gmiller - 6:32 pm on Dec 31, 2000 (gmt 0)

I'm still not sure why everybody thinks skins are the reason NS6 is slower in some areas :)

Skins were actually something that was added because it cost them basically nothing beyond what they were already doing. The real problem is that much of the code consists of "first cut" implemenations of components that need to be rewritten. One example is the newsgroup subscribe dialog in NS6, which is several hundred times slower than the one in later Mozilla nightlies.

The startup time is a similar situation: it spends about 11 seconds inside the OS loading dynamic libraries, and another 10 or so reading the component registry.

They *could* have made Mozilla a Windows-only product and removed XUL and themes, but it wouldn't make a huge dent in speed or memory usage. People assume themes are to blame because it's the most obvious user-level change.