“We sat here watching Ben Goodger doing a talk about Firefox at EuroOSCON, it got me thinking about this concept of taking a huge and bloated project (such as Netscape) and cutting it down to the core and releasing a spin-off project such as Firefox. With all of the recent discussion and email I have been receiving triggered from Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org, it makes sense if this process was drilled into OpenOffice.org.” In addition, OpenOffice is nearing the 50 million downloads.
“We sat here watching Ben Goodger doing a talk about Firefox at EuroOSCON, it got me thinking about this concept of taking a huge and bloated project (such as Netscape) and cutting it down to the core and releasing a spin-off project such as Firefox. With all of the recent discussion and email I have been receiving triggered from Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org, it makes sense if this process was drilled into OpenOffice.org.”
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Does anyone has the slighest doubt that the assholes who run around making assinine suggestions like this *DO NOT HAVE ANY INTENTION WHATSOEVER OF DOING ANY OF THE ACTUAL WORK INOVOVLED IN SUCH A PROJECT?*
And then these clowns will sit around moaning and whining about how nobody will listen to them.
Firefox is still huge and bloated. The thing chugs and chugs once left minimized for a few hours when you try to bring it up — and this is on very-above-average specs. Neither Opera, IE, nor Safari on my Mac do this.
The Mac version of Firefox is very poor, Mozilla even admit it. Windows users don’t have this. FF Beta 1.5 is an improvement, but you should try Camino (if you haven’t already).
I meant Firefox on Windows is a bloated mess that takes ages to come out of swap (even with 2 GB of RAM).
I’m perfectly satisfied with Safari. It’s integrated very well with the OS, and I don’t wish to switch away to lesser software.
That’s a lie!
I’m using FF on Windows and I don’t have issues with FF.
I have issues with the Windows swap, but that’s true for ALL applications, including Notepad.
not a lie. it’s taken for granted that firefox has serious memory leakage issues, and I’ve been experiencing this both on Win and Lin. Switche to Konqueror now.
Funny though. I’ve never had any issues with FF. Not on Windows, nor on my Linux installation. Can you provide some links? I like that kind of stuff
Firefox is very slow on all platforms — most of the time, it’s even slower (and has a larger footprint) than Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey! If the hypothetical OpenOffice.org Writer-“lite” turns up to be slower and more bloated than the full OpenOffice.org, then it will be following in Firefox’s footsteps.
That’s not to say that splitting OpenOffice.org would necessarily be a bad thing (I’d just want Impress), but Mozilla->Firefox is a bad analogy.
I agree. If OpenOffice.org ended up being the next Firefox, we’d end up with a 200MB word processor that ran in a separate process from the also-200MB spreadsheet, and you’d have to install extensions to insert tables and special symbols. To its credit though, it would have pretty icons and the menu structure would follow the example set by Microsoft Word.
Not very poor, 1.5beta2 is getting better and better. But yes, Camino rocks, it looks slick and very well integrated in OS X desktop.
I don’t quite agree that FF is memory hog, yes it had ansd stil has memory leakage problems, but it is getting close to plug all of them.
I agree.
Firefox is hardly the cut down version of mozilla that the developers want you to think it is.
When people refer to firefox as a lite web browser I have to laugh and tell them to get back to me when firefox isn’t using 100MB of my precious ram.
Firefox wants to be emacs and I’m sick of it. Applications should be what they are, over extendability creates bloat.
It’s a pity that there is no really alternative.
– Jesse McNelis
There are lots of alternatives. My favorite is Opera. It’s small, fast, and very configurable. I liked it enough to actually pay for it (before it was free). If you’re more of a “closed source is evil” person, there’s also Konqueror and Nautilus (I assume you’re running Linux if you hate closed source).
No one should be forced onto a particular platform. Even if the platform is Firefox.
The embedding of OOo documents in other documents works better than MS Office or Corel Office. In fact it is beautiful. Pasting a spreadsheet inside a word processor document works great in OOo. Have you ever tryed it? That is one of the great things about have a full Office Suite especially OpenOffice.org.
Not to mention that OOo supports nested tables unlike some other popular suites.
Which office suites do you mean? MS Office supports nested tables, as anyone who has been annoyed when the cells that they want to copy-and-paste to another part of the table instead end up in a nested table in the cell they were in will tell you.
This dude has a similar take on the same subject, but for KOffice instead of OpenOffice.org.
http://ingwa2.blogspot.com/2005/09/koffice-kids-office.html
It makes perfect sense that you should be able to download just the OpenOffice.org Writer, without the Spreadsheet and all the rest. Then if you want to you can download the other parts of the system.
And they could still package all of the various components into one distributable package.
Anonymous’s (What a Joke! thread) point is well taken though – Firefox was started by one guy who did some of the initial heavy lifting. It wasn’t started by someone telling Mozilla what to do.
Look at GoBe Productive 2.01 for BeOS: an office suite that has great integration, and a fair amount of features, and is pretty fast and isn’t bloated. Sure, there are features that would be nice to have (I’ve not looked at their Windows 3.x version to see if they’ve added the few I’d really want) but they’ve proven you can have a useful office suite without it ending up like Mozilla.
