OSBlues

After reading this on Trustware BufferZone from a link from OSNews I was quite interested in this side of virtualisation. I have to admit I haven’t actually given this one a try but after seeing a comment on OSNews referencing this Altiris SVS Review I was really impressed by the by what this could do. I thought “this would be great for testing sites on different browsers, for installing random things to try in a safe environment before propertly installing it”. So, I gave it a shot… hmm, probably my fault but i thought I’d try and install Firefox 1.07 under it for testing purposes, well, it destroyed my real Firefox and meant I spent all evening trying to fix it 😦 I ended up reinstalling Firefox and losing all my settings which was not good. Since this initial experience I haven’t tried anything further as it scares me, let me know if you’re experiences differ.

I really ought to try BufferZone now, I guess.

I’ve always had major problems with memory usage in firefox on my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC, so I decided to do a little research and finally get this nailed. Let me just start by saying when I mean major problems, I mean MAJOR problems, I’ve seen firefox using 700, maybe 800MB of the 1.5GB I have in this machine, which is ludicrous. Well, I think my research paid off, I found this post on firefox memory usage at mozillazine forums and followed it. I can safely say that since doing most of the advised points I’ve seen vast improvements, in fact I’ve only seen firefox above 100MB once! When I’ve seen it reasonably high, I’ve then minimised it only to see it plummet back to 10MB or so in task manager which is really great.

I also stumbled across Planarity today which is keeping me amused 🙂

It’s not formally anounced yet but Firefox 1.5 is now available 😀

Enjoy.