minefield4

[vinnie]

This is not very bug but, with stable version was lost symlink /usr/local/bin/minefield4

[Jason W]

I was not aware that previous builds had that symlink.

[vinnie]

I thought the symlink was yours, but instead was mozilla, there was no doubt because I used it in the settings of pidgin.

[vinnie]

communication service, from last update minefield4 no longer loads the HTML5 video, however firefox.tcz does it, and also inherits the settings.

[Jason W]

Hey, can you give a link to the video that won't play.

[jls]

any youtube video, first go to http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Jason W]

Thanks

I am in the process of passing on the Firefox extensions to Matt Causey, who did the latest minefield4.tcz build, and I have alerted him.     

[curaga]

Heh, I see the new minefield4 was done in the spirit of my old build Even with the same text.

Since it seems that a lightweight build has made a comeback, perhaps there's need for a custom "full" build, with all the video and other bells and whistles.

[Jason W]

Actually, my builds of minefield were done in a similar spirit, disabling updater, installer, dbus/gnome.  As well as also using Swiftfox patches as a guide to set default cache size and other things.  And in addition, mine also disabled the urlclassifier which creates that ever growing sqlite file.  But mine did depend on libasound, where the original minefield.tcz didn't. 

So mine was not exactly a full build though it was pretty much fully functional in audio/video.  I remember discussing whether do disable or leave in features with Matt, and he seems to prefer a more stripped down build than what I produced.  At the time I advised to leave the features in as most folks would want them, but perhaps there is room for 2 minefields, one like I did or maybe adding in some stuff, and one stripped down.  Or we may just want the custom build to be fully stripped as the official Firefox provides all the bells and whisltes, we will see.

I will get with Matt and see what he thinks about it.

[curaga]

Oh, sorry for not getting that right. I only tend to use FF when forced to (when Opera doesn't work ).

Seeing that Matt's build depends on libasound, I wonder what broke video then.

[Jason W]

It's all good.  I had used your original minefiled.tcz as a guide on building the later versions, though I am sure some things have crept in along the way.  And as Firefox is such a memory hog, using 320MB just to start and go to Facebook one time, I would be very interested in any reduction in resource usage in a sparser build.

 

[vinnie]

Thank you for the support 

[Jason W]

Just for memory footprint comparison, I tested the Firefox extensions by opening them in a terminal to www.google.com.  I was astonished to see how each release of Firefox is fattening up in terms of RAM use, as we see Opera in that same time has hardly increased at all.  Here are the numbers, I am posting them to help in deciding whether it would be worth maintaining 2 custom Firefox builds, or would there really even be enough of a difference in RAM use by the further stripping of features.  Even launched in safe mode, Firefox uses the same amount of RAM as in normal mode.  Matt can decide the feature set of minefield4, and we can then determine if we need another build.

Code: [Select]

granparadiso (firefox 3.0.x)              97mb
shiretoko    (firefox 3.5.x)             136mb
namoroka     (firefox 3.6.x)             160mb
minefield4   (firefox 4.0)               217mb
firefox.tcz  (official firefox 4.0) 238mb
swiftfox     (version 3.6.13)            177mb
opera    (version 9.64, browser only)     74mb
opera    (version 11.10, browser only)    92mb
midori       (version 0.3.3)             109mb


[curaga]

How did you measure?

[Jason W]

Quick and dirty with top.  Perhaps not the best way, though I don't have time today to delve into it further.  If top 'VSZ' does not give a good idea, I can later use another method.