This Old Blog

The genesis of this post goes back over a month, to November 26th, when Slashdot reported about an article "The NeoSmart Files" published titled " Firefox 2.0 Recap ". The author complained about the new theme (too ugly for his tastes), the first-run website (too ugly again) and RSS support (too poor for his tastes). All those flaws just seemed to ruin his day. So I bookmarked that article for future comment (in Firefox 2, of course) and then installed Opera 9. I'd already upgraded to IE7 and Firefox 2. Then I spent the past month extensively using Firefox and Opera, with some limited use of IE7. Windows Usage The screenshot below shows all three browsers running on Windows XP SP2, with a shot of Windows Task Manager showing the memory footprint of all three browsers. I'd opened up all the browsers and loaded them up with multiple pages in multiple tabs, and then I'd let them sit and 'cook' for a while, moving around from site to site to let them...

Well, it's December, and I've been using my 770 for nine months. I've grown quite familiar with it's capabilities and its quirks. I've lamented it's many shortcomings (just click on the Nokia770 label to read them all). I'm not here to heap more criticism, I'm actually here to praise one of its finer points: its display. The display on the 770 is one of the best, if not the best, I've ever seen. It's resolution of 800 by 480, its 65K color depth, and the small size of the screen help to create a visually stunning experience. The 770 developers even seem to have cleaned up one of Linux's more noticeable annoyances; font rendering. The two screen shots that follow give you some idea as to how fonts look on the 770. The Opera browser does a magnificent job of rendering text as well. I don't know if it's using the same fonts and font engine as the rest of the 770's OS and applications (I assume that it is). It's a decent little n...

I was working on SLED 10 this morning, and decided to compare the visual quality of Firefox 1.5 vs. Opera 9.1. This is SLED 10 AMD64 binaries. What I discovered is that Opera has noticeably inferior text rendering compared to Firefox's. The screen shot below has Firefox above with Opera below, looking at the same page at the same time. Both are running on the Gnome desktop.