Re: IE vs. Firefox

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4678

Posted by subs
2005-12-08 05:28:33

I’m pretty fed up with the whole IE vs. Firefox debate. I’ve tried FF a number of times and keep coming back to IE. IE always feels faster and sites render properly. We’ve never had any security problems with IE on any of the machines here. There is a lot of beat up going on.

I’m also peaved at the way Firefox broke the Extension I wrote for Surfulater in FF 1.5 and also many other extensions. I’ve written about this at: http://blog.surfulater.com/wordpress/?p=43 and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/powertoolssoftware/message/14964

The simple script at: http://packetstormsecurity.org/0512-exploits/firefox-1.5-buffer-overflow.txt will crash FF 1.5

And finally this post by brundlefly76 at http://discuss.extremetech.com/forums/1004292531/ShowPost.aspx is noteworthy:

——————-
I love Firefox, it is my favorite browser, but I have to correct the article on a point you made multiple times.

FIREFOX IS NOT A ‘LEAN AND FAST’ BROWSER.

This myth has been perpetuated by the open source community forever.

See comparison tests here:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#winspeed

Firefox is slower than Opera and IE, and has a much larger memory footprint then IE (right now 80MB vs 41 MB in task manager)
(it also has has a history of bad memory leaks, and monitoring task manager right now, there are still some in 1.5).

Its MUCH slower in cold and warm starts, and slower in rendering CSS, tables, and images.
It does have better script speed, however, probably due to IE’s ActiveX support.

Firefox is great because it has tabbed browsing, extensions, and themes.
Which, of course, go on to make it even more bloated should you choose to install them (who doesnt?)!

Although slower, it is still plenty fast enough - all mature browsers are.

Both IE and Firefox have their crashes, but the frequency with which this happens is greatly exaggerated by both sides.
Neither crashes often.

Can we all just agree that Firefox is superior in features and move on?

———————

Neville Franks

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