Archive for August, 2006
Just took some pics of my PCs and my nitro R/C car/truck. The good PC on the pics is my router, the one with neon blue lights. As you can see the Maxtor hard drives are in it ;). The R/C cars are dirty as hell but impossible to keep clean. If you see a clean one, they never use it :). The car has a TON of upgrades. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars have been dumped in to it. If you know anything about RC cars you’d appreciate it :P. The car is a Traxxas Nitro 4-tech. The truck is a Losi XXX-NT.
Everyone these days seems to be raving about Firefox, and how it should be used over Internet Explorer. I totally agree with these people, however Firefox isn’t anywhere near the best browser out there. Opera outperforms Firefox in basically all tests. The goal of this article, isn’t to get you to switch. I simply wanted to write a quick article giving facts on why Firefox isn’t the best. If you want a detailed report, stop reading. This is just a few quick facts.
Which browser uses less RAM?
I opened 9 popular websites in 9 different tabs in each of the browsers. The websites were as follows:
http://www.ebay.com/
https://www.paypal.com/
http://digg.com/
http://images.google.com/images?q=images&sa=N&tab=wi
http://pscode.com/
http://amazon.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.aol.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/
I then minimized all browsers, and checked their memory usage. Firefox using ~22 MBs was by far using the most. Most browsers release their memory when you minimize them, however Firefox does not by default. If I didn’t configure it to do that it would be using ~50 MBs. If you’re interested in configuring it to release its memory see this article. In this test, Opera and IE were considerably less.
The next test was restoring all windows and checking their memory usage. Firefox used the most memory at ~31 MBs. Opera used approximately half as much as Firefox.
PC Requirements
Firefox:
Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-III+ 233 MHz
64 MB RAM
52 MB hard drive space
Windows 98 or higher
IE:
66 MHz processor
16-32 MB ram
12 MB Install size
Windows 98 or higher
Opera:
20 MB of free disk space
Any system running Windows 95 or higher
Cold and hot start times
Firefox 1.0 - 11.54 seconds.
Firefox 1.5 - 17.26 seconds.
Firefox 2.0 - 11.64 seconds
Opera 7.54 - 4.90 seconds.
Opera 8 - 3.66 seconds.
Opera 9.01 - 2.47 seconds.
IE 5.0 - 5.25 seconds.
IE 6.0 - 6.99 seconds.
IE 7.0 - 7.80 seconds.
Cold start was the amount of time the browser took to start up after you logged out and then back in. These tests were taken on an 800 MHz P3 Box with 256 MBs of ram.
Hot start times
A hot start is the time it takes to open your browser after the original opening of it.
Firefox 1.0 - 2.52 seconds.
Firefox 1.5 - 2.74 seconds.
Firefox 2.0 - 3.05 seconds
Opera 7.54 - 2.40 seconds.
Opera 8 - 2.38 seconds.
Opera 9.01 - 2.24 seconds.
IE 5.0 - 3.11 seconds.
IE 6.0 - 1.77 seconds.
IE 7.0 - 2.40 seconds.
Rendering times
Rendering CSS and tables. Simply the most part of using your browser is its ability to render websites. Opera is far faster than Firefox or Internet explorer at rendering. For the full list of rendering times and the hot/cold start times see this site
Which browser is more web compliant?
Simply put, Opera. Taking the Acid2 browser test reveals that Opera is the ONLY browser to pass the test. Internet Explorer doesn’t even come close, while Firefox is on the right track.
Opera’s perfect rendering.
Firefox is on the right track but nowhere near correct.
“¦Uhm..Mr. Gates, care to explain?
See for yourself. For more detailed statistics on how compliant each browser is, view the chart. Opera wins in all categories. To be fair Firefox’s new version (3.0) which is currently in development passes the Acid2 test.
Security
Since Firefox 1.x has been released there have been over 125 vulnerabilities. Opera is the most secure browser out there. Firefox users might say Internet Explorer’s ActiveX is insecure, and should be removed. In IE7 on Vista it runs in restricted access mode, meaning any harmful AvtiveX installed, is not in fact harmful at all. The fact is Firefox extensions pose an equally dangerous threat to the users PC. Most people criticize Microsoft for being slow to patch its vulnerabilities. Well Firefox isn’t exactly perfect either, as shown here.
Cost
Some people are still living back in time when Opera wasn’t free. For over a year now, Opera has been without ads, and is 100% free for anybody. The only difference is that Opera is closed source while Firefox is open source. If you don’t know C++, then that shouldn’t make a difference.
Extensions
A lot of Firefox fanboys will claim that Firefox has extensions, and they can’t do without them. Stated the most is ad-block (which Opera has built in). Well opera has widgets, which is basically the same thing as Firefox’s extensions. They also offer a documentation to start making your own widgets.
It’s not an opinion that Opera is by far the best graphical browser out there, it’s fact. It’s incredibly fast, secure, resource light, and the most web compliant. I’m not saying Firefox is a bad browser, all I’m saying is it’s simply not the best.
