[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mar 9, 2009, at 6:04 AM, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 11:31:15PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>> BTW, I wouldn't call 4 gigs a small capacity, which is what my  
>> U80  has.  I don't recall who said that above, and I suppose a  
>> U60  probably only goes to 2 gigs, which I still wouldn't call  
>> terribly  small.  Despite the 4 gigs, the U80 still runs Firefox  
>> sluggishly.  I  want to see a good GNOME (or KDE, or XFCE, I don't  
>> care) webkit browser.
>
> Is the sluggishness worse with Firefox(FF)3 than FF2? I'm not
> convinced yet that FF3 is ready for olde sparc machines.

I might have to install FF2 to compare, but I'd rather live with a  
sluggish FF3 than go back.

I thought that FF3 was clearly faster than FF2 on a slightly higher  
clock rate PPC machine (quad 450s versus dual 533s).  FF3 still  
wouldn't be considered blazing on the G4 though.  Sadly FF speed is  
one of the major pains driving my desire to upgrade.  That and an  
inability to play flash video anymore (it used to work just fine, but  
more and more flash videos stutter through getting 1 or fewer frames  
per second out, I find this sad since similar size MOVs play just  
fine on the machine).