Purrfect
I like this! Exactly what I’ve been dreaming about during my slightly boring SWD lessons
We might as well just start proclaiming that Microsoft Office has won.
Once the lead guys change their focus from a suite to only one component, that’s basically the end of Open Office. Just like Mozilla’s email/html editor/chat are all long in the tooth.
I agree that OOo should stay integrated, but your example of Mozilla is flawed. You said:
Once the lead guys change their focus from a suite to only one component, that’s basically the end of Open Office. Just like Mozilla’s email/html editor/chat are all long in the tooth.
All of those Mozilla components have been replaced with feature rich applications. FireFox for browsing, Thunderbird for email, NVU as an HTML editor, and the Chatzilla extension for FF is quite nice. Those apps all work together quite nicely as they allow cut and paste and all make use of the Gecko rendering engine.
“””
Those apps [Firefox, Thunderbird, NVU, and the Chatzilla extension] all work together quite nicely….
“””
And how much extra memory do they use being separate programs rather than a unified suite?
That assumption is completely wrong. Mozilla’s email is being developed and supported just as much as Firefox as Mozilla Thunderbird, chat was *always* an afterthought with Mozilla, and an HTML editor is simply not very important to developers *or* end users. With that said, a mozilla based HTML editor is available, is being worked on and is decent.
Let me get to my point: Developers will work on those things that will be used. Anyone working on an OFFICE SUITE is not going to ignore the spreadsheet or the presentation package any more than they would the word processor. A browser suite is a different beast entirely. Just because people might want a word processor more won’t eliminate the need (and the corporate mandate) for a full featured office suite.
Eh, I would disagree with this. I use Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for mail and I like having the two applications separate. Thunderbird can open Firefox windows and firefox can pull up Thunderbird for a quick email. The html editor info you have posted is also not factual. You can download Nvu editor which is a spin off of Mozilla Composer. I tried it and it works well but I stick to text editors since I am used to them.
I’ve been reading various articles and occasionally listen to Jono Bacon on a podcast. I think he has put forth a lot of good code and PR for the FOSS community. That said, I would like to disagree with Jono on this point. I do frequently embed components inside other components, and use three components of OOo regularly (Writer, Calc, and Impress). If I wanted a light weight application I would use Abiword and Gnumeric (and I think that they’ve sufficiently copied MS Office to be very understandable by most users).
OOWriter’s ability to easily integrate complex tables is the only reason I ever choose it over LaTeX (that said, better logical formating in OOo would be wonderful for long documents).
What I would like to see is better use of the UNO framework to further gnomify (it’s not a word, but I’ve seen it used before) to speed up and better integrate the suite (look at how fast KOffice is on KDE*). I realize my wish is unlikely (I’ve already got a project of my own to work on, plus I’m only a novice self taught programmer)
* I understand that KOffice is unrelated to OOo, but I was looking for an example of a large integrated office suite that is very responsive.
Abi-word.
A light weight (for word processors) app that only writes to and from various formats. Works nice on Linux, OS X and Windows.
“Abi-word”
Abiword seems quite slow on documents with more than 50 pages on my ibook 1.4Ghz Tiger. I was very disappointed.
I would like to love Abiword as next guy, I really would like to. But it is not there yet.
I would like to help them though on that way on target.
OpenOffice 2.0 FINAL is OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! w00t
grab it here: ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/mirror/OpenOffice/stab…
Those files are 3 days old! How could OOo 2.0.0 have remained unoticed so long? Why haven’t we got an official announcement?
Maybe RC3 was good enough to be named final, they might be doing last minute testing and announce the release soon.
BitTorrent too:
http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/
… to divide OOo in lighter, faster apps without losing integration. Changes have to be made to improve, not just to change.
I see no reason why the components cannot be broken apart, and installed seporately and then loaded dynamically when a document from one, embeds a document from another.
Mozilla is doing some interesting things to reduce code reuse as well with xulrunner. Coudn’t some common framework be used for modular OOo?
So they’re aiming to reduce code reuse? That explains the bloatedness I guess.
If the best we can hope for is that OpenOffice will one day be as fast as Firefox (which is not even fast to begin with), then I’d say there’s not a whole lot to look forward to.
I have Run OO.o and MS Office 2003 on the same machine. (Athlon 1.333GHz w/256Mb of RAM and 7200RPM HD and XP Pro)
OO.o certainly doesn’t load any slower than Office 2003.
As for Firefox being slow, it’s just load time, I’ll deal with it. It’s better than EVERYTHING being slow because the machine is RIDDLED WITH SHITWARE from running IE.
This definitely not true…unless you forgot to mention that you are using the “QuickStarter” cheat for oo.o
Even oo.o developers admit to the slow start up…or are you saying MS office starts slow for you? How much time does each take to load?
This definitely not true…unless you forgot to mention that you are using the “QuickStarter” cheat for oo.o
QuickStarter is no more a “cheat” than MS using its operating system monopoly ensures that components MS Office depends on is available in memory. It evens the playing field.
