> But Mozilla RC1 is still unusable (I'll try AbiWord soon).
> It's definitely a monster, and takes a good four minutes
> to start up; once it does, typing into textfields will lag
> by a half-second per keystroke.
>
> I definitely get the sense that Mozilla is slow on other
> platforms because of its interface (try running it on an
> early Mac or K6-2!).

Welcome to the modern world, where companies like Microsoft
get by adding bloat after bloat to their code, under the 
assumption that you will be upgrading to a faster machine 
by the time you are running it anyways.  Office2k takes a
good chunk of a Gig of hard disk space... anyone know how
much Office-XP has grown to?  Every release seems to grow
by several hundred Meg - after all, disk is cheap right? - 
but, of course, disk is also 'slow' compared to RAM, so it
takes longer to load..

One of the things I've always liked about NetBSD... the fact
that things get ported to many platforms, some "obsolete" (a
relative term) and slow.  I read, with great interest, the 
thread on port-vax last year on the new 'rc' code, and how
the performance was slow.  Seeing this, a lot of suggestions
came into play about how to speed it up.  

The plus side to this, of course, is that when the code runs
faster on an old Vax, it will run really fast on a top end PC.
After all.. what exactly *IS* the purpose of a faster system,
if a chunk of the speed gets eaten up by your 'new/improved'
OS?  Microsoft could stand to learn a lot from this... I think
it would press more of the windoze-masses to upgrade to the 
latest OS if it promised faster speed, rather than the equivalent
speed on faster hardware with more bloated cutesy or rarely used
'features'.

Geez.. my old 1.78Mhz TRS-80 (Z80) booted off floppy in seconds.
Power on, floppy seeks to track zero, seeks to the directory,
seeks to the OS and loads it... 10 seconds or less you are at
a 'LDOS' command prompt.  Now I have a 1Ghz system at work with
256MB of RAM, and it takes well over a minute to boot into its
fancy graphical interface.  Sigh... "progress".