Mozilla Guide for Windows UsersTuesday April 13th, 2004TweakHound has a guide to Mozilla for Windows users. The screenshot-heavy, text-light article covers the Mozilla Application Suite, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Thanks to bekrut for the link. By saying mozilla suite is slow and heavy and not better than IE it does not help, even when it praises Firefox. Rather than complaining about one person's analysis, it should be noted that someone felt this way, and if others do as well, see if there is not some way to improve the suite. I stopped using the suite becuase I felt for my own use it was too 'heavy' and did not like the interface but have been very pleased with Firefox/Thunderbird. We cannot assume that each product is perfect and determine any contructive comment to be incorrect. We must learn from what other's think about the software and, if there are enough people that are in consensus, work to improve upon the complaint. Amem to that, but I would like to add a simple thing much of the bloat of ie is hidden under the hood. The browser is loaded in the boot time so it can snap open, I know mozilla has this options also but 2 wrongs don't make a right. Also I wouldn't be surprised if there was another browser foot prints hidden in system services so that ie would look lighter on the memory then it actualy is. I find the suite very fast, not slow as he states. Also he failed to review a major fratures of the suite. There is a good newsreader and he failed to mention one of the suites best features for me the Sidebar. It is hear that a user can keep all their bookmarks handy, easily switch to browsing history, and search with multiple search engines. It is okay to prefer Firefox/Thunderbird over the suite, but to bias the review by omiting major features of the program is not right. If you do not intend to offer a complete review of the software, don't review it at all. An incomplete review does more harm than good. People do not get to discover all the features contained in the application. Based on the review they may conclude the application is too linited for their use or they do not discover how useful it is to keep the bookmarks aavailable in the sidebar. The reviewer could have introduced a potential Mozilla user to the useful feature of searching multiple search engines in the sidebar. With such an incomplete review of the Suite I wish he had simply stated that he will not review it. The suite is a much more powerful piece of software than his review leads the read to assume. I wish he had not reviewed the suite rather than provide a severly truncated review. >I find the suite very fast, not slow as he states. So do I - if I use QuickLaunch (or whatever it's called, going off memories from using Seamonkey eight months ago). If I don't use QuickLaunch it's extremely slow. Launching Firefox is as fast as QuickLaunch without having to stay in memory. I don't like keeping things in memory if I can help it. I have 384MB RAM; for those with less I assume the issue only becomes larger. Of course, if you were talking about rendering, they're both pretty fast. i have XP, and use Lotus Notes, Lotus Designer, Lotus Sametime, Total Commander, and foobar2000, and althou i prefer Firefox (since 0.8), and i even deleted the suite, i never feel the mem is an isue ... even more, i don't know why people complain about it ... ff/moz can be open all day without crashing (ask this for IE). Posted about this article in the tech forum too -- in short because: - He's so aggressively pushing for Firefox that I take him less seriously for it. Why should I believe someone who says Thunderbird has 99.9999% of what "the planet" need from Outlook 2003? I don't want Thunderbird to be bloated, but still think it misses some useful features from Outlook. - He makes a feature sound unique to Firefox ("Check that box under Multimedia!!!) even if it exists in the browser he compares to (IE). - He don't bother with Thunderbird's spam filter since he don't think it will do anything good and don't want to bother teaching it. Strange opinion indeed when you're writing an article that's supposed to show off application features. - "I don't like it and that's why this section is a little short." In case anyone still wondered whether the article was biased or not, he later makes it very obvious that it is. If I were using IE today, I'd take a *critical* article much more seriously when considering switching to Mozilla. - "Also, I REALLY...REALLY hate those stupid little green "bookmark ribbons". He also contradicts himself by later saying he don't bother with themes. Strange for someone who "hate" minor visual features... Yeah, I was really confused about the junk mail thing. His argument seemed to be that because other client side filters were rubbish, the Thunderbird filter would be too. It was even more confusing when he said that he didn't want to bother because you had to train it and then went on to say that he got more spam than the average user. Maybe he doesn't understand the tech? Clearly, the more spam you get, the faster you can train the filter. Indeed, I would expect the filter to be more effective if you get more spam just through havng a bigger corpus. some junk mail