This is again not true…if you want you can compare MS Office and oo.o on a Mac…oo.o is still hugely slower in startup…
Of course, now you will say, oo.o is not native on Mac… that just means it both slow and not truly cross platform – but that is another point altogether…
Don’t get me wrong…I like oo.o per se and am trying hard to stick to it for most of my work but the lack of some features (unrelated to the present discussion) prevent me from using it all the time. I am not trying to knock it. But saying that there is no problem with oo.o startup while forgetting to mention that the Quickstarter was being used is plain misleading.
firefox makes the UI simpler and more logical – which is good. that’s why i use it. but on windows on a new PC with 512MB RAM it is very slow from swap – or whatever it does after a period of inactivity.
OOo – its capable – but i view it as a netscape – capable but unpolished and needs to be trimmed down bioth in terms of UI and code. modularise so that i don’thave to have the database if i don’t want. make a firefox out of it.
The truth is this already happened. It seems people forget, or simply don’t know, where OpenOffice.org, or the current version of Star Office, came from. As someone who actually used Star Office before it was acquired by Sun, I have to say that this Mozillarization already happened. Not that it could not go further, but just like Mozilla, and Navigator for that matter, the orginal Star Office was for most purposes a big chunk of code, where you would open Star Office, not a single app. After the Sun acquisition, it was broken into parts (Mozillarized), and that’s what we got today. Again, this could certainly go further, there’s no complain about that; but the assumption that this hasn’t happened already, tells me the author didn’t do his homework first…
The reality is, currently, OpenOffice.org is a complete dog. It is deathly slowly (this is a 2.0-pre, with GCJ on an Sempron 2300+) ridiculously complex and non-standard on every platform.
The project needs a major rethink if it’s ever going to get anywhere and modularisation might be a positive step.
After going through the interesting comments above, I would like to summarise some concerns –
– Openoffice suite is much slow in machines with small memory/low processor though this behaviour has somewhat better in the latest builds (2.0 RC3)
– The present user interface is much like the MS Office suites. (And there are reasons for that)
But I don’t think OpenOffice suite needs to be provided as split individual components/packages because office users generally tend to use atleast two or three of them (so there is no need of splittig out the other). It is better to have the whole suite there and support integration. From the usability side also this is required.
On the first point that OOo is slow, I would agree to some extent. When you have a cold start, OOo loads somewhat slower than MS Word or other components. I doubt the comparison because, when loading OOo you load the complete suite – you can open your writer, calc, impress, base, draw documents from there. But I can’t open a spreadsheet file from MS Word. This is only a logical comparison, I am unaware of the code dependency on this account. I believe that exists. ALso MS OFfice applications *are* preloaded (through the OSA9.exe during startup). Also being from the same *family* the know each other better (i.e. reuse of pre-loaded modules, perhaps).
Also, OOo could work on around 50 listed types of files. I wonder whether this could also be a reason for the heavy code. If you want to please each and every one, then such things does happen. Atleast when doing the default file formats your software should be responsive. (If I am wrong on this front, please correct me. This opinion is not from a developer but only a logical conclusion). IF that is so, the user should be given a choice of the types of components / document filters to be installed or these should be installed only when necessary. Anyway, there is a need to make OOo code leaner (the developers are trying to do better and there is improvement in performance in 2.0RC3). Perhaps more developers contributing work to the project could help. For this there needs to be proper documentation of the codebase to make the new hackers aware of the code usage. This would make their job easy.
Another thing I have always put forward is a total rehash of the ‘User Interface’. Somehow much less have been done on this. Many of the users call it ‘crappy’ and the like. This is true to some extent. I have also found out that specs in this regard were dropped somewhere in between or altered to adjust to the present UI. This *is* an important requirement for achieving /attracting more user percentile. Comparisons would come up as Office 12 is delivered. There is total restructuring of the userinterface in Office 12 (switching from menu based to taskbased toolbars and the like) No. I would not suggest giving the users flashy/translucent windows/menus at the cost of Hardware requirements. But would suggest adaption of the app. to the OS theme or having an individual look, which is better in the first place. Perhaps theming of the suite could also be thought of (like Firefox). One thing is to be kept in mind. Normal users HATE to WAIT. And when you are targeting them your application should be faster and efficient.
After this we require better marketing techniques. the SpreaOffice.org is up. They would be working on this side. More countries are accepting the OpenDocument format. This is also a welcome step in this direction. Though many of the commenters talked as though OOo is for Linux, I would say it is more important for Windows. Remember the share of computer users who use Windows. Therefore, to make OOo popular target them. At this point what we need is proper marketing of the suite and spreading awareness. But the first thing is to have an EFFECTIVE RESPONSIVE office suite.
– HkrG
But OpenOffice Writer opens from a fresh boot in 6 seconds on my new system. I don’t think this qualifies as slow in anyones book!
Guess the ubuntu team worked hard to integrate OOo to Breezy and (I think) they recompiled OOo with GCC4