[ILUG] Mozilla M18 latency

[Caolan McNamara]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2000 at 10:29:31AM +0000, John P . Looney wrote:
>  I have to say, it's been feeling like it's getting slower and slower for
> me. M14 was OK, about as heavy as NS 4.5 - M17/18 have been really, really
> bad. It's threading has gone to the dogs too - say I nip over to slashdot,
> it'll take a minute to load & render, I can't do anything on the other
> page, till it finishes.

On the plus side it does render much faster than netscape, at least as
far as I can see, Id be interested in urls which render faster in netscape
than mozilla M18. Mozilla seems to really have incremental table rendering 
speeded up in comparison with netscape, take this "doing the dog on tables"
page, http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/Portal/ netscape has to wait until it has 
everything downloaded before it can make a stab at rendering it, mozilla makes 
it up as itgoes along, total rendering time does seem less on mozilla after 
its in cache by a little, but the incremental rendering is the real winner
it feels vastly faster, and is usable while still fetching the page.

Now once its down resize the page in each browser, mozilla laughs at you. 
Netscape goes into toxic shock. Plus mozilla just looks beautiful, 
the incremental rendering, resize proof rendering, beautiful default
chrome,  and improved css are all reasons that Im using mozilla as
default browser. I find netscape awesomely slow and of course a css
nightmare, plus I need a browser with real mathml support.

On the other hand , Im obviously too reactionary to figure out why I
want a mysidebar, though it will stay closed when asked in this
version, unlike older ones, shudder!. I absolutely hate the crashing,
its still unstable people, heres one for mozilla, when you crash it 
should save the url's you have open and on restart offer to restore state, 
which brings me to the other problem, actually filling in the bugzilla
is an absolute chore, M18 doesn't work with it, and neither does
the version of netscape I have as backup!, so I cannot make the
save state suggestion, or report that <ul><li> <p>thing</p></ul> is 
being rendered without a bullet while <ul><li><p>thing</p></ul> is
working correctly.

Javascript stuff seems all sorts of odd, and I have never tested Java,
all that though is old news to netscape users, so isn't an added
burden. And there still are many oddities with css, this though
might be me, all I ever hear is that mozilla is a wonderful standards
complient css renderer, for attributes like colours and border
widths and styles, fonts and other trivial effects it does seem pretty
good, for css layout with loads of floating left and right and so
forth, I never get what I want, usage of unrelated attributes like
borders seem to throw mozilla into confusion, very similiar to how
netscape would get confused. One example with buttons is at
http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/Portal/test4.html

The textbox control should be inside the black border, and nothing
can make the box align correctly vertically inside its div, 
with a float to the left and a float to the right a element 
left to hopefully be in the center will never align perfectly 
with the floating element horizontally, it will always be set 
slightly further down the page. Te same test opened in netscape
is a big chunk of black crap, so its a massive improvement, just
not perfect, you *still* need to use tables to achieve any kind
of layout within html, I still cannot seperate layout from
content the way I want.

Still have some strange problems with cookies, seems to forget them 
very quickly, forever requiring logging in to sites, though the 
login manager is a real real winner for auto remembering your user 
and pass combinations.

So its all a bit confusing at the moment, I think it has
excellent rendering of standard web pages, improved css
support, that is not as good as billed, a few neat features
and nice looks, but too unstable and inconsistent to reccommend 
to nongeeks. *Im* confused with the "avoid multiple posts" feature,
I always choose the wrong one, thats just not acceptable for
someone who does not want to learn about the arcanitites of
crap design decisions made in the previous decade.

C.
-- 
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