Firefox!! What are you doing to me?!
Dec 30
I have long been an avid user of Firefox. Mainly because the other options suck.. (Though I must admit that Opera 9 is nice.) But lately it’s pissin me off..
Firefox does everything I want it to, and does it nicely. Though lately its starting to do somethings that disappoint me. Firstly, the latest update seems to have a terrible memory leak. In windows 2000 pro if leave firefox open and running for more than a day or two it will have hundreds of megs chewed up.. Even after ALL tabs are closed. That’s not cool.
Combine that with the fact that often after exiting it, it will linger in memory until you reboot or end the process and you have issues – frankly that’s not acceptable. Come on guys, other browsers are catching up.
IE7 is still nothing to fear but its getting closer.. and as I mentioned Opera is nice and every day 1 or 2 new users switch to it.. (bringing to total users that use it to about 43..)
Firefox still outperforms IE in my opinion and has much better DOM / JS support. But IE’s CSS support is getting better and might even be close to even with firefox. Firefox still has the plugin architecture though, god bless it.
Either way, I’m still unhappy with it lately. Its slowing down something aweful, and bogging up my box.. To give you an idea how bad it is… I wrote this using IE6… Bleh..
Dec 30, 2006 @ 09:41:06
Weird – the Mac Firefox doesn’t seem to leak memory like that. I’ve had Firefox sessions up to a week or two, maxing out at around 30 tabs without any trouble.
Opera has a lot more users than most people think, and for lots of good reasons. It doesn’t really have the extension thing going for it, but you can customize the hell out of pretty the entire existing interface and behavior.
Opera made the first cell phone browser to pass ACID2 and have recently implemented some of the new WHATWG stuff for streaming Ajax requests from the server to the browser (http://labs.opera.com/news/2006/09/01/).
At this point I use Safari (ATSU experimental support, and the webkit nightly builds have an increasing amount of CSS3 support) and Opera (its tabbed browsing features blow everyone else out of the water, though OmniWeb supposedly has really nice tab features) for most of my non-work browsing.
But Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar don’t install in those…
Dec 30, 2006 @ 09:41:52
P.S. I’d rather write a post using elinks than IE6.
Dec 30, 2006 @ 12:40:31
Right.. Firebug