3 ms·

I know I could have four browser windows open with 20 tabs each, to a random selection of web pages. If I try to do that today on a laptop with 2GB RAM on a mod

I know I could have four browser windows open with 20 tabs each, to a random selection of web pages. If I try to do that today on a laptop with 2GB RAM on a moden browser, it dies from running out of memory. I tried using an older browser, but it won't render modern pages and uses legacy crypto. So I know for a fact that modern browsers simply can't work on older hardware, whereas the older browsers used to work, but are no longer compatible with modern websites.

slededit 8y ago
Firefox didn't even have tabbed browsing in 2003 and everyone else was in the IE6 winter. FF was only 1 year old at this point. Were you using another browser?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Firefox didn't exist in 2003, it was released in November 2004. Before then, the name of the browser was Phoenix. It had tabs since version 0.1, released in September 2002. Later it was renamed Firebird and then Firefox. Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
  - slededit 8y ago
    It existed but was still under development and not enabled by default. E.g. there was no graceful handling of tab overflows https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Desi...
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      Yes, I definitely enabled all the beta/testing features. Tabs may have been limited "depending on screen resolution", but as a gamer I had probably one of the biggest screen resolutions you could run, with a CRT to match. I'm pretty sure I was using an AMD K6-2 500Mhz with between 128 and 256MB RAM. Sometime after 2002 I built an Athlon-based system with a gig of RAM, so I could be mis-remembering my computing platform when "peak browsing performance" happened, but I know that no browser has ever been as fast as Phoenix was.
      - ecliptik 8y ago
        I feel the same way about Phoenix. In 2003 I was running 0.1 on a Pentium III 450Mhz with 128MB RAM and it's still the fastest browser I've ever used. The newer Firefox Quantum releases are coming close, but even then it's on a quad-core Core i7 2.8Ghz and 16GB of memory MacBook Pro.

slededit 8y ago

Firefox didn't even have tabbed browsing in 2003 and everyone else was in the IE6 winter. FF was only 1 year old at this point. Were you using another browser?

peterwwillis 8y ago
Firefox didn't exist in 2003, it was released in November 2004. Before then, the name of the browser was Phoenix. It had tabs since version 0.1, released in September 2002. Later it was renamed Firebird and then Firefox. Pre-tabs I probably had only 40 windows open at a time.
- slededit 8y ago
  It existed but was still under development and not enabled by default. E.g. there was no graceful handling of tab overflows https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design/Tab_Overflow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Desi...
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Yes, I definitely enabled all the beta/testing features. Tabs may have been limited "depending on screen resolution", but as a gamer I had probably one of the biggest screen resolutions you could run, with a CRT to match. I'm pretty sure I was using an AMD K6-2 500Mhz with between 128 and 256MB RAM. Sometime after 2002 I built an Athlon-based system with a gig of RAM, so I could be mis-remembering my computing platform when "peak browsing performance" happened, but I know that no browser has ever been as fast as Phoenix was.
    - ecliptik 8y ago
      I feel the same way about Phoenix. In 2003 I was running 0.1 on a Pentium III 450Mhz with 128MB RAM and it's still the fastest browser I've ever used. The newer Firefox Quantum releases are coming close, but even then it's on a quad-core Core i7 2.8Ghz and 16GB of memory MacBook Pro.