Evaluating Mozilla 1.0 Candidate 1 - page 2

Evaluating A Mozilla Beta Release

The hardware used for the evaluation was a typical 3 year-old PII 300 MHz. clone laptop. It has 128 Mb of memory, a 4 Gb drive, CD and 14.1 inch XGA screen. The ESS 1968 audio chip handles the sounds and Trident 9397 video chip with 4 Mb video memory handles the graphics. The laptop has a 3Com 3CXFE575B PCMCIA 10/100 ethernet card. My testing was done connected to Road Runner residential cable service.

The laptop had SuSE Linux 7.3 Professional (2.4.10 Kernel) running in a 2.1 Gb partition. I had about 100 Mb of swap and two other DOS partitions of 1.2 GB and 600 Mb. This combination requires fairly lightweight applications, so for window managers, I typically run FVWM or ICEWM. FVWM loaded as the default window manager (since I didn't choose KDE or GNOME) under SuSE Linux.

Mozilla version 1.0 Candidate 1 was downloaded from the Mozilla ftp site at ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.0rc1/. It was in tar/gz format and was very easy to install. A window appeared that lets you choose from a basic browser up through a full install with mail, irc, etc. I chose the full install option. Only default settings were used.

Opera version 6.0 Beta 2 was downloaded from the Opera download page. I chose the dynamically linked release in RPM format. Again, loading was not a hassle and I just used all the default settings. It was the free version so the Opera advertisement was in the upper right corner.