filters can come pre-loaded with some other person's idea of what "spam" is. i would rather decide for myself what is and is niot junk mail. i ask for some advertising stuff, and avoid a lot of personal looking stuff. after justa week of training my filter MY way, it works far better than any commercial software that i have seen. :) all i had to do is reset the junk filter once, after i learned how to use it (to delete it's old bad habits it had picked up before i new how to flag junk). Why did you put your site name on all screenshots ? Is that your idea of the opensource world ? Regarding the amount of code that Mozilla provides freely, i think you can accept that someone will maybe take your precious screenshots, dont you think ? Article quote: "At all stages Mozilla 1.7 beta uses more resources than does IE 6". What method did the reviewer use to determine resource usage? Was the fact that IE preloads many of its parts separately taken into account? If all that was done was to look at memory usage in the Windows Task Manager, then the conclusions drawn are unfounded. <joke>Perhaps Mozilla should load most of its resources upon startup and NOT tie them to the mozilla.exe process. Then we could get Mozilla's memory usage down to 1 byte!</joke> I thought I would post a response to some of your comments. These comments are not meant to be confrontational or defensive… At no time did I say that the article was a "review". That would imply that some scientific methodology was used which is not the case. Biased? Of course it is. What would be the point of the article if I just regurgitated the features? That info can be found on the product page. The reason the article as a whole was short is because I’ve found that the majority of net surfers simply will not read long articles. I try to get as much info in as I feel is necessary to get my point across quickly. That is the very reason it is “screen shot heavy”. I felt that the screen shots could say more and say it quicker than I could. I do not use the junk mail filter because with the amount of testing I do I image/restore my computer almost weekly. This would require me to constantly retrain it. FWIW – Outlook did a much better job at filtering junk mail without training than did Mozilla. In retrospect that fact should have been included in the article and I have ammnded it as such. I do not use themes because they use resources I would rather have available somewhere else. I have themes disabled altogether in XP. Resources are the same reason I do not have anything save Zone Alarm in my quick launch bar. The reason I tag most of the pictures on my site is not to keep people from stealing the images ( I could care less) but to keep people from directly linking to those images and stealing my bandwidth (which I pay for out of my own pocket). Am I a Firefox fanboy? Guilty as charged. I’ll close this with this thought… If Mozilla 1.X is all that many of you think it is, why do so many people use Firebird and Thunderbird? Why have so many been so excited about them? Indeed, why do they exist at all? An offer for you… I will post a few responses or a rebuttal article within my article. Please keep it short and to the point, and attack the message not the messenger. :) I’ll leave this offer open for 1 week. thank you for the updated note on your web site about the junk mail filters. much happier now :) http://www.tweakhound.com/mozilla/mozilla17beta.htm Don't mind us. We are just a bunch of grumpy Mozilla zealots. Thanks for explaining yourself, though. I have used Firefox at work on Windows since version 0.6 and at home on Linux since 0.8 and I think it's great and I would definatley use them if I needed a browser only (at work I have to use a particular mail client, at home I choose to use Evolution). On the other hand, my dad uses the Mozilla suite as he needs the mail, web browsing and news components of it. I have thought from time to time about if he should switch across to Firefox and even suggested it, but as he almost always checks mail when he web browses and needs to webrowse when he looks at this mail, he can't see the point in starting up two different applications to do this. His thinking is that two apps can't use less resources than one app that is designed to do both (and he's on an older computer). I've decided that when both Firefox and Thunderbird have made it to 1.0, then I will look into this again and see if it's time to give him a little nudge again. For my dad, saying that the Mozilla suite is slow to start up or is bloated, would need to be compared to both a web browser and and email client. To the slow to start up, he'd probably say - well I only do that once a day, so it's not that much of an issue. Anyway different horses for different courses, but if I had of read your comments about the suite, I would've thought it was so bad that there is no reason anyone would ever want to use it, and I'm not sure that that's true. One extra comment I'd make is that I've found the two extensions adblock and flashblock great for helping out people on slower links, and from stopping the distraction that flash ads create when trying to view pages. Oh and by the way, my dad finds the spam filtering excellent. cheers, noelley |