FireFox Myths

When I installed IE 7, I couldn't even open Visual Studio 2003, because it said that I required IE 6 or greater. Ditto for MSN. I thought, "WHAT!?! I JUST INSTALLED A NEWER VERRSION, YOU @#$!!" The amazing thing is that I thought in all capital letters. And that's the kind of thing that's possible with the right motivation. ;)

It was after I removed IE 7 that I got IE 6 screwed up. That might be why I have 4 other browsers now. :)
 
One of those threads the OP linked to brought up another interesting point that had slipped my mind. For some reason, Firefox tends to be a God-awful memory hog. Even with a single tab open and having only viewed 1 page I've sometimes seen it consuming more than 300MB of memory, which is just insane. OTOH, I can leave an Opera window open all day with 8-9 tabs and never see more than 80MB or so of memory taken by it.
 
That is actualy a feature :)
Firefox stores recently viewed pages in memory to improve performance... I have 1.5GB RAM that 20% is used on desktop. >1GB is used when I play games. So why not utilize some more?


On other hand Internet Explorer caches them on disk, so you often can hear it writing and reading to disk.

I don't have link for article anymore, apparently you can tweak that setting for Firefox.
 
That is actualy a feature :)
Firefox stores recently viewed pages in memory to improve performance... I have 1.5GB RAM that 20% is used on desktop. >1GB is used when I play games. So why not utilize some more?
Click to expand...

And you would seriously expect me to believe that one single webpage would require >300MB of RAM to cache?

Besides, in my experience FF acts exactly like IE - while it may store elements of the page in cache, when you go back to a previous page it attempts to refresh it. OTOH in Opera (I'm saying this a lot, it seems ;) ) when you hit the back button you immediately get the page you had - no touching the 'net unless you hit refresh.

But anyway, I did some tinkering last night and found the culprit. It seems that when FF loads Shockwave, it's memory needs jump by about 250MB. It also required about a constant 10% CPU usage to display the shockwave page (and remember that 10% of two cores, so 20% of a normal single core). IE OTOH (page won't load correctly in Opera) requires 35MB and 3-4% CPU to show the same page. Something just ain't right there.
 
So, basically... better browsing if you have the resources? Because I have the resources to run FF without problems. Many times I'd play a reource-hogging game like Civ IV (Where the players also hog resources :mad: ) and FF in the background, no problems. Let's see... with four tabs open (I have 4 home pages on FF) my memory usage for FireFox is 27912 KB of memory. That sounds like a lot, but remember that to get it in megabytes you have to divide by 1024. So, according to my calculator, 27912 / 1024 = 27.2578125 MB of memory. I have a max of 1024 MB of memory, and I can expand in up to three more slots if I want to. In reality, FF may be big, but it doesn't even dent my system. Besides, how much do you need in the background when your attention is on the Web? I only keep Civ IV and FF open at the same time because I'm lazy.

BTW, Mozilla Suite takes more resources b/c it's in the systray but it is way faster. Sites that take 30 seconds to load load almost instantly. :)
 
Padma said:
It needs repeating. ;)

It doesn't matter what bnrowser you use, or even what OS you use. If you don't make sure your system is properly secured, you will have problems.
Click to expand...

And reiterating.

I don't have the same sort of sample group as Speedo, but in my experience the biggest security problem is the loose nut behind the keyboard.
 
So, basically... better browsing if you have the resources? Because I have the resources to run FF without problems. Many times I'd play a reource-hogging game like Civ IV (Where the players also hog resources ) and FF in the background, no problems. Let's see... with four tabs open (I have 4 home pages on FF) my memory usage for FireFox is 27912 KB of memory.
Click to expand...

27MB is about par for the course for a browser or average program. No big deal most of the time if you have a decent amount of memory. But even in your case with 1GB of RAM, if you hit one of these quirks where FF decides to suck up 300MB, plus the 3-400MB XP normally in use between XP and whatever else you have running, there's 2/3 of your memory gone. Now, in case like when you're playing CivIV, the Windows VMM will most likely step in and save you by forcing FF and other programs to page their data, even if they "prefer" not to.

I'm certainly not worried about running out of memory (I have 2GB), but it's certainly annoying, and there are times that I need it. With large amounts of stuff open in 3ds Max, Photoshop and Maple going at the same time, I can suck up all of that memory with a bit of effort.
 
Meh... another "my browser is better than your browser" thread. I used to get involved in these kind of arguments, but I've found that these arguments are rather pointless. Just use what works best for yourself. Myself, I switch between Firefox and Konqueror (At the moment, I'm using Konqueror). For some people the browser that best serves their purposes may be Opera, for others Firefox, and so on. And, if in some weird universe Internet Explorer best serves your purposes, then go ahead and use it.
 
Speedo said:
The guys obviously dislikes Firefox, but much of what he's saying is true.
Firefox has many vulnerabilities, in fact I think last year more critical vulnerabilities were found in Firefox than IE6.
Out of the box, Firefox is just about as unsecure as IE6. Of course, Firefox can be made more secure by adding extensions - IE can't.
Click to expand...

that may be true theoretically (I think you're referring to the Secunia Advisories? ) but there's one flaw in this argument. Most (if not all) critical vulnerabilities in FF have been closed well before any exploits of these vulnerabilities were in the wild. I can't claim the same for IE (wmf-exploit anybody?)

In a nutshell, I would say that FF is indeed more secure than FF, but it's not as secure as some freak want to make it. No browser is.

I do, however, agree with your other statement: the user is by far the biggest security risk of any browser

A few days ago I switched from FF 1.5 to Opera 9 Technical Preview 2. Not because I was dissatisfied with FF but out of curiosity (yes, I just can't stand it that there are browsers I haven't tried). Atm it's hard to tell which I like better, Opera 9 sure has a few nice features, but I'm missing the "search-as-you-type" functionality :(
 
Atm it's hard to tell which I like better, Opera 9 sure has a few nice features, but I'm missing the "search-as-you-type" functionality
Click to expand...

Eh? Unless they've changed it (Haven't played with Opera9) just press "." and start typing, then use F3 as normal to find next. Really, a lot of the stuff I hear people drooling about that they've found some extension for in FF is built into Opera from the start.
 
Speedo said:
Eh? Unless they've changed it (Haven't played with Opera9) just press "." and start typing, then use F3 as normal to find next. Really, a lot of the stuff I hear people drooling about that they've found some extension for in FF is built into Opera from the start.
Click to expand...

:worship: there I used Opera for a week, and was constantly annoyed by this feature missing ... :lol:

thanks a lot
 
I was happy with Opera, but some important web pages I used worked badly with it. And back then those ads were still around. So finally I gave Firefox a try. I had to tweak it with some extensions to gain some Opera'ish elements (the vanilla FF release is somewhat horrible in my taste). After adding some other extensions inspired from yet older Netscape days I was very satisfied my FF, so here we go then.
 
Yeah, one thing I noticed about Opera is that I have to go to my User CP, and then refresh to see any new replies. I found that out the hard way after in Opera it said no new replies, but in Mozilla it shows the new ones. And no, there's no way that could be "just seconds ago" posts. I mean, 15 replies don't get posted in the same second. Ever.
 
I hate firefox.

But Avant is beta testing their browser with a Firefox core, but the Avant User Interface. Looks pretty good so far. It's called Orca Browser.
 
FF, I will switch to opera but the thing I like best about FF is I can right click and block Ilex's freaky avatars [someone with freaky avatar's on another forum].
Click to expand...

Content-specific blocking will be in Opera 9. Actually, if you're willing to use a beta you can get it now in Opera 9 TP2.
 
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