Cleaning Out Fonts to Quicken TenFourFox

[z970]

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/07/clean-out-your-fonts-people.html

New post by Dr. Kaiser detailing how disabling all installed fonts to the bare minimum can improve TFF's startup times and browsing speed.

At the end of the previous post, there is also a comment string that goes more into detail about this, proposing a recommended minimum fonts for Tiger (which does not include Leopard, unfortunately).

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/07/tenfourfox-fpr15-available.html

In other news, thanks to @eyoungren, the useless Telemetry options (Telemetry altogether?) will be disabled in FPR16, right out of the box.

 

[eyoungren]

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/07/clean-out-your-fonts-people.html

New post by Dr. Kaiser detailing how disabling all installed fonts to the bare minimum can improve TFF's startup times and browsing speed.

At the end of the previous post, there is also a comment string that goes more into detail about this, proposing a recommended minimum fonts for Tiger (which does not include Leopard, unfortunately).

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/07/tenfourfox-fpr15-available.html

In other news, thanks to @eyoungren, the useless Telemetry options (Telemetry altogether?) will be disabled in FPR16, right out of the box.

Well…font management.

I'm a Graphic Designer by profession so I have well over 8000 fonts or so on my system. Not all in the fonts folders of course, I use a font manager.

Here's the Bible on font management if you're truly interested in paring things to a minimum: http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/osxfonts.html

And…more relevant to PowerPC: http://www.jklstudios.com/misc/OldArticle/osxold.html

 

[wicknix]

While all this is true, if he were really concerned about speed and start up times he'd disable all the junk i did in IceWeaselPPC. There is so much unneeded background garbage running in TFF it's not funny. Do a memory test between the 2 and you'll see a HUGE difference (including start up times even without the font tweak).

Cheers.

 

[sparty411]

While all this is true, if he were really concerned about speed and start up times he'd disable all the junk i did in IceWeaselPPC. There is so much unneeded background garbage running in TFF it's not funny. Do a memory test between the 2 and you'll see a HUGE difference (including start up times even without the font tweak).

Cheers.

Have you considered providing him with your input? Just curious, as I have no idea how receptive he might be to that sort of thing.

 

[z970]

After disabling my fonts via Font Book to the recommended minimum, I can confirm a noticeable difference in TFF startup times, a slight (though detectable) difference in browsing speed, and a snappier system overall. Tested with my G3 on 10.4.

Give it a shot, folks.

 

[wicknix]

@sparty411 No. It's his project, and he has a maxed out g5 quad and probably doesn't notice it. IceWeaselPPC was just to show how efficient and secure TFF could be. I mean.. do you know anybody that actually uses Pocket? or shumway? (mozilla's attempt to replace flash) which was abandoned in 2016. The security holes in webrtc? Googles spyware called SafeBrowsing. Why are they enabled? There's no reason for any of that bloat to be included sucking up valuable resources, tracking you, or leaking your IP address. I'm glad TFF exists for numerous reasons, but for g3/g4's with limited specs it's not very well optimized. AF PPC and IW PPC prove that (and both were built for generic g3 without any altivec optimizations). This response in no way is meant to be cruel, but rather just another developers (my) opinion on what could be done to make TFF even safer/better. I build browsers the way i want, they do theirs the way they want. Some people will agree with them for their "completeness", and some will agree with me for slimming, security and speed. There really is no right or wrong here, just a matter of opinion.

Cheers

 

[sparty411]

@sparty411 No. It's his project, and he has a maxed out g5 quad and probably doesn't notice it. IceWeaselPPC was just to show how efficient and secure TFF could be. I mean.. do you know anybody that actually uses Pocket? or shumway? (mozilla's attempt to replace flash) which was abandoned in 2016. The security holes in webrtc? Googles spyware called SafeBrowsing. Why are they enabled? There's no reason for any of that bloat to be included sucking up valuable resources, tracking you, or leaking your IP address. I'm glad TFF exists for numerous reasons, but for g3/g4's with limited specs it's not very well optimized. AF PPC and IW PPC prove that (and both were built for generic g3 without any altivec optimizations). This response in no way is meant to be cruel, but rather just another developers (my) opinion on what could be done to make TFF even safer/better. I build browsers the way i want, they do theirs the way they want. Some people will agree with them for their "completeness", and some will agree with me for slimming, security and speed. There really is no right or wrong here, just a matter of opinion.

Cheers

I think it's safe to say, most users value security and speed, over "completeness".

 

[z970]

Update: I can confirm there is a noticeable all-around speed improvement in Panther after following the Tiger minimum font list.

So... That doubles as a Panther minimum font list, too.

 

[eyoungren]

Update: I can confirm there is a noticeable all-around speed improvement in Panther after following the Tiger minimum font list.

So... That doubles as a Panther minimum font list, too.

For those of us who deal in fonts every day, that makes sense.

Most people don't know, but every font you load takes up a small bit of ram. If you load your font folders up with lots of fonts then those fonts are taking a collective chunk of ram - which the system no longer has available to it.

This is one of the reasons (besides management) that font managers exist. Having 10K fonts enabled when you're using maybe only 50-100 can drag your system down.

But most people who do not understand fonts or font managers just toss fonts in the fonts folders.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Years ago, fonts used to ruin every single day of my week. Primarily because the company's design department was run by a clown who employed another clown (his friend) to administrate multiple different Macs with different OSes and different versions of software over a network. The second I left and did my own font management I never ever had another problem again

 

[eyoungren]

Years ago, fonts used to ruin every single day of my week. Primarily because the company's design department was run by a clown who employed another clown (his friend) to administrate multiple different Macs with different OSes and different versions of software over a network. The second I left and did my own font management I never ever had another problem again

I've been in newspapers all my career until just recently. In one of my jobs we used to send the newspaper on a ZIP disk with fonts, images and the newspaper document.

The prepress guy hated our job because one font (Optima) crashed his system each and every time. He was using OS9, we were using OS9 and he'd tell us that after it crashed his system he'd have to restore OS9 every time. Always thought that was weird, but anyway.

Turns out he was using ATM Deluxe to load fonts (we used Suitcase). That's one of the very first font managers, but it was garbage. ATM Deluxe had the spectacular problem of loading the very LAST font loaded if your font was the same, NOT the actual font you were trying to load.

So every time this prepress guy went to load Optima, it wasn't loading OUR Optima, it was loading any old Optima he had previously loaded - which crashed his system. Once we pointed out this issue with ATM Deluxe (and also started sending PDFs) his complaints disappeared.

Interestingly enough, I ended up dealing with him about 12 years later when another paper I worked for started sending PDFs to his company for printing.

 

[Dronecatcher]

The prepress guy hated our job because one font (Optima) crashed his system each and every time. He was using OS9, we were using OS9 and he'd tell us that after it crashed his system he'd have to restore OS9 every time.

This sounds familiar - we had so many avoidable catastrophies I could write a near unbelievable book. The most insane was when it was decided our 500 page catalogue needed "theme" backgrounds...but rather than doing it ourselves it was outsourced..to another friend of the director. Instead of supplying us with around 20 backdrops to drop in it was insisted they take the entire catalogue on a huge (by standards then) hard drive and put the backdrops in themselves. Not only did they do that, they then flattened every page to bitmap so any subsequent page layout change, text amend or price alteration had to be returned to them to be output again. Oh and the theme backgrouds were stock imagery - we could've done the job in an afternoon - this company was paid £20,000.
Plenty of life lessons learnt at that place!

 

[z970]

Interesting stories.

Goes to show how bumbling and oafish some managements can be...

 

[Dronecatcher]

Goes to show how bumbling and oafish some managements can be..

In my instance, corrupt would suffice.

 

[eyoungren]

In my instance, corrupt would suffice.

In the last job I had it was disinterest and neglect.

The boss was only interested in the privileges and status the business brought to him in the local community. Once events occurred that required him to take responsibility and work he sold the business - with the caveat that he maintain his position and pay under the new owner - hence returning him back to privilege and not responsibility which is what he desired.