Firefox Hoopla!!!

Ok! I'm really getting tired of all the Hoopla!! concerning Firefox, the web browser, to hear some people talk the saviour of web browsers. Like that saviour 'operating system' that you keep hearing about. Think Bill Gates.

MY 2 CENTS WORTH

First of all the download size: Firefox is 5MB in size roughtly. Thunderbird email client is 6MB. After all if you don't use Internet Explorer you probably don't use Outlook email client, so you would probably need to download Thunderbird email client. Mozilla Suite is 11MB (of course it includes the browser, email client and html editor).

According to the download site http://www.mozilla.org/products/ Hard drive space requirements for Mozzila Suite, Firefox and Thunderbird are all 52MB each. In Windows XP Home Edition; if I click on Start> the Settings> then Control Panel > and then double-click on Add or Remove Programs make sure the Change or Remove Programs option is checked and find the installed program, not to unistall, just to check its installed size.

Firefox has an install size of around 15 MB, unfortunately, its doesn't say the size of Mozilla Suite, so I have to do this the old fashion way - that is go to the install folder and count the megabytes.........There are 2 folders actually, the main programs folder at C:\Program Files\mozilla.org...on my current system, 21MB in size, and the second folder, at C:\Documents and Settings\Terry\application Data\Mozilla at 4MB, for a total of 25MB. If you are using an older version of Windows it would be C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla. Thunderbird takes up 22 MB installed.

So if you use both Firefox and Thunderbird you are not saving much hard drive space compared to the Mozilla Suite. Note that hard drive space will vary depending on components installed and over a period of use, cache files and plugins will alter the hard drive space required. Both Mozilla and Firefox set up a default 50MB cache file.

Unfortunately, the smaller footprint size on the hard drive doesn't mean a smaller size in memory. I don't know how to check it in older versions of Windows, but in WinXP, just right-click on a blank part of the Taskbar and in the menu chose Task Manager Then click on the processes tab.

You can see how much memory each program uses just on opening. If you have both Mozilla and Firefox, open up each one individually and close it down again and monitor how much memory is being used by each program.

Notice if you minimize the applications in most cases the memory requirements drop dramatically at least for the Mozilla Suite application. When both are open no matter what the application they seem to share the same basic core files. This would explain some of these numbers. If I am reading these numbers correctly, the K tranlates as three zeros so 15, 544 K = 15,544,000 = 15.5MB roughtly.

Iternet Explorer by the way registers 10MB (10, 648 K). But to be fair, keep in mind, a lot of IE componnents are already loaded and integrated into other components of the operating system. If you could isolate each componenet I suspect the memory usage to be much higher.

To me, like a lot of users, memory usage is more important than hard drive space usasge. If you install both Firefox and Thunderbird, I don't think you are saving any hard drive space compared to installing a integrated suite like Mozilla. And even though it may not be very sicientific, from the above results you can see it does not win any awards in the memory usage department either.

You be the judge. I haven't noticed any speed improvements in web pages displaying or download speeds. This is not the first time I used these programs and past use hasn't impressed me either. Needless to say, I am a devoted Mozilla Suite fan, have been for a few years, and from the looks of it, will be one for years to come.

But that is just my experience. Try the programs out for yourself. Don't just take my word for it, or anybody elses for that matter. Good or bad. Don't be afraid to experiment.

By the way in case you are wondering, I stopped being a Internet Explorer fan a long time ago, mainly because of security and privacy issues. I haven't went back and don't plan to.

All Mozilla products can be downloaded from this site: