So, I decided that it was time to try Mozilla again. This is my review of it thus far. The evaluation was done on a Sun Ultra30 with 128MB of RAM running Solaris 7 and a Dell PII-233 with 64MB of RAM running Mandrake 7.2. I had to compile the Solaris 7 version from scratch because there was no pre-built binaries. I used the pre-built binaries tarball on the LInux machine. The only problem in installation / compiling I ran into was on the Solaris machine. I couldn’t get the PSM to install. I think I’ll get it tomorrow….

So, it is definately faster than previous versions of Mozilla. For most web sites, I think it’s still a bit slower than netscape for things like nslookups. For nasty sites like www.lsc.nd.edu, I think it is much, much faster than Netscape, and probably just as fast as IE.

There are still some places where the interface is a bit clumsy, but I’m guessing those will go away with time ;-). I haven’t tried the mail stuff yet, so I don’t know how that works. To be honest, I don’t really care, as I won’t use it all that often.

Things that I like about Mozilla:

• The ability to chose to automatically deny cookies to a site, so I won’t get all the annoyning doubleclick cookies all the time.
• The ability to view the lsc page without waiting for half and hour 😉
• The font-size changing thing that makes sense for demonstrations and stuff

I haven’t seen the resource hogging that others have complained about in previous versions of Mozilla, but I haven’t been using it very much yet. It doesn’t seem to have any major memory leaks, which is probably a good thing.

All in all, if you are stuck with Netscape, try Mozilla. it might make web browsing tollerable again.