Lightweight internet browser alternatives for an old win PC

[Xyga]

So I've been using FireFox for years and the cpu/memory load has been growing with each and every new release...

Now with v29.0 it's really bothering me, even a clean install with barely any extensions has it using almost 1Gb of the pagefile and 1Gb of my RAM after only 5 minutes of browsing lightweight pages and and forums, with only 5 open tabs or so.
Almost twice these figures when a page with flash content running, and the cpu usage peaks to over 50% or even 70% at times.
The little know tweaks to apply in about:config didn't make a noticeable difference (they did before, but not with that new release).

My computer is quite old (about 7-8 years) and I would like to use it for maybe another 1 or 2 years before I buy a new, modern one.
It's a laptop with a 2GHz Intel c2d, ATI gpu 256Mb(512HM), 2Gb DDR2, Win XP SP3.
(I can swith to Win 7 if I want since I have all compatible drivers, but I don't know if that will make my system any faster).

Any recommendations for a less memory and cpu - hungry browser ?
Chrome made things even worse, Opera not much difference, IE is out of the question... I just don't know.
Found very little info on alternatives.

Plz halp !

[Eno]

I used to alternate between Fx and SeaMonkey back on Windows. For better or worse it's built largely upon Fx's technology and comes with Thunderbird(e-mail manager) and ChatZilla(IRC client), but as a browser it is(or at least was back then) lighter, more stable, sports a much saner, more traditional interface and is still largely compatible with Fx extensions.

I don't know if Midori has a Windows build, but it's another really lightweight browser I use from time to time. It's not feature rich and has issues displaying modern pages with lots of JS/CSS/whatever glitter though.

Or you could go full 1337 and use elinks/w3m on cygwin .

[Ed Oscuro]

Doubling that memory shouldn't cost much and will help things along. Memory is more expensive than it was a year ago or so, of course.

Firefox has made impressive gains lately in stability and memory usage. Even some versions ago I found I could keep it pretty stable around 1300 tabs and probably 50 windows (1500 tabs starts to get unstable). And ~700 tabs in 25 windows is only using 1.6GB of memory. Note that this isn't with all those tabs loaded simultaneously - Firefox lets you get away with this when other browsers don't. Until recently, it loaded all the tabs on every program startup, making a huge collection of tabs cripple performance. But that's no longer true.

The key thing to know about Firefox is that restarting it often is a good idea. I have found that the official Session Manager plugin is vital for restarts, since it prevents you from losing your previous session after a restart.

I don't think other browers are any better in this regard. Chrome's "one process per tab" has its upside, but it's more resource hungry. I don't think IE excels in anything in particular, and other browsers are too small and not modern or feature-rich enough for me. You could check them out though.

Another thing which can often help is reinstalling the OS. If you can back up all your important files (I wrote about the files you need to back up in Firefox recently; it's not many) this can fix a bunch of issues.

Also, if Windows app compatibility isn't an issue, you can take a look at lightweight free operating systems.

[ED-057]

Your "old" system has better specs than what I use 90% of the time. I'm not sure if Firefox is the whole problem, you may have other software on there eating up resources.

I use Opera 9.25 and Palemoon. Opera's UI was the best, but then it became buggy and now they have completely abandoned it. I still use 9.25 for all my regularly visited sites, and there is no problem leaving it open with multiple windows and tabs. The memory footprint is fairly small, but it doesn't handle javashit very well so I leave that disabled. For sites that need javashit/flash or otherwise don't work right, I launch Palemoon and generally close it again when I'm done. But I have never seen it use anywhere close to 1GB.

[BryanM]

Use Firefox 2.0 without Java enabled or flash installed. Use a different browser for using websites with plug-in content that you're relatively sure isn't full of computer AIDs.

Fun trivia: Youtube has had a nag line for Internet Explorer 6.0 for about a decade now. Still, their Chrome browser runs flash like absolute dogshit. I've never seen anything so inefficient and shitty. "Oh you tried to play two videos on two seperate tabs without waiting for the first one to load completely? I'ma just freeze your computer for 20 seconds and make the plug-in crash 'cause fuck you that's why."

If this is how their robot cars are going to work, people are going to die. Like, a lot.

[trap15]

That's flash's fault, not Chrome's. Adobe writes all the Flash implementations. That's why it runs like shit, because Adobe is trash.

[Xyga]

Thanks for all the advices, I'll give a try to some lighter browsers like Midori, Firefox 2.0, (IceDragon maybe?) and probably buy some more RAM too if it doesn't get significantly better.
(Would 4GB of speedier RAM make a real difference ?)

I forgot to mention that I've put all of Firefox's cache on my RAM with '-1' cache size setting (auto) because I assumed it would be smoother like this. Disk cache is off (my hard drive is kinda slow, 4200 or 5400rpm, don't remember exactly).
Number of pages to keep in memory also reduced from 50 to 5.

The thing is memory usage piles up quickly no matter what cache option I'm using, and Firefox doesn't seem to like to give back free memory quickly.
Restarting works of course, but I would have to do that every 10 or 20 minutes to keep my system quiet.

I usually don't have much stuff running aside from avast! and its load isn't important. So it's really the browser.

[SuperDeadite]

Keep in mind if you are using 32bit Windows, (which is likely as you are running XP), 32bit Windows can only use about 3.6gbs of RAM. That is the limit, you have to go 64bit in order use more.

[Xyga]

Oh yes good point.

[Eno]

That's flash's fault, not Chrome's. Adobe writes all the Flash implementations. That's why it runs like shit, because Adobe is trash.

Not denying Adobe is trash, but didn't Chrome use a custom flash player developped by Google? Or is it just written by Adobe for Google's use only?

[ZellSF]

A stock Firefox install does not use 1 GB of memory while only doing light browsing.

Remove all your extensions, create a new profile and add extensions / change settings one by one until you figure what causes so high memory usage.

[Ed Oscuro]

Use Firefox 2.0 without Java enabled or flash installed. Use a different browser for using websites with plug-in content that you're relatively sure isn't full of computer AIDs.

If you're going to do this, expect a lot of breakage in fun places, I'd expect. Lots of vulnerabilities to ads injected with shit and other attacks, too, and probably you'd be leaking personal information on top of that.

If you were going to do such a thing, I would sandbox the browers at the bare minimum. Maybe make the entire PC a throwaway with no personal information, but just your browsing habits and logons are what most spies would like to see. Again, not really the plan I'd follow if I absolutely had to fall back on only one PC - I'd focus on making that system secure rather than trying to eke performance gains from dangerous living with vulnerable programs.

I've got a Core 2 Duo laptop (T7700) which I still think is quite usable.

On the subject of Flash, I find that good websites tend not to use much flash. For those that do, I use Flashblock. Firefox is plenty usable with just Flashblock installed, though my own preference is to add a couple other addons. Some, like NoScript, help more than they hurt by preventing resources from loading - and that's purely from a memory usage standpoint, before you start looking at all the security angles of refusing to let content load on your machine.

That's flash's fault, not Chrome's. Adobe writes all the Flash implementations. That's why it runs like shit, because Adobe is trash.

Not denying Adobe is trash, but didn't Chrome use a custom flash player developped by Google? Or is it just written by Adobe for Google's use only?

http://9to5google.com/2012/02/22/pepper ... -on-linux/

IF you allow Flash on Chrome (and I do - light usage and some Flash based sites are the only reasons I use Chrome really), the Pepper Flash player has specific advantages over the other type. I don't know why Chrome does this, but they seem to always allow both the regular flash and the Pepper Flash player to be enabled at once - I manually go into about:plugins (well, chrome:plugins - another example of Google's closed-source special snowflakeness) and disable the regular one so only Pepper Flash is loaded.

trap15 is right. The core idea behind Flash is still okay and still useful, but the implementation is so, so bad. One of the lovely things Flash does, on top of eat up CPU cycles in mostly serving GIF-based ads, is hook into system calls in strange ways - so common keyboard shortcuts you use and love in your browser no longer works. Flash will prevent Ctrl + Page Down from switching to another tab, for example - but only sometimes. A page with a flash movie will tab over, but load an SWF file directly and you cannae do it no longer! I bet it's like Java - a "good idea" that was probably implemented on a shoestring and then never properly developed or revamped even when evidence of its horrible hackishness piled up - all the money spent on it, since buying the technology back in 1990something, likely has gone into advertising and ensuring market dominance, rather than rewriting things in sensible ways that people can live with.

A stock Firefox install does not use 1 GB of memory while only doing light browsing.