Well first of all Maxtor hard drives just plain suck. There is no other way to describe them. Anyways I bought a brand new Sata2 200 Gig Maxtor hard drive from Fry’s Electronics. Switched the jumper to 1.5 Gbps because my Gigabyte K7 Triton motherboard doesn’t support Sata2. Popped the hard drive in, and went to install Windows XP. Windows couldn’t find the hard drive. That was no big deal, I didn’t expect it to. Went to the Gigabyte website and downloaded the needed sata drivers and put them on a floppy. Restarted the XP install, and it recognized the drive fine. Partitioned it, and started the format. Went to get something to eat and came back and it was at 20%. That’s odd it should take minutes to do a quick format. I tried a slow format and that completed, but the install froze at the copying file stage. Got out the trusty Gentoo live cd and tried installing Gentoo. When trying to make a partition reiserfs or ext3 it froze just like Windows. At this point I knew something had to be wrong. I called Maxtor tech support bracing myself to be connected to India at any time. To my surprise what I got was a knowledgeable and understandable technical support person. Told him my issue and he said he’d send an RMA out to me. When I got the RMA I had the same problem. I called back and he went through a ton of trouble shooting steps. Finally he figured out the issue: the firmware version on the hard drive isn’t compatible with nForce3-4 chipsets. Oops! Good job Maxtor for shipping a drive that is basically DOA to tons of users. One simple solution is to upgrade the firmware. Well that’s going to be quite hard to do on a computer that is not compatible with your chipset. So finally he told me he’d send me a different model that is better than what I have now and possibly more gigs. He told me to put the old RMA into that box and ship it back to them. Never said anything about my old drive which I assume I can keep. So now I’ll just upgrade the firmware on that hard drive and have almost a half terabyte of disk space to play around with. (I told him I had no way of updating the firmware, because I didn’t want to deal with asking people to open their box and stuff heh.) So now I’m left with the old hard drive which works perfect and the newer model :). Even though Maxtor drives suck I have to say I’m very impressed with their support. The people didn’t treat me like an idiot, and knew what they were talking about.
Welp it appears there was an awful error on eCost.com allowing those hard drives to be bought for .42-.58 cents. I picked up one of them before the site got the Digg effect. Then later on after they didn’t change it I used google checkout and picked up five more. Someone called them two hours before I purchased the last five and they said they were aware of the mistakes. Well if they were aware and did nothing to fix it, that is false advertising. They will be forced to honor the price of I will call the BBB, and email Google, and ask why they put such crappy merchants on google checkout. All and all I think I will get something out of it if not all six.
EDIT: It turns out they have no intention of honoring any of them. Posting something and leaving it on your website for days with no intention of selling for that price is fraud. The people at that company simply don’t give a fuck. They’re going to be swarmed with calls fromt he BBB, I don’t know what they were thinking.. Here is a call I made to them for laughs.
Well I finally got both operating systems successfully configured. Windows XP was obviously a breeze to install, and I did that first. Installed gentoo last with minimal issues. Originally I installed XP on sda1 and moved it to sda4 so I needed to repair boot.ini which was easy. The steps to repair a missing or corrupt boot.ini can be found at About.com. Most of Dell’s parts are fairly compatible with Linux. The wireless card which I regret not upgrading requires ndiswrapper to work properly, but since I don’t have wifi I didn’t bother with it. The kernel drivers for the sound card are a little buggy, the sound skips sometimes with Xgl. For instructions on how to configure alsa/sound see the Gentoo handbook. After sound was configured it didn’t work with Firefox and flash animations. After googleing a little I found this solution. Since it’s a laptop the screen should shut off when you close the lid. It should also have some power saving techniques such as hibernate and sleep. First you’ll need to enable acpi in the kernel and recompile. Emerge it, and add it startup. I enabled all the acpi sub categories..video..battery etc. This should get your battery meter to work. In /etc/acpi you can find scripts to configure the screen to shut off when you close the lid. For more details on this script see this link. Gentoo wiki has more details on acpi. I needed to add a hack to the .sh file to get the screen to shut off properly. “xset dpms force off && sleep 5″ should work. You’ll need to emerge some things before that command works however. You’ll need to configure the ATI drivers to get proper resolutions. Just emerge ati-drviers. You might want to pick up the extra utils with that as well. emerge -s ati to see what is avalible. Find the aticonfig binary path and run it with the –initial flag, and it _should_ work. I setup Xgl which was nearly impossible, but it looks elite. Here is the Gentoo manual to install and configure Xgl. Remember the Gentoo handbook is your bible.
Here are some extras you can download:
- xorg.conf - Xorg configuration file.
- .config - Kernel’s configuration file.
- make.conf - /etc/make.conf Gentoo’s flags for compiling things.
- compile.sh - Quick bash script to recompile your kernel if you are constantly trying new things like me.
If you want to make your box look like Vista like I choose to do you’ll need:
You will also need to set Aero as your theme once you install compiz and Xgl. Here is the final product of what my Gentoo Linux desktop looks like.