Firefox 3.0? More like Swiftfox! June 9, 2008

Firefox 3 is really what they say it is. Fast, efficient, and with a few new features to boot. Mostly the enhancements are under the hood with the revamped Gecko engine, making XHTML developers like myself uber happy.

The first thing that hit me was the speed. This little guy can really chew them pages up! I browse the GP32X forums, keeping myself up-to-date on the Pandora console, and speeds become an issue when you start opening 8 or more tabs at once. To demonstrate the difference (which is substantial), I’ve done up a little video. It’s nothing fancy, just the two browsers, one run after the other. The screen capture software actually makes my computer appear (and at times act) a little slower, so imagine a 110%-130% (guesstimation) speed increase as you watch this.

Fastest Linux OS Yet! February 12, 2008

I’m not the kind of person who likes to get the most speed from his hard-drive and whatnot. When I switched to Gentoo, it wasn’t for the speed. It was for the ability to upgrade to whatever version I wanted, SVN or latest stable, and not have to deal with compiles that failed or package systems that didn’t install correctly because I had compiled something it didn’t like. In fact, whenever someone on the #ubuntu support channel talks about some software or other that required compiling and running “make install”, I almost immediately say that “make install” can cause issues. (ndiswrapper is an exception – Ubuntu’s copy is outdated in the extreme, and the compiled version slips right in, with no problems now or in the long term.)

So, here I am, happily checking out BZFlag SVN and so on and such forth and etc., and I realize (as I boot my newly-compiled copy of Eclipse) that Gentoo really does blaze through this stuff like no other OS I’ve tried.

Needless to say, I’m as happy as could be in Gentoo, with a full desktop at my commmand, and the ability to customize to whatever I want it to be.

(P.S. Gentoo is not for the faint of heart: you build your system from near-scratch. If you don’t know what “ln” and “fdisk” are, you should use the beautifully-prepackaged Ubuntu.)