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I use FF. I have found it to be quite a bit faster, nicer and less prone to dark side hacks than Internet Explozer. FF is my main browser now. I keep IE around for the few sites where FF seems to have a problem, like on Trendmicro's on-line virus scan page.
I don't know why someone in this thread called FF bloated and slow. I can say that the 1.0PR release of FF was noticeably faster than the 0.8 release, at least on my machine. The 1.0 final release might be slightly slower than 1.0PR, or it might just be the cached pages having had to reload. FF is certainly faster than IE.
As to FF being bloated vis-a-vis Opera, maybe that is Mozilla compared to Opera, not FF. I thought the whole purpose of FF was to be small and fast, with just the most important features and not a lot of bells and whistles few ever use.
I just want a basic browser that is reasonably fast, blocks pop ups, has bookmarks, and now that I've gotten used to them, tabs. (At first I didn't know about tabs and was just using FF as a very plain vanilla browser. Then I bothered to read the help pages one day.) The magnification feature is nice, too, and the fonts seem more reliably readable on FF than IE. Some sites, particularly some European ones, seem to use a font that comes out as tiny, smeared text that even W98 magnifier doesn't help on IE. Don't have that problem with FF. Being faster than IE is nice, too.
I also want to get away as much as possible from anything Micro$oft. No desire to support a monopoly. I only use their OSes, just because there is so much s/w out there for them. I also have Linux and even OS/2. I have a copy of Office merely to be able to read Word and Excel documents that I can't read with my older version of PerfectOffice, and because some dweebs refuse to put them into .pdf or .html format that EVERYONE can read. Posting Word documents on a website is particularly egregious stupidity, IMHO.
At any rate, I'm happy with FF for my main browser, didn't like Mozilla because it had too much built-in (I use Eudora as my mail client, for example), and keep IE around just in case something doesn't go right with FF.
I've never tried Opera, heard that it had more problems with websites than FF or IE, and more bugs than FF. Also heard it was slow and bloated. But I've never used it, so maybe these are ugly slanders. I probably won't use it if I'd have to pay for it. I'm wondering if the ad banners are bad like Juno crap or THG's site, or if they are small and unobtrusive like Eudora 5.x in full featured, free mode?
At any rate, I'm happy with FF (for now). Death to IE and the evil empire of Micro$oft.Last edited by Mcollector; 22 November 2004, 14:38.You were told - SasqComment
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Yes, I'm sure. I've typed phrases and it takes me to a site related to what I intended to find with a google search. Many times it was exactly what I was looking for. The resulting URL looked in no way like URL completion, though I think FF will do that, too. As far as I know, that's the default FF behavior. I didn't turn anything special on that would have done that.Originally posted by az
You sure that wasn't just address completion? (automatically adding the www. and .com)
You were told - SasqComment
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I'm not talking about mozilla, I'm talking about firefox, compared to opera.
I do have firefox 1.0 installed to compare it side-by-side, and while firefox is slightly faster at loading pages here without tweaking settings for either opera or firefox, it is a lot slower in:
- history navigation (it doesn't even appear to load pages from cache at all??)
- javascript menus (noticable lag)
- switching between tabs
- page rendering (try auto-scrolling through a page and you'll see what I mean. Could be a messed up auto-scroll implementation too)
I've found all these things give firefox a really sluggish feel compared to opera. As for html handling, I've explained that firefox does better in that department. Appearantly it also doesn't crash as often as opera on most systems. As for bloated, I clearly explained in my posts why it is bloated: Even with barebones functionality it's noticably larger in size than opera which is feature-filled (probably comparable to mozilla in amounts of features, of not more).Last edited by dZeus; 22 November 2004, 14:42.Comment
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I can only give personal comparisons of IE v. FF. I've not tried Opera, so I have to rely on what others say. Maybe my comments were related to what others said of older versions of Opera.
In any case, crashing is not a good thing. I've had IE lock up or crash on me more frequently than FF. I can't remember a hang on FF.
I don't see what the slowness you mention in switching between tabs is, unless you have a less capable machine than mine (hard to believe, mine = 400 MHz PII with 192M and a 32M Millennium G400DH (not using DH)). Tab switching seems to happen in 300 ms or less, if I can even hazard a guess at the speed.
I've noticed some funnies on manual scrolling occasionally, like something doesn't quite catch up right away, but they are gone very quick. I'll have to try autoscrolling later. Don't have that turned on right now.
Yes, there are history page caches. Clear your FF cache, go to some static web page that takes a short while to load, then close FF, then go back. I do this for the seti@home individual results page all the time. Perhaps FF clears the cache when you shutdown your system. I vaguely remember pages seeming to reload when I reboot. I leave my machine on 24/7 to run seti@home, so I don't quite recall.
The one thing I don't like that FF doesn't do is to pop up the autodisconnect window when I close it. Mozilla doesn't do this either. IE does. I have to disconnect manually with FF. Fortunately, the modem LEDs warn me that I'm still connected. I've gotten used to doing it now, but I wish FF had an option to autodisconnect on close of FF.You were told - SasqComment
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all I can say is try opera for a while for yourself and then make comments about my comments
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FF is bloated because it still relies on some of the same codebase as Mozilla does. The rendering engine itself accounts for much of this bloat. I can't say for Win-based installations, but, on OS X, the 25MB it takes up disk space-wise is hardly a bother. Yes, Opera is less hefty at almost 10MB. FYI, Safari is only a tad more than 8MB, though it's rendering engine is "part" of the OS.
I've never noticed on Windows or Mac any slowness in tab switching except when the system is grinding to a halt anyways.
There are some issues with scrolling down a page; far less smooth than I would care for.
With FF, however, I get a browser without the need to prune all the unwanted extras Opera throws in. At that, I can use whatever mail client I like, which I know you can in Opera, but what's the point of doing that when you payed for the whole thing... True there is a free, ad supported version, but that's just annoying over a long period of time if all you want is a browser. I think that's why a lot of people choose to go with an alternate browser. Opera is nice, but it's more than some people need.
Opera is a suite in essence, with lots of extras that are nicely packaged, so comparing that to a simple, bare-bones browser like Firefox is rather like comparing Notepad to Office (okay, maybe not that extreme
).
“And, remember: there's no 'I' in 'irony'†~ Merlin MannComment
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The second half of that sentence makes the first half null and void.Originally posted by dbdg
... my XHTML and CSS syntax is correct...well as correct as I want it to be.Gigabyte P35-DS3L with a Q6600, 2GB Kingston HyperX (after *3* bad pairs of Crucial Ballistix 1066), Galaxy 8800GT 512MB, SB X-Fi, some drives, and a Dell 2005fpw. Running WinXP.Comment
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How does panning look in FF?
Here's a little demo of it in Opera - excuse the low quality and the jerky-vision please, it's the vidcap (In Opera, this is much smoother).
http://www.fieras.de/murc/panning.avi (~3.4 MB)
AZLast edited by az; 22 November 2004, 19:40.Comment
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Get a 404 on that link, but could just be me.“And, remember: there's no 'I' in 'irony'†~ Merlin MannComment
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panning on FF is smooth and easy, just press the mouse wheel and move in the direction you want to pan.Comment
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Tabbed browsing isn't slow here.
Page rendering isn't slow here.
Tried Opera in the past and to be honest found it no quicker than IE. Also found that it had problems rendering a few sites.
The site I found that doesn't work with FF is the football league web pages which seem to be IE only for the forums.
So bar the Java bugs which maybe suns fault and not FF FF is the way to go for me.
Anyone tried Firefox on a usb stick yet???Comment
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