Gosh. I don't see the huge difference in both browsers. Both have exploits and bugs and such. Both of them have to be patched/fixed regularly and both of them use similar amounts of memory. The biggest difference ofcourse is tabs in FF. Ofcouse IE will seem like a horror, MS built it into Windows XP. Because of that, any flaw IE had was a flaw for XP as well and then was alot more visible and an outright alarming prospect.
FF came out and got popular because people swore it had less flaws than IE and such; well duh! - at the time FF was released, mozilla had tried and true products to reference...they knew what functionality to deter in order to provide a more stable default product. They had been working on firebird (or whatever it was called) and were hearing about problems and issues with both that product, and IE.
IE came from the ground up. First as a seperate browser, then as a built in part of XP. While MS could patch it and tweak it, they didn't have the luxery of performing any big overhauls on it, or making any dire changes because of that fact. All other browsers can mess with cores, change out dll libraries, you name it, they can do it...why? Because the application isn't built into the OS...XP will function with or without it. Not so with IE. (The IE browser can be carefully and selectively removed from an XP installation, yes - but that's the browser part, core IE files must remain behind for windows explorer and various XP windows to to function) I mention this pre-emptively lest I be flamed and bashed by those who use those xp cd makers.

In any case, look at how many patches and security problems FF has had since it's release? I'd say pretty close to the amount of IE fixes.

C'mon people...you MUST realize at this point, it's all a matter of individuality, if you want hundreds of plugins, default tabs and skins, then get FF.
If you're satisfied with simple browsing and getting toolbars, etc to add functionality to your browser, stick with IE. Plain and simple.

FF 2.0 Alpha?

Isn't too early for that? It's nice to test new version and they get feedback, but still. Why not release beta? Alpha is too early. Oh well, not my problem.... =D

I wonder how many new Myths this version will spread?

http://mywebpages.comcas...ortCD/FirefoxMyths.html

That page seems to be an anti-Firefox page that ignores some critical facts:

- Firefox has been out for a small period of time compared to IE, so it will have it's share of bugs.
- IE6 has been out FOREVER... but oh, they're still finding no shortage of CRITICAL VULNERABILITIES in it.
- The Mozilla team fixes critical bugs much faster than Microsoft. No "Patch Tuesday" needed.
- All of the "Feature Myths" could easily apply to IE as well... except the few IE doesn't support at all.
- No mention is made of how Firefox's flexible Extention system can add nearly any required functionality.
- Firefox is doing #$%^ well considering IE has held ~90% of the browser market for years.
- The last time I surfed the web using IE, I got popups and activex install prompts galore. I was surprised and shocked that Firefox had blocked all that.
- Mac, Linux, and non-XP Windows users can't get the latest version of IE, leaving them with known vulnerabilities within their system. But they CAN get Firefox, and remember Mozilla's bug fixing I mentioned above.
- ActiveX unnecessarily opens your entire system up to arbitrary code. Look at the alternative, Java, which sandboxes it's applications to prevent malicious code from getting anywhere. I'm not saying Java's perfect, and I don't know the details, but I know the IDEA that it has is good.
- Why does he mention Firefox wasn't the first browser to have tabs? I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, it's the BEST browser (for my purposes) to have tabs.
- I should probably only mention that, using Firefox as my web browser, the only spyware or virus I have tracked on my computer since I got it a few years ago has been tracking cookies. I could block even them with Firefox's cookie manager if I wanted to.
- Firefox doesn't support the full W3C standard. Guess what? IE supports it less. Pages that render perfectly in both Firefox and Opera can look like trash in IE.
- So Firefox fails the Acid 2 test. If you think it looks bad in Firefox, you should SEE how it looks in IE! :D The Acid 2 test is only a measure of how browsers treat INVALID CSS and HTML... it's not as important as supporting the standards, as webmasters should be writing valid code anyways.
- Firefox doesn't work with every webpage, we know. But why? Most of the time it is because the webpage designer only tested it in IE, and gave no thought to other browsers at all. Most of the time this means they will not have followed the W3C standard, and the site will be broken in other browsers because they followed MICROSOFT'S "standard", which conflicts with the real standards set forth by the W3C. Some webpages even outright block other browsers (nothing a good UA spoofer won't fix). JavaScript is an even bigger thing that doesn't work good cross-browser, but I won't get into that. Basically if you want to write good JS, you have to write it twice--once for IE, and once for Mozilla.
- Avant Browser and other IE browsers fall victim to the SAME IE vulnerabilities... and are reliant on MS for patches and updates. If you use Avant you are no safer from IE vulnerabilities than if you use IE, except maybe if you count the placebo effect.
- IE starts up faster on Windows because it is ALWAYS RUNNING, as it's part of the operating system. Even still, IE startup times are comparable to Firefox (without extentions or themes) startup times on my system. At any rate, it's this advantage IE has that has been the cause of all the monopoly accusation stuff against MS in recent times.

and finally...

- It's not fair to compare other browsers to IE and only comment about the cons of the other browsers, even if IE has the same cons. That article has an obvious bias, which in itself invalidates it, but I've provided my points just the same.

1.5 "feels" bloated to many because it consumes a lot more memory that previous versions. Memory footprint jumps over 200mb at times in fact. Leave a few tabs open overnight, and check task manager in the morning. It will jump a lot.

You CAN however, apply a number of tweaks which will make ff manage memory a lot better. There is one tweak in particular which is nice. When you minimize ff to the taskbar, it will free up memory and cpu cycles.

Read through this page: http://forums.mozillazin.../viewtopic.php?t=354828

The upcoming 1.5.0.1 release even fixes 2 memory related bugs.

Did you test your benchmarks in safe mode? It's not really fair if you don't, because it could be a badly-written extention and you'd never know it.

FF Bloated?? Aah come on! What are you running? Windows 95 on a Pentium100? We don't care that you guys think FF is bloated, lame or whatever. Shut up and use it or whatever else you want. Opera, IE, who cares! Geeez I'm so tired of whiners...

LAME, BLOATED, SPAM.

Firefox was sent to you in an unsolicited e-mail?

I'm just glad to have a browser that isn't IE ;)

Thank you so much for your insight and addition to the comments on this article. It was so very enlightening.

LOL! Ditto.

Ahhh betanews, home of the jackasses who just sit on the a** all day & night flaming everyone at any possible chance, get a life buddy!

Im sorry you feel that way, you didnt add ANYTHING to the discussion and instead made a lame post about being happy with any "Non-IE browser"

Please! You're the biggest troll here.

His post was valid. IE is bloated - VERY bloated for a non-java browser(gecko is java right?).

Because of the way IE is setup to integrate with windows, ANY browser will have less exploits in it, short of accepting scripts like "del *.*" from webpages. :P

FF FTW?

ff pwns

all u people are freaks...i have an ancient machine and ff 1.5 runs perfect!

FF's becoming more & more a bloated, buggy mess. Even Netscape's better now.

Bloated, yep. Buggy, no.

If you dislike the bloat, try PortableFirefox. It's incredibly quick. On my system it makes IE look slow.

FF plugins are crap though(plugins, not extensions). Earlier today my java plugin fubar'd my quicktime plugin, which resulted in weird video pixels all over the screen, and the monitor flipping to 320x240pixels in an incredible BLURRY antialiasing. It looked really funky, and then it hard-locked. I thought it might be my system, but sure enough it was the plugins as I can repeat it again and again. =)

Love that java.

ha thats funny. he made a mistake he ment to say: Quote "Netscapes's becoming more & more a bloated, buggy mess. Even FF's better now.

If you think PortableFirefox is quick. Try Opera 8.5, It's incredibly quicker..

So, you are telling me that to get a browser that is quick and light and easy on memory usage, I have to use a specialized version of firefox? Shouldnt a browser already be lean and run well and be easy on system resources regardless of whether or not its a specialized "Mini" version? Opera is far smaller in size than firefox and has MANY MANY more features, its cross platform, and uses FAR FAR less memory than firefox. Sounds like mozilla keeps looking for excuses for the firefox browser instead of fixing the issues at hand.

Firefox is stupid and loads your cache when it starts. 99% of people leave cache ON, despite not needing it. The cache is responsible for nearly all the loadtime.

PortableFirefox turns it off, for people that are too stupid to do so. Also, it's portable, so you can run it off a USB drive without installing to someone's computer. It also comes with a few other tweaks common to Firetune, and the Fasterfox extension.

Opera isn't as customizable as Firefox. It doesn't suit me, or 50% of people out there, but it's great for many.

Loaded sites slower, but less CPU usage(on my machine).

All depends how you tweak stuff. Tweaking firefox is easy. Tweaking Opera would likely require reading stuff.

Bloatware is a term fanboys love to use for any software they don't like. Unless you can give us some actual examples of why it's bloated your argument is total BS.

on my system, regular FF makes IE look slow =)

"PortableFirefox turns it off, for people that are too stupid to do so."

Sounds like someone has a superiority complex...

Quoth Metshrine:

"Opera is far smaller in size than firefox and has MANY MANY more features, its cross platform, and uses FAR FAR less memory than firefox."

Extensions afford Firefox infinitely more features than Opera. I haven'yet seen an Adblock equivalent for Opera, for example.. & Firefox is also cross platform, even extending its reach as far as the Riscos desktop. (see: http://www.mozillazine.o...kback.html?article=6822)

As for memory, ironically it's the extensions that are often at fault. However, there are workarounds for some of the memory issues, not least the non-static memory allocation..

"By default, Firefox does not use a fixed size memory cache. Setting a fixed size memory cache can reduce memory usage.."

More here: http://forums.mozillazin.../viewtopic.php?t=354828

Not really. I was one of those people, which is why I recommend PortableFirefox now.

I like firefox.

It's bloated because it has non-disableable features like tabbed browsing. When I right-click a link, there's that option I never use that has been linked to memory leaks. When I open a tab, it pops up quick, indicating the code was ready and willing.

Ideally, features like tabs would be packed into modules(ala Azureus?) so that people that NEVER use them could completely get rid of them. The firefox team at one point stated(roughly) "our goal is to make tabs easy to use and commonplace, yet completely transparent to those that do not prefer them." Well, the feature is still there, I hit it lots when right-clicking, and it's not GONE from the menu or memory.

But like I said, I actually like firefox(enough to uninstall the IE inf files), so I'm hardpressed to come up with anything else.

I hear for v3.0 there's going to be new accessibility options that 95% of us won't use?

FF=BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Former FF televangilist.
Now I regret my dedication to it somewhat.
I see lots of quality issues with 1.5 that I never had with 1.0.x I've rebuilt my profile probably 3-4 times at work now. I have constant issues with plug-ins that I never had on IE (except java,) and I frequently have to end task on FF in the task manager to get it started again. I have no spyware, other issues with my machine.
I won't go back to IE for obvious reasons, but I probably will go back to 1.0.7. That seemed to work much better overall for me.

I've been through that many times with previous versions of FF (mostly the pre 1.0 versions), so I've learned to wait out the new releases. Unless there's a giant security issue being addressed, I just monitor the comments under the homepages of the extensions I use and update when everyone else stops b!tchin' about incompatibility. ;)

I wish I had your patience. Part of my obsession is running software that is fairly cutting edge, but not beta, or a version or so behind. Something about running the "currently supported" version that gets me wet.

I can't understand what problems you are having. I've been using FF for a long time without ever having to delete my profile. Whenever a new version comes out, I simply install it over. I am running a couple of plugins and extensions without any problems (Flashgot, Adblock Plus, PDF Download, Tabbrowser Preferences, Web Developer, CustomizeGoogle, Adblock FilterSet Updater, CuteMenus, IE Tab, Greasemonkey). Some of the previous versions used to crash without me noticing but this hasn't happened in weeks with the latest builds.

i as well have no problems and i have most of the plgins and extensions mentioned before with a few others. i suggest talking to the dev people and see if there are other examples of this because i don't believe it at the moment.

I don't think you have to worry soon. Firefox 1.5 has been repulsive and buggy for me too strangely enough, but alas, the new stability candidate will hopefully fix the issues i've been having.

Is is weird that I found FF1.5 Alpha (Deer Park) the best browser of all the 1.5 releases? Something's wrong here. :-P

If they are already working on 3 why not just skip 2 completely and concentrate all of their efforts on it?

It's a development issue. Firefox 2 will be based on a bug fixed Mozilla 1.8 core, where as Firefox 3 will be based on the upcoming Mozilla 1.9 core.

I don't really need any other functions for my Firefox.

I'd appreciate it being more stable (plenty of crashes before this last patch so hopefully it's already been sorted)
The memory usage doesn't really bother me. It could definitely be improved on though.
200kb memory usage in an hours surfing is WAY too much.
Just from surfing forums too - no porn involved :)

There are a lot of wonderful things being added for v2.0 ...

