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<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">Hi all,<br><br>Iceweasel was mentioned at the last meeting and there seems to be a<br>continuing meme that the browser is somehow behind Firefox and was<br>
branched off from on an old version (I shall mention no names as to<br>where this meme resides ;-) </blockquote>
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<div>One of the things that really lets desktop Linux down is the browser experience. It was so bad that I ditched my Debian install and went to Windows 7.</div>
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<div>The browser is probably the single most important application in a modern operating environment*. Yet Debian has just about the worst browser of any modern OE.</div>
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<div>The Windows version of Firefox is much more stable and requires fewer megabytes of memory than the Linux version. Ice Weasel is simply terrible. It is incredibly buggy and because its internal name is different to that of Firefox, some extensions don't work with it.</div>
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<div>It goes back to the point I was making in a previous e-mail about how we can't give libre software a free pass simply because it is free.</div>
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<div>If you compare Opera to Firefox, Opera is technically superior in almost every dimension. The only area where it is weak is in the plug-in space. </div>
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<div>It uses less memory, it's faster, and has many features that are included as standard that would require extensions in Firefox.</div>
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<div>If we want free software to succeed, we have to take quality and feature depth seriously. Firefox simply can't afford not to address its instability on Linux and it's crappy memory management.</div>
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<div>It's sad, because I enjoyed every <em>other</em> part of the Linux. But Linux without a half decent browser is practically useless.</div>
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<div>Cheers,</div>
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<div>Simon </div>
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<div>* I use Operating Environment over Operating System to avoid confusion between the operating system (which is the kernel) and distribution (which contains everything else). Using this convention neatly disarms the idiots who want to call Linux, GNU/Linux. </div>
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