Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 24th Jun 2008 00:34 UTC
Although Apple is marketing Mac OS X Snow Leopard as an operating system update with "no new features," under the hood improvements will actually translate into a slew of new enhancements, five of which are described herein.
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Member since:
2006-01-23
Then again, look at these other apps:
iChat 111mb / Pidgin 2mb
Mail 287mb / Thunderbird 33mb
Safari 64mb / Firefox 4mb
(Note that even the upcoming versions of all the Mac apps are still substantially larger)
Of course, as I am sure someone will point out, the size of the install might have little to do with performance (both theoretically and empirically). It could be a difference between binaries on OS X and Linux? Or perhaps Mac apps have tons of documentation? Or perhaps the old apps contain both PowerPC and x86 binaries?
Or perhaps Linux apps make use of a lot more shared libraries hence the applications themselves need to implement less functionality. On the other hand, I would think that a private company (Apple) could facilitate sharing of code more effectively than an amorphous group of worldwide developers (OSS)...
mb = millibits? ;-)
Most applications built for Leopard are complex binaries that include PowerPC and Intel code.
Firefox 3 on my PowerPC machine runs a hefty 45.3 MB once installed. That doesn't include my user data. Thunderbird 2.0.0.16pre is a whopping 64 MB.
iChat is more than a simple chatting application now. It contains code to connect with the other user and share that user's "screen". It also has code for voice and for video.
I suspect the slim down in Snow Leopard is partly the fact that there are no PowerPC binaries involved at this moment (and perhaps, in the future).
Generally, the multiple language resources are there and with Mac OS X, many, many languages are supported by the default installation.
Also, if resolution independence is well-supported, they may have dumped their bitmapped graphics for SVG or another vector format.
As with all developer releases, things will change significantly before the final release and bloat will likely happen naturally, as slim and fast rarely work correctly.