2 February 2005

Kudos to Firefox

I had found a pair of EDO RAM modules(yeah, I know its old!) and thought of testing them on my old, yet working, Win98SE box. I had shut down the machine a few months ago and I was too lazy to boot it back up. So tonight I finally hooked up the machine and added the newly found old RAM modules to it. With 64MB RAM it booted much faster than earlier.In the process of testing its performance, I thought of firing up Firefox. It took around 30-45 seconds to start Firefox, but it was much faster than when it had only 32MB RAM.

After a few seconds after Firefox started I saw the pending updates icons (red arrow) on top right of Firefox window. Just to check if everything worked allright, I went into Preferences and clicked the "Check Update Now" button. Firefox's auto updater started and showed 3 updates were available for downloading. They were Firefox1.0, DOM Inspector, and Feedback Client. I selected all of them and to my surprise it downloaded all of them. I did not have to do anything else till it finished downloading and installing the updates. Finally, it gave me the following message:

Firefox successfully downloaded and installed updates. You will have to restart Firefox to complete the operation.

That is perfect as far as normal user is concerned. The update system worked seemlessly with minimum user interference. Had I not shutdown my machine for this long, I would have never known how nicely the updater works as I normally downloaded the nightlies weekly.

Congrats to the Mozilla community for such a professional product.

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