News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

Mozilla has come out with a new version of Firefox: Version 3.5.

There are several improvements in this version. I especially like two of them:

1) They finally seem to have memory management under control. Previous versions of Firefox would seem to slowly take up more and more memory, and never release it even when you closed tabs. This version seems to use much less, and you regain memory when you close a tab. It’s about time they fixed that!

2) Private Browsing. You can enter a “private browsing” mode, where nothing is kept on the computer to show where you went or what you did. Useful if you are using someone elses computer and want to do banking or private email, or just when it’s nobody’s dang business what web sites you were visiting.

The page rendering engine is supposed to be faster, but I can’t really tell a difference.

Anyway, I’ve been using it for about a week so far, and find it an improvement.

I run Linux on my Netbook, and find that it works perfectly well in that application. On my netbook I primarily need a web browser and email, along with the ability to view media and PDFs, and run Skype and ICQ. I don’t think there’s any reason to pay anything for Windows on a Netbook.

But I don’t run it on my main computer. My main complaint about Linux is the difficulty I find installing new programs. There are lots of free programs for Linux; almost anything you can do in Windows, there is a roughly equivalent program for Linux. But installing those programs is such a chore that I usually just don’t want to bother.

Linux enthusiasts are going to tell me it’s easy. If your particular brand of Linux supports RPM, just find an RPM packaged version of the program (if it exists), open a shell window and type,

rpm –ivh packagename

If you’re lucky, your version of Linux may even have a GUI-based RPM interface, but you still have to figure out how to use it.

Or, if it’s not RPM and you get it in a “tar”, just open a shell window and type:

tar –xvzf Apackage.tar.gz
cd Apackage
./configure
make
make install

Oh, yeah — before you start this you should log in as root, otherwise you will probably get errors about insufficient rights.

See this long page for more insight into the complications involved with installing programs on a Linux computer.

Compare this with Windows, where you simply double click the setup program’s icon and in a minuter or two it’s done. There’s rarely a question about which version of Windows the program is designed for, or if you have the proper installation package.

Why can’t Linux be this simple? I’m running old versions of Firefox and Thunderbird on my netbook, because I don’t want to jump through the necessary hoops to upgrade them.

Linux has come a long way, and in many ways is as good as or better than Windows. But for me this is a real show-stopper. Linux can’t be a mainstream OS until it is simple to install and upgrade programs.