Remove all your extensions, create a new profile and add extensions / change settings one by one until you figure what causes so high memory usage.

Indeed, though he did say it was a stock install.

What I'd do is uninstall, then go to %APPDATA%, find the Mozilla folder if it still exists, and nuke it. That should help. If there's still a problem, either Firefox is being dumb with the registry, or it's something outside Firefox. Like I said before - I'm a big fan of reinstalling Windows OSes after a few years, even in these happy days of Win7.

[Despatche]

That's flash's fault, not Chrome's. Adobe writes all the Flash implementations. That's why it runs like shit, because Adobe is trash.

yeah it didn't used to do that shit. flash used to run ok a few years ago... it's just gotten worse and worse and worse.

Not denying Adobe is trash, but didn't Chrome use a custom flash player developped by Google? Or is it just written by Adobe for Google's use only?

pepperflash is really just normal flash with some tweaks, and it still used to not have this problem; try telling chrome to load another flash, it'll do the same thing.

i've seriously considered trying to install an old flash multiple times, but each time i eventually remember that sites force updates too. it's so bad that i have to download every youtube video and watch streams through livestreamer.

[Ed Oscuro]

Flash is one of those programs that I wouldn't expect to be smart about updates. Despite doing pretty much nothing in updates except patch security flaws over the years, I'm sure there's a lot of settings that get fucked with every update, so I'd seriously consider uninstalling it and trying again.

And once again, don't underestimate the power of a fresh OS install. It often clears up problems that are really troublesome to track down otherwise, and as a bonus you don't have years of reports and other data you really don't want sitting around the odd corners of Windows.

[Stormwatch]

Try Pale Moon, a more optimized Firefox fork.

[Xyga]

A stock Firefox install does not use 1 GB of memory while only doing light browsing.

Remove all your extensions, create a new profile and add extensions / change settings one by one until you figure what causes so high memory usage.

Indeed, though he did say it was a stock install.

What I'd do is uninstall, then go to %APPDATA%, find the Mozilla folder if it still exists, and nuke it. That should help. If there's still a problem, either Firefox is being dumb with the registry, or it's something outside Firefox. Like I said before - I'm a big fan of reinstalling Windows OSes after a few years, even in these happy days of Win7.

Yes it's a fresh install with only adblock and shockwave active.
Before the fresh install I remember deleting the Mozilla folder in program files and cleaning the registry with CCleaner.
But I didn't check inside %APPDATA%...
Next time I'll give it a try.

To be more precise about memory usage it's not always around 1Gb, it is more around 500Mb with light browsing (which is already around 200Mb more compared with previous FF version) but whenever I visit some heavier pages (say with flash) it quickly reaches around 1Gb. Okay that's expected...
But after that even if I close the heavy tabs, FF doesn't give the memory back, and the plugin container process remains active though with a much lower memory load since no flash content is being displayed on any open tab.
Commonly I'm left with something between 850Mb/950Mb.
I have noticed the pluging container ends up turning itself off after a while if I don't visit any other sites with flash content.
The overall thing kind of settles and goes back to below-500Mb load if I do nothing for several minutes.

While I'm typing this post, I have only this tab open, plugin container is not running, but FF's load is 300+Mb.

EDIT: look like I'm not the only one experiencing this: https://support.mozilla.org/fr/questions/986174

Pale Moon

Added to my list thx.

[ZellSF]

To be more precise about memory usage it's not always around 1Gb, it is more around 500Mb with light browsing (which is already around 200Mb more compared with previous FF version) but whenever I visit some heavier pages (say with flash) it quickly reaches around 1Gb. Okay that's expected...

It isn't, 500 MB while browsing is expected though, but not under "light" browsing (I have 4 tabs open now and many extensions and Firefox is at 315 MB + 16 MB cache). Assuming you're not under or overestimating any numbers, there is something weird with your Firefox profile. Create a new one (start Firefox with -ProfileManager). Do not apply any tweaks to it.

Commonly I'm left with something between 850Mb/950Mb.

Just to ask the obvious, what do you need more than 850Mb for that you need to run simultaneously with Firefox?

More basically: what problem are you trying to solve?

[Xyga]

I tried the profile trick already and it didn't change the behaviour.

