Is Firefox really <i>that</i> great, or do people just have a boner for it because it isn't Microsoft and it's <i>slightly</i> less of a pain in the arse to code for? I just had it running for about an hour or so, and with only one page open (the BBC News site) it was using over 80MB of memory, which isn't good. Even IE isn't that bad.
"To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web."
"Back-Forward cache
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
Back to the about:config screen: Firefox has a special "Back-Forward cache" for recently visited pages that works differently than the regular browser cache. The default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers, "-1," will save up to 8 pages if you have more than 512MB RAM on your PC. Reduce the number to zero for maximum memory savings."
I'm one of the people who doesn't like Firefox, but the dislike is relative. Firefox has one thing that makes a difference: gecko.
IE may be faster that FF, but it has broken alpha support for PNG, CSS rendering is completely different from any other browser, it lacks support for many interesting newer web technologies, and new security issues are continually found. It uses more memory if several pages are open, if that really matters after all the other problems.
IE has been holding back the state of the web for several years now. I curse its existence.
>t's <i>slightly</i> less of a pain in the arse to code for?
More than slightly, man. >>3 isn't joking; IE is an anchor to progress on the web. The internet as a whole would have been much better without it.
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Wakaba text formatting rules:
http://wakaba.c3.cx/docs/docs.html#WakabaMark
IE is really pathetic...
I recently started playing with Google Maps, specifically their API. I had been thinking of doing a website covering my travels around the country side, and figured the Google Maps API would be just perfect as a navigation medium. Get the map going, suck a whole load of co-ordinates out of a database, whack the markers on the map... bingo. :-)
The issue I hit, was when I tried absolute positioning of the <div> tags. The moment I tried setting style="position: absolute; right: 10px;...", Opera understood, Firefox understood, Konqueror understood, IE b0rked.
I've hacked around the problem by assuming a 720x540 screen area, and positioning accordingly, along with a warning notice about why the site looks crap, and what they can do about it. But I really hate IE as a result. I disliked it before as I see it as a huge security hole. Lets face it... any web browser that allows web applets, such as Windows Update, to alter critical system files, is an open door, and should not be used. Now, I hate coding for IE too, and thus am almost of the opinion of, Stuff it... the W3C says my code is correct, it works on every other browser, Microsoft can fix their crappy browser.
http://outdoors.longlandclan.hopto.org <-- That's the site there if people are wondering what I'm on about. At the moment, the hack simply looks for MSIE in the HTTP_USER_AGENT variable, and switches the stylesheet to use style-ie.css. I'll have to do the same for the photo album viewer too, but I'm less than enthusiastic about the whole issue. IE has left a really BAD taste in my mouth.
I know there are a lot of people who swear by IE, and are big critics of Mozilla and Opera, but I wonder how many of them would change their tune when doing cross-browser site development.
Igloos in Australia? Bwahaha. :)
>>15 Hah... yeah... nicked the icons from KDE. The igloo icon sorta looked like a dome tent, hence I used it. Plus some of those places got bloody cold -- so we might've well been camping in igloos. ;-)
firefox is good for normal browsing and I use Browzar for stuff I don't want to be discovered. www.browzar.com
how 'bout K-Meleon? any of you guys try it yet? it's based on gecko, is supposedly lighter than anything and fully customizable. I'm running it right now. It does seem light, but boy is the user interface such a pain in the ass...
> is supposedly lighter than anything
>>17
lol an ie shell will cover your steps for sure
I used to use firefox, now I use swiftfox. Swiftfox is firefox, just optimised for you CPU. For me the difference is notable; Pages render a lot faster. If you are using firefox now, I really recommend giving swiftfox a try, especially if you like to have a lot of tabs open and your machine isn't all that powerful.
> Swiftfox is firefox, just optimized for lazy fucks who can't build from source themselves
fixed
>>23
In other words, for ~95% of firefox users?
>>9
Opera sucks sure there's an ebuild for opera but it just get dropped to /opt, it's statically linked, and it's CLOSED SOURCE, which means that it is a BINARY package.
No sane human being would do that.
i want to try that swiftfox. looks interesting for me, i hope it doesn't take ages to load like firefox (yes, my machine at home is not that powerful)
>>24
Just which variety of Linux can't build things from source? I know some specialized embedded distros don't include a toolchain, but I wasn't aware any desktop versions had bastardized it to that extent.
>>28
I wasn't talking about the tools, more about the people...
Most linux users I know haven't ever built something from source because they use linux only for browsing and torrents, and you normally don't need to know how to build stuff from source for that.
I know it's not that complex, but it's more complexer than just downloading something and running it, what is what they are used to because they mostly run windows.
Also, people are lazy. This is why we have such things as perl or electronic can openers.
Most I know, are into building their own distributions.
Not that many distributions out there that are targetted at MIPS or ARM... ;-)
The only reason people use Firefox is because they haven't used Opera for long enough.
Opera is just better.
>>32
Not open souce bla bla etcetera, I'm not going to use it.
Firefox also has extensions which make it into the ideal browser for viewing porn, therefore it is clearly superior.
>>32
opera is ugly.
>>34
I used to say that (I'm a firefox guy), but opera is skinnable.
Opera's default skin and layout is terrible, and now there's those infernal UI lag spikes as well. Instead of fixing it they come up with useless features like the mini-window mouseover, which pretty clearly was thought up by a smart idiot.
I think Opera's usability went downhill when they decided to skin it. Now it has this cluttered flashy glitzy interface.
Being skinnable is never, ever an excuse for not having a well-designed interface out of the box. That's as worthless an argument as the open-source "well you have the source, fix it yourself" mentality.
>>37 Exactly Skinning is a gimmick for the most part... a useless feature that really doesn't add anything to the usability of a product, and greatly complicates the UI components.
I find the theming in Firefox is sometimes useful in that, one can pick a theme that occupies less space... but it's no substitute for proper UI design.
its like all of those open source projects that refuse to add features because "you could just as easily make a plugin yourself"