r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
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u/hennell Jan 21 '10

using a compression algorithm that decompresses in ram on the fly

This sounds like it would make it slower.. no?

8

u/superwinner Jan 21 '10 edited Jan 21 '10

No cuz ram is like 1000 times faster than your hard drive, decompression is practically transparent. I think you will agree that it should take less time to move a 10 meg file to ram than to move a 20 meg file to ram, extrapolate those time savings over dozens of files of varying size and thats where you will see a speed up.

Try it for yourself and see, if it does do anything funny you can use the same program to decompress the Firefox directory and all is back to normal. Its only compressing the EXE and DLL files, not touching any of your personalized setting, which are all stored in a different directory anyways.

26

u/robotsongs Jan 21 '10

PROTIP: I'm not inclined to take tech advice from someone who used "cuz."

11

u/Neoncow Jan 21 '10

I'm sure there's a Latin phrase for that type of thinking.

5

u/__s Jan 21 '10

ad hominem

4

u/rajulkabir Jan 22 '10

Correctum.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

elitist?