vUDS and preparation for 13.10

[PCMan]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 3:21 AM, Phill Whiteside <PhillW at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Indeed,
>
> for those not too familiar with the history of choices, the choice to move
> TO Chromium was because it ran on the lower RAM machines and that Firefox
> had become bloated. This has now changed and Firefox now offers the lower
> RAM usage. I repeat, this is confirmed by the Canonical guy who looks after
> Chromium. At each cycle we address which are the 'leanest' applications. We
> hold no fan club of applications, if a leaner application arrives that gives
> the same usability as an existing one, then we use it.
>
> We ship pidgin by default, some people prefer X-Chat. We discuss things and
> then a decision is made. In this case, my vote is as always.... Use the
> application that uses the lowest resources. That is what lubuntu is built
> on.
>
> Regards,
>
> Phill.
>
> On 20 May 2013 19:34, Ian Gilfillan <launchpad at greenman.co.za> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I find your claim that 95% of the people prefer Chromium dubious.
>>
>> Dubious is not the word.
>>
>> But leaving aside the brave cry on behalf of the imaginary 95% who are
>> unable to install a browser of their choice, Firefox is a better default
>> browser choice for Lubuntu as these days, unlike in the past, it works
>> better on low memory machines. Mozilla's MemShrink project has worked hard
>> on reducing Firefox's memory usage:
>> https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memory-consumption/
>>
>> Some other recent benchmarks:
>>
>> http://myworldthruabrowser.blogspot.com/2013/01/firefox-18-gets-reviewed-and.html
>> http://www.zdnet.com/time-to-take-another-look-at-firefox-7000009692/
>>
>> For Lubuntu, that should be the primary deciding factory. Better
>> accessibility, support for the Mozilla Foundation over Google - these are
>> all extra plusses, but Firefox performance on low memory machines should be
>> the primary reason to switch.
>>
>> --
>> Ian Gilfillan
>> www.greenman.co.za

Thanks Phill for the brief history.
I was one of the supporters of switching to Chromium at that time.
Besides, being the first in *buntu family for the switch raises some
discussions on blogs and technology news sites.
At that time, firefox is bloated while Chromium seems to be faster
(only true if you open few tabs). Both ate all of your RAM after many
tabs are opened.
However, after so many years, things changed a lot and it's time for
evluation again.
Firefox did a lot to improve its memory usage and Chromium added much
more features to it.
I just fixed my old desktop PC last week and have both of them
installed in LXDE.
I have about 800 MB of RAM, but after I surf the web and tried to open
several tabs, my system became non-responsive. The command "free"
showed that my 800MB was totally used and swap was used.
Finally I switched to firefox, which is still bloated but behaved
slightly better in this case.
Chromium is no more the same as the fast browser we've chosen years ago.
So this time I'm not against switching back to Firefox.
Personally I'm a Chrome user, though. :-)