850Mb/950Mb

-> sorry maybe I wrote that bad, basically I mean FF keeps about half my RAM busy.
It's a problem for instance when I'm playing a game on an emulator and regularly check guides/tips online (sometimes I just pause the emulator to read or keep it running in a small window).
In these situations my system can quickly reach its limits, with high cpu and ram usage and of course overheating a bit after a few hours.
Restarting FF regularly would solve this, however it is definitely not convenient.

Another example would be watching a video/show with a player in a window while doing stuff on the web with FF.

If I have to choose and do only one thing at a time that's really poor multi-tasking capability even for a 7-8 old pc.

Anyway, from what I could read here and there on mozilla forums this is pretty common behaviour on XP 32.
That's what you get with old hardware and an old OS, can't blame Mozilla for not wanting to waste time optimizing their browser for obsolete computers...

[BryanM]

That's what you get with old hardware and an old OS, can't blame Mozilla for not wanting to waste time optimizing their browser for obsolete computers...

There's literally no reason for an inactive tab to do anything. I don't care if you have one cpu or a thousand of them, it's a waste of electricity. Gimme mah megahertz damnit.

My first impression of chrome was like "so this is what kids like these days? We're in some kind of new-age universe where the best user interface is... no user interface at all?"

I can feel the healing power of the moon crystals already.

[Ed Oscuro]

fuckin moon crystals, omg
That's actually one of my beefs with the new Firefox UI. The new UIs have no branding whatsoever. Hey, it's good from the standpoint of saving RAM...but why they have three parallel lines to represent the most important menu, instead of a little icon themed after the brower, is totally beyond me. Like that would be the obvious place to let all the kiddies and old people know "hey this is where you click to do stuff." It's like the new version of the old File menu paradigm, really. It is also pretty strange how the new paradigm is "as we get bigger and bigger resolution screens, people need less and less menus, adding more clicks to do things." OK.

@ Xyga: Spend more time thinking about working around the resource constraints, rather than just hoping to coax more and more out of the old system. An example:

Use GameFAQs while gaming? Click the "view original text file" and then open it with your favorite lightweight text reader, like notepad.

Also, you can look at %appdata% at literally any time. Firefox takes just seconds to get a fresh copy of, and even if you want to back up the old installation, that's copying over something like literally three files: Off the top of my head - copy and paste the two files with the names including the words "keys" and "signons" - both these needed for saving passwords - and your bookmarks, which you back up and import from the bookmarks toolbar. In most cases you don't need anything else, literally. That being said, it is strange if Firefox isn't working right after a fresh install - although I am not sure that's actually happening here.

Firefox is pretty much the best optimized browser for old systems - has been for a long while. Unless you use something super stripped down - maybe Opera fits this criteria, I dunno. Back to Firefox - as mentioned, it doesn't activate old tabs unless they're in focus, so if you have two windows with four tabs each, you don't get 8 tabs loaded into RAM when you restart the browser and it loads that old session. It will have 6 tabs inactive.

[ZellSF]

I tried the profile trick already and it didn't change the behaviour.

850Mb/950Mb

-> sorry maybe I wrote that bad, basically I mean FF keeps about half my RAM busy.
It's a problem for instance when I'm playing a game on an emulator and regularly check guides/tips online (sometimes I just pause the emulator to read or keep it running in a small window).
In these situations my system can quickly reach its limits, with high cpu and ram usage and of course overheating a bit after a few hours.
Restarting FF regularly would solve this, however it is definitely not convenient.

Another example would be watching a video/show with a player in a window while doing stuff on the web with FF.

If I have to choose and do only one thing at a time that's really poor multi-tasking capability even for a 7-8 old pc.

Anyway, from what I could read here and there on mozilla forums this is pretty common behaviour on XP 32.
That's what you get with old hardware and an old OS, can't blame Mozilla for not wanting to waste time optimizing their browser for obsolete computers...

High CPU and overheating... The main culprit here would be flash, really. Tell Firefox to only play plugin content on demand and on whitelisted sites (go to add-ons manager, select plugins and move ALL of them over to "Ask to Activate". It will ask before activating any plugin content, at which point it will also allow you to whitelist domains entirely. It's also entirely possible plugins are causing your memory leak problems and plugins persist between Firefox installations so try that before anything else.

