[RULE] Mozilla components

[James Miller]

On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Richard Kweskin wrote:
>
> I haven't tried Thunderbird but I have tried Firebird 0.6 and Galeon (cannot remember which version.)
>
> In the days of Netscape 4.x I had everyone in the school I worked at use the whole suite.
>
> However, at the moment a good but small app is the goal. Firebird (which I downloaded from one of the Mozilla pages) comes in binary form wrapped up with tar and gzip. The only additional dependency needed with Shrike installed by Slinky was the package from cd1 called compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.118.i386.rpm (Michael's "mozilla_packages" list helped me find this out.)
>
> I am using Firebird and Sylpheed for all the browsing and e-mail on the "rule-101" box and all is going well (with the exceptions mentioned in an earlier post) but when the same combo of apps was attempted on an old clunker 486 (yet to be reported here) Firebird took far too long. (Icewm and Sylpheed seemed reasonable, though.)
>
> Dillo is probably the only X brwser that will pass on that box, but that is just speculation at the moment. (Watch this space.)
>
We had the same problem trying to find a graphical browser for Basiclinux.
Nothing suitable was found for 486's, though someone was reporting
reasonable performance from and older version of Opera (6.03).  I tried
that version on a 486 DX2 66 with 20MB RAM and it was too slow to be
productive.  I got slightly better results from Links2.1-pre9 (graphical
links) which, with svgalib, gives inline graphics in console mode.  But it
had some rendering problems, and though it can be compiled with SSL, its
SSL capabilities weren't always working either.  Svgalib is a great
alternative for those who want some graphics on older hardware that
doesn't tolerate X very well, btw.  Unfortunately, it seems like
development is not progressing much these days on it.  In any case, none
of the Mozilla variants are suitable for a 486 - even the so-called
"stripped down" ones - unless it's a really top end model and has lots of
RAM (e.g., 64MB).  Dillo is the only graphical browser that gives
reasonable performance on those types of machines, but, as you are all
likely aware, it lacks quite alot of functionality that many web sites
seem now to consider indispensible.

James


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