Can I have Mozilla co-reside with Microsoft IE and Netscape on one laptop?

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Request for Question Clarification by larre-ga on 22 Nov 2004 13:04 PST

It'll depend (a little bit) on the laptop. Mac, PC, Operating System, older, new?

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Hi, 

I have IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and Netscape running on the laptop
that I working on right now. Your limitation is probably not in the
area of the browsers, but in the resources available on the laptop
itself. Can you run them all at the same time? Setting aside,
available ram and your OS stability, there will be a significant pause
in the response time when moving from IE to the Mozilla/Netscape
browser and back again. This is due to the dynamic link libraries used
to run each of the packages. A significant level of library switching
has to happen in the background to switch between the browsers. I've
gotten to the point of 'acceptance' with this, since I understand it,
but it is still irritating at times (even on a very new, rather fast
laptop this will happen).

The browsers themselves do not cause a problem being installed on the
same system, but the switching back and forth between them, after a
while, I have discovered will cause the system to become less stable
and start responding much slower after a long period of use.

Can they co-reside? Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the system I am
typing this with is doing just that, but is it smooth? No, and some
tolerance is necessary so that the laptop doesn't become small pieces
on the side of the freeway. :-)

Thanks, 

webadept-ga

This was a very good answer from a usability and capability
standpoint. I would have liked some more examples of the impact of
using multiple browsers on one laptop, other than the decrease in
performance. BUT - OVERALL VERY GOOD!!