Re: Discovered a new browser...
From: Joshua Tinnin (krinklyfig_at_spymac.com)
Date: 01/23/05
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To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 20:37:48 -0800
On Saturday 22 January 2005 11:56 am, Tom Huppi <thuppi@huppi.com>
wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, W. D. wrote:
> > At 04:15 1/22/2005, Tom Huppi wrote:
> > >It's only been recently that I've taken an interest in seeking out
> > >lightweight software.
> >
> > Any other tips? Which window manager/GUI do you recommend?
>
> Unfortunately, no. I've only recently taken to researching this
> problem and have no first-hand experience with any of the tools
> I've run across. I've always used 'fvwm2' since that's what I set
> up on my first FreeBSD box circa '98 and it's served my needs in
> this area fine. My needs are, however, limited. I'm more
> comfortable starting the applications I need from an xterm, and
> indeed, I spend quite a lot of time in an xterm doing one thing or
> another. I suspect that 'fvwm2' fits into the 'lightweight'
> category, but it's by happenstance. It seems that many of the
> Linux distributions which aim to conquer the problem of running
> well on dated hardware choose IceWM (iirc.)
Personally, I like xfce, though that is a desktop (wm, panel, taskbar,
etc.) rather than simply a window manager. Even so, it's quite quick
and light. That, coupled with its simplicity, has made it very popular
on kiosks as well as desktops. Fluxbox and Window Maker are good
examples of lightweight (but not too light), highly configurable window
managers. I often use Window Maker when I have to use Cygwin on a Win32
machine.
> Anyone else have any tips or thoughts? I notice 'firefox' is
> happy to gobble down 50M and often significantly more with Xorg
> similar on my 5.3 system. It is very fortunate that FreeBSD's VM
> subsystem is intelligent enough to adapt else I am certain I would
> be having a lot more swapping on the box I'm currently using.
> I'm wondering if either of these applications themselves are
> 'smart' enough to adapt a bit to limited resources, or if there
> are any ways to build them specially to be a bit lighter.
Well, Firefox in my experience runs about the same as Mozilla, but I
have several extensions. You might want to try deinstalling the
extensions, but Firefox isn't *that* light, at least not when you're
getting into memory footprints smaller than 30M. It's just for that
reason that I keep w3m around, plus the fact that it renders some sites
more readable or usable. Of course that's a text browser, but you'd be
surprised how well it can work (except if you really like multimedia
websites, but then you probably wouldn't be thinking much about memory
if so).
Dillo is good, but it was originally a tool meant for production
environments, although it's been cleaned up a bit, and it's nice and
snappy and does well with basic websurfing (as well as w3c compliance).
Galeon is based on the Gecko engine used in Mozilla/Firefox, but it's
supposed to be lighter (not quite so in my experience).
When it gets into GUI stuff, most of it is going to be pretty heavy
these days, especially because so much of it is hooked into large
graphic toolkits and/or even larger user environments. The tried and
true console apps still work well, such as Mutt for an email client,
w3m for web, vim for text editing, etc. Incidentally, I just discovered
ctorrent, a BitTorrent console client written entirely in C. It's much
faster and more efficient than any other torrent client I've used, and
it's not full of bugs like most of the GUI clients are (even Azureus,
which I like). Many times, simple is better for more than one reason.
- jt
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