Keyboard customization
Text-rendering changes
Annotation of Web Pages
Page Change Notification (Which was present in Netscape Navigator v4.5 strangely enough)

And for v3.0

Page Zooming sounds great!

At any rate, I would like to see the foXpose extension be included in the actual application itself as I feel that it makes tab navigation so much clearer and brings everything together... I'm suprised that v2.0 Alphas are coming so soon.

I hope that they fix some of the features that missed the 1.5 build.
print preview
Notification that there are updates available for your extension.

yes, more speed and use the SVG graphics rendering for windows.

I hope Firefox will not get in wrong direction with adding useless features into it.

The speed is really important!

I agree, the memory usage is already horrid enough

They are working on memory leaks as we speaks.

You mean like they've been doing since the 1.0 release? You mean the same memory leaks that have been in existence since the .5 release? I am sorry, but the memory usage at this point is unacceptable.

The memory usage coming in FF patch will be(and already is) greatly enhanced. I agree with you that RC3/Final memory usage was horrible in some cases. I am on 1.8.0 branch(1.5.0.1 FF) around 3 weeks already, and it has improved significantly, one couldn't believe in a such a big progress in only a few weeks.

Hope you'll all see, I've tested around 500 builds of Firefox now (from phoenix 0.4), and latest builds have really nice / low peak-memory usage compared to past. I get some layout bugs that aren't in Final thought and one-window-eating-70%-of-memory of previous-10windows-with-each20-tabs-open-in-it 'feature' is still present. And when you minimize FF it still won't help to memory freeing in any way.

I know the memory usage of Firefox is appalling. They are now specifically targeting memory issues for 1.5.0.1, and 2.0 I guess.

M-M-M-M-M-M-axxxxxthonnnnnn.

They need to spend more time and money developing Seamonkey. It is certainly the better of the two browsers and it doesn't require a lot of time and effort with themes, plugins, and extensions.

In reply to robmanic44:

Mozilla do not need to spend any time or money on SeaMonkey, since that is an independently
developed app, and is a community based continuation of the discontinued Mozilla App-Suite.

The only things Mozilla are doing for the SeaMonkey project are donating ftp.mozilla.org
server space for downloads, and webspace on mozilla.org for the SeaMonkey website.

ripj: That is something I wanted to know as well, I wonder what they will add into Firefox 2.

Check out the Firefox wiki for information on future releases
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:Home_Page

Here's the most interesting page, detailing planned features and what priority they will be given:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/...uct_Planning:Draft_Plan

OK, OK.. I was wrong about Firefox, I am actually using it.. and I do like it better, so anyone know what major improvements there will be?

Major overhaul of bookmarks.

Search engine plugins managing.

Improved tabs, including close-buttons on each tab

... and as I understand things, possibly a session saver

close-button on each tab!!! Whoo-hoo!! Sounds small but it's a personal victory to me. I requested that feature at least 2 years ago and got blasted by the developers. I (and others) have been fighting with the core dev team on this issue. I am so glad to see them put it in the core product.

Their main argument against it was the fact you couldn't use "muscle memory" to rapidly close multiple tabs.

See this blog post more details:

http://weblogs.mozillazi...en/archives/009210.html

They are making a pretty nifty implementation if those early words were anything to go by.

"close-button on each tab!!! Whoo-hoo!!"

Uh, I already have close buttons on each tab. All you need is a simple extension called Tab X.

Yeay, an extension for features that should be included by default! God, how will opera or IE7 ever catch up with this (Oh wait, they have)

Metshrine's right i only use firefox sometimes because it is more main stream than Opera (my preferred browser) and thus works with most pages but opera is far better (close buttons on the tags and advanced feed management)

nooo, i dont want x button on every tab, i like it the way it is, the xtabs pissed me off when i first tries opera and ie7, its betta THIS way

I think the menu-before-close function was made in this sense. I like it too.

As mentioned elsewhere, middle button on a tab closes it. Not exactly well documented but optimal once known.

Spread the word..

hmm.. I am not sure, but I think I detect a minute quantity of sarcasm in that statement...

so you would rather have a button ...... way over here to close the tab, rather than a button sitting rightnexttothetabitself? (X?) uh huh..

You like to keep your sock drawer on the opposite side of the dresser where the underwear is too don't you?

Ah, contraire! What if we have a mouse sans a middle button?