Firefox 4.0 Beta VS. Other Browsers

Renzatic on 9/7/2010 at 18:08

Right, Koki. Because handy things like mouse gestures and flashblockers are for nubbers who don't know what they're doing.

inselaffe on 9/7/2010 at 22:34

Er did you skip the reading comprehension test on registration here?

On a surprisingly happy note - some new firefox 3.6.6 update thing seems to fix the problem of flash crashing your whole browser :) It now has some special "this plugin has crashed" in place of the plugin when that happens, allowing you to just reload the page (or plugin content itself).

Enchantermon on 11/7/2010 at 21:34

Quote Posted by Koki

Not use extensions. In Firefox.

That's just failing at Internet.

Never needed them.

Koki on 13/7/2010 at 05:19

Uh, right.

Speaking of browsers, for the past few months I've been using Chrome at work because my PC there is venerable Celeron 2.0GHz with 256MB RAM. I got regular freezes lasting to up a minute or two, but hey, Chrome is fastest browser in the world so that's the PC's fault, right?

Well yesterday shit got extremely bad, every ten minutes of browsing I had to take a five minute break just so Chrome can catch up with opening those extremely CPU intensive message boards. So I thought fuck that, no way the PC is THIS bad or the Internet thing would never get off the ground. I switched to Opera(as if to prove my point, the Chrome hard crashed - complete with "send error report to Microsoft" window and all - when I was closing it) and voila, everything works smoothly now.

I must say I like Opera, if only you could turn off these stupid tabs. And install adblock that actually works. And flashblock. Then I'd switch.

Fuck Google Chrome though, I'd rather use IE8.

Renzatic on 13/7/2010 at 06:44

Actually, Opera 10.60 is currently the fastest browser in the world, beating Chrome out by a few seconds on some test or another.

And something I find rather funny. Those who stick to the default Chrome stable builds seem to have the worst experiences with it. I've been in the beta/dev channels since I started using the thing, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. Chrome 6, which I believe is only in the dev channel at the moment, actually eats up less memory and runs a little bit faster than 4 or 5.

Still, it'd be about the last browser I'd choose to run on an old Celeron with 256 megs of ram. It doesn't exactly scale well down to lower end machines. I've used the beta build on an old Athlon XP with 512 meg onboard, and while it wasn't the crash-prone mess you found it to be, it still wasn't anywhere near as quick and breezy as it is on my comp here.

Sulphur on 13/7/2010 at 06:55

Given Chrome's memory usage compared to IE or Firefox, running it on 256 MB of RAM is a somewhat ridiculous proposition, considering that XP by its lonesome is probably already grinding that page file to a fine paste.

Koki on 13/7/2010 at 10:05

I thought Chrome used on average 20% less memory than FF/Opera.

steo on 13/7/2010 at 16:15

Fuck all those other browsers and start using Internet Explorer Pro.

Renzatic on 13/7/2010 at 16:31

Nope. Despite its reputation, Firefox actually uses quite a bit less memory than the other browsers. If I remember the benchmarks correctly, IE uses the most, Opera and Chrome are about neck and neck if you're running Chrome without extensions, and Firefox is at the bottom in memory usage.

Even with extensions, FF is still the best of the bunch, using half as much as Chrome with the same amount of extensions installed. So if you want the thinnest browser, you use Firefox 3.5/3.6. Not sure how 4.0 compares exactly yet, but my experiences with it show (http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/browsers.jpg) about the same results. I have 4 more extensions installed in Chrome than I do FF, but still, the same amount of tabs are using almost double the memory because they're all tucked away in their own process.

Enchantermon on 13/7/2010 at 19:43

I must be a pretty rare case, then. Chrome is almost instantaneous for me and Firefox (3.5 now, I haven't tried 4.0) and IE are both slow (FF being the faster of the two). Plus, I can open loads of tabs on Chrome. I have 33 open right now (and I've had more) and everything is still snappy. Before Chrome came out, Firefox was choking when trying to hold up fewer than that. I'm still sticking with Chrome. It had some problems when it was in beta, but aside from a few crashes which it always gracefully and quickly recovered from, I haven't had any problems, and certainly not ones of a magnitude that would cause me to try other browsers.