I really don't think there's much to save on RAM, unless you're willing to use really basic or outdated browsers. In my VMs I use K-Meleon. It's Gecko (Mozilla) based and uses Windows APIs for its UI rather than the heavier third party solutions other browsers often choose. It's kept (relatively) up to date but I'm not sure if there are any solid release schedules or auto-updating mechanisms so it's far from ideal from a security point of view.

4 GB of RAM would make a difference, if you are NOTICING disk swapping a lot. Important thing here being noticing by using the computer, not looking at it in task manager. Installing a OS with better memory management while you're at it would be a good idea. I'm not sure I can really recommend wasting money on DDR2 RAM today though, it'll be useless your next computer upgrade.

[Xyga]

I haven't tried every recommendation yet but I will, that's quite interesting actually.

Keeping an eye on process explorer and/or the task manager I went and put Midori & Pale Moon to test, every time with the same pages and number of tabs open (some light pages and some with flash or various animated stuff and pictures).
Only fresh installs + adblock and shockwave. Nothing else activated without asking.

Total RAM & pagefile usage weren't showing much different figures compared to FF 29.0
The time both took to free some memory and reduce load on the cpu after closing all tabs were very close to FF as well.
Little differences were noticeable though;
- Midori was slow and choppy as hell, with a load pretty much equal to FF 29.0
- Pale Moon was noticeably smoother and snappier, with a tiny bit less load on the cpu

Then I gave a try to some memory-related addons, pretty much useless regarding RAM and pagefile, however there's one that actually did something: Memory Fox.
When activated that thing actually brings the browser's cpu load as low as it can, keeping an eye on the processes it was quite impressive. Explanation:

Inactive - playing a youtube video
browser.exe -> +/- 340Mb
plugin-container -> +/- 100Mb
Active - playing the same youtube video
browser.exe -> +/- 50Mb to 175Mb (varying quite a lot real time)
plugin-container -> +/- 100Mb

That's around 25% cpu usage VS. 40% to 50% before (!)

And when I quit the page with the video the browser.exe gets back up to around 350Mb... but the plugin-container.exe stops immediately, freeing around 50Mb.

So far Pale Moon + Memory Fox managed to make the overall experience a little bit smoother and quiet, when tweaking FF 29.0 or using Midori didn't help at all.

Now for the RAM, there's no good way to purge it. As long as the browser is open, its cache with a lot of the data is stuck to the RAM and that's it until you close the program.
The only thing I can try is to set a fixed max cache size capacity value smaller than the current (which should be 24Mb since it is set on auto) but I don't know if 18Mb will make any noticeable difference... (looks like it doesn't so far).

I'll try some more stuff yoiu guys recommended of course, but I have to say I quite like Pale Moon for now, it feels and looks like the FF of yore (afaik it is), before it began imitating competition.
Love that minimal look, no need to use theme or tweaks and I've gained quite a bit of real estate (I only have 800 pixels so it's really nice).

[Ed Oscuro]

4 GB of RAM would make a difference, if you are NOTICING disk swapping a lot. Important thing here being noticing by using the computer, not looking at it in task manager.

Yes, it's usuallly pretty simple to listen to the hard drive working.

However you can also look at this scientifically and pin down which program is doing it with Process Explorer - selecting one of the many options (for example, Writes) in the "Process I/O" tab of Select Columns. This would help if there's still uncertainty about whether it's Firefox or some other program, or even Windows, that is using the disk a lot.

For what it's worth, Microsoft pushed out a lot of search features to even old OSes like XP, which index the entire system. There's also automatic defragmentation. I would look seriously at disabling all this stuff. Defragmentation is helpful but only needs to be executed rarely in most PCs.

[Eno]

- Midori was slow and choppy as hell, with a load pretty much equal to FF 29.0

Weird it's usually quite light here. Can't say I've ever used it for heavy browsing though, and anything is less bloated than my main Fx profiles anyway

Now for the RAM, there's no good way to purge it. As long as the browser is open, its cache with a lot of the data is stuck to the RAM and that's it until you close the program.
The only thing I can try is to set a fixed max cache size capacity value smaller than the current (which should be 24Mb since it is set on auto) but I don't know if 18Mb will make any noticeable difference... (looks like it doesn't so far).

There's that thing that's been around for some time now, about:memory. From there you can drop lots of stuff from RAM aswell as check where it's being allocated.
IIRC there was also an about: full of other relevant performance data, but I can't remember what it is now.

I'll try some more stuff yoiu guys recommended of course, but I have to say I quite like Pale Moon for now, it feels and looks like the FF of yore (afaik it is), before it began imitating competition.

Glad to know it's good. I've been postponing the 29 upgrade in fear it will break my UI beyond repair, Pale Moon is my plan b in case that happens.

[Ed Oscuro]

about:memory is just a stopgap solution - and also useful for memory diagnostics which don't likely help much here - I only use it if I'm worried about the browser crashing and want to keep a session going (which doesn't happen anymore). Clearing your history and restarting the browser will do the job better.

[ZellSF]

Total RAM & pagefile usage weren't showing much different figures compared to FF 29.0
The time both took to free some memory and reduce load on the cpu after closing all tabs were very close to FF as well.

Midori doing the same despite being an entirely different browser should tell you everything: browsers do this for a reason. If you find an alternative you're likely sacrificing features and/or performance. If both browsers reach 1 GB, you should probably look into your own usage patterns to try to fix the problem there. I have to ask: how are you getting that 1 GB number?

I'll try some more stuff yoiu guys recommended of course, but I have to say I quite like Pale Moon for now, it feels and looks like the FF of yore (afaik it is), before it began imitating competition.

Glad to know it's good. I've been postponing the 29 upgrade in fear it will break my UI beyond repair, Pale Moon is my plan b in case that happens.

Postponing the upgrade makes no sense, they're very unlikely to revert it. The only thing that will change over time is that you'll subject yourself to more security issues. There's Classic Theme Restorer if you dislike Australis.

[Xyga]

Yes think I am beginning to understand better why browsers do this, why I get around 1GB after about 20mn of browsing the internet with varied content and why memory usage builds up and remains high even after I have closed most if not all tabs.

I guess websites are getting heavier with time, with more and more memory-heavy content. I won't change that, and no matter what I do trying to move the cache around or shrink it, the cpu needs to read the data from the RAM at some point... if browsers were designed to always purge the data of each and every tab that's not active, and do it real-time, it wouldn't make sense, as a simple click on a tab would mean reloading the entire page every fucking time.
(Restoring many closed tabs that have already been completely purged would be problematic as well, imagine asking the browser to restore 20 tabs or more at once with ALL the contents...)

Small tweaks, memory help addons, using older browsers, disabling extensions/plugins, blocking ads, pasting stuff to .txt files, etc -> all this helps a bit (slightly smoother and faster browsing, slightly less memory and cpu usage at times) but doesn't make any big difference in the end.

I couldn't find anything wrong with my system by the way, nothing stood out in process manager, no abnormal behavior.
Main system processes and antivirus are pretty much the only things noticeable among the average 20-25 processes
Most of the useless stuff is already disabled; defragmenter schedule, system restore, indexation, bunch of services I don't use, etc.
So I would say my system is pretty sane, balanced and quiet.

The real problem here is me failing to realize we're in 2014.
If I want to run another 'heavy' program besides my browser, then I need more RAM. Period.
(Until I get a more modern computer of course).

EDIT: Yes I've tried Classic Theme Restorer but it didn't let me achieve the same super-minimal presentation.

[ZellSF]

It should, this is (almost, I don't hide the tab bar) my Firefox 29 config:

There are minimal themes you should look into (I don't personally bother) if you want the UI even smaller than that.

[Xyga]

Duh I must have missed something then. I'll try again thx.

[Eno]

Postponing the upgrade makes no sense, they're very unlikely to revert it. The only thing that will change over time is that you'll subject yourself to more security issues. There's Classic Theme Restorer if you dislike Australis.

Yes, I know. It's not that I expect them to reverse it, it's just that I don't feel like messing with the interface again, with the possibility of extension breakages, the fatal migration pains to Pale Moon and whatnot. That and I want to test the vanilla 29 experience so I can write a big rant about how fuc- I mean, build an informed opinion on the merits and demerits of the new interface. Read, I'm lazy.

about:memory is just a stopgap solution - and also useful for memory diagnostics which don't likely help much here - I only use it if I'm worried about the browser crashing and want to keep a session going (which doesn't happen anymore). Clearing your history and restarting the browser will do the job better.

That's why I suggested it, not as effective but less disruptive than a full restart. Though you could argue that any disruption at all is bad enough, which is fair.