and 2 other guys as well...

Running Firefox on Debian here, and it's very stable. If I didn't have flash installed, I don't think it would ever crash.

As for the large download, it is very likely because of libraries. Though here's the positive: on Linux if you need those libraries for another program, "bingo" you already have them; on Windows, you have to download them over again with every new program.

Windows programs are always shipped as a big-zip-kitchensink-ball-of-crap.

Mega Man X has a point. There are issues with the Linux version of Firefox that have not yet been addressed. If it is only used exclusively as a browser, and you only use Linux as your OS, then its short-comings might not be obvious, but if you use multiple browsers, and multiple OS's (like I do), then you pretty quickly notice the differences and problems with Linux Firefox.

The main issue I have is that the Fedora RPM is size optimized and not speed optimized. This causes Firefox's render times to be 3 times slower than the Windows Firefox, and 3-4 times slower than Opera. I now run a speed optimized RPM which has tripled my render times. Opera is still faster but only just.

However, Opera is not without its problems. Firstly it often renders pages with impossibly small text, that requires several clicks on Increase Text Size to get a page that is readable. These sites display perfectly in Firefox.

Also Opera lacks the wealth of extensions that Firefox has. In particular I love the Web Developer extension and wouldn't be without it. It has literally saved me hours of debugging work, by easily highlighting page elements, and outlining tables, divs or images. Opera would be so much better if it had this ability. As a web developer, Firefox is the browser of choice.

Another private extension, that Firefox has is one that a local has created to monitor our main Dam Water levels, that updates on an hourly basis based on formula's and data from several weather stations. Not essential, but interesting.

Hello

I am only linux user since very short time (almost two weeks.......) but i use it at work and at home, and parallel i use Windows XP, also at work as well as at home.

I use Firefox as my only browser since i first became aware of it (previously used Netscape - I.E. was started the last time some 2 years ago or so). Right now i'm on FF 1.5 on alltogether four installations - Windows/Linux at home and same at work.

i notice no difference WHATSOEVER in behaviour or speed of FF between each Windows/Linux installation. At home it's clearly faster because the machine has more than twice the CPU speed (Athlon XP 1800+ vs. Celeron 600) and lots more RAM too (786 vs 128 MB). However on ANY of these configurations FF runs stable, never crashes/hangs nor 'disappears" on me. I have several extensions, plugins and even a theme installed on each (and on all of them the same, like flash player, real, pdf, flashget, forecastfox, Google toolbar etc).

I am working on the computer all day, doing internet research amongs other things, so i can say that i am indeed a heavy FF user. At work i use mostly Linux now but sometimes have to switch to Windows, and at home it's pretty much 50/50 between Linux and Windows (some quirks with Linux on the home machine still).

Maybe i have to add that i use Linux like "out of the box" at the office, because after installation (SuSE 10.0 by the way) just about everything worked flawless from the first reboot, and just today i installed testwise the new KDE 3.5. Needless to say - it works flawless too I think these Compaq Deskpro were created for Linux

Regards......

Thanh

It maybe more of a Fedora issue than Firefox issue, but I doubt it. I tested the Fedora RPM's for 1.07, and also the Mozilla.org RPM's and got similar results although a bit better with the mozilla.org ones.

The speed optimized rpm's provided by one of the regular posters on FedoraForum (mtl2002) was a threefold faster.

I think that most Linux distros would likely see something similar. There is a browser rendering test page that give good data on relative speeds. You might like to try your Linux vesus Windows machines to see how wide the margin is.

Here is some good data on browser speeds. It looks like FF1.5 is slower than earlier 1.0 releases of FF.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#linspeed

Here is the render test page.
http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time.php

I get 7.73s for a first page load and 7.32s on a page reload in Firefox 1.07 on FC3 using Mtl2002's RPM's. I will do an update post from when I am in Windows tomorrow.

Have any of you guys had Linux FF 1.0.x crashing issues and are now trying out 1.5? I'd love to read comments on relative stability. Extra bonus points if you know whether popular extensions such as Adblock, Flashblock and TabBrowser Preferences are up to speed yet.

As it is, FF only crashes on occasion so I probably won't bother with 1.5 until the stable Archlinux repository updates to it. Especially since Kerry pointed out that it's slower on some benchmarks.

I think I've got the reason why it's bigger than the windows version:
I't's a Static Build.

see: Configuring Build Options - MDC

Dear Mega man x,

Reading some of the posts you have made here has prompted me to download the Opera browser to my desktop.

I am going to have my hard drive reformatted Wednesday ( hopefully for the last time ). I have used firefox with Windows XP and here using Linux.

If I have any questions about Opera I hope you will be willing to advise me.