Firefox 2.5 or 3.5 on G3 iMac?

[lewis82]

I recently picked up a copy of PPC Tiger and I instaleld it on my old iMac G3. The system is a little bit more responsive thanks to the new system. It has 640 MB of ram installed (I know I could put 1GB, but 30$ for a 512MB stick seems very expensive to me), and has a 400 MHz G3.

Right now it has Firefox 2.5 on it (because it's the last supported version under 10.2.8, its older system). I hesitate to install Firefox 3.5 because I fear it would be even more sluggish. I know it's less of a memory hog than Firefox 2.5, but what about CPU consumption?

Anyone has tried it on at least a G4, or better a G3? Was it worse or better?

 

[splitpea]

One thing you could try would be to back up your entire profile and just try 3.5 for a few days -- you can always nuke it and restore 2.5 and the backup copy of your profile if it doesn't run well.

Is there any particular reason you're running Firefox instead of Safari? You might also try Camino, which is like a lighter-weight version of Firefox.

 

[lewis82]

It ran Firefox under 10.2.8 because Safari 1 was real junk. It kept crashing and was slower. And even if Safari was faster, I'm used to it and it'll be too long to transfer bookmarks.

As for the profile, do you mean the Firefox profile? Or the user profile?

 

[splitpea]

The Firefox profile. Should be located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox -- you can just drag a copy to your desktop to back it up.

Transferring bookmarks doesn't take too long - I believe there's an import function. And just to try the browser and see how it runs you don't need to import your bookmarks.

Safari runs much faster than Firefox under PPC because its javascript engine is much better optimized; add in the fact that Firefox's entire interface is based on Javascript, and it's a major difference. Safari should be faster and more stable under Tiger than Jaguar; that said, I have stability problems with it too -- right-clicking causes it to crash (in Tiger on a G5).

Again, I recommend giving Camino a trot out -- it's more responsive than Firefox, and more stable than Safari.

 

[lewis82]

I gave a shot at Camino and it really is faster. Firefox 3,5 is slower, on the other hand. I guess I'll just stick with Camino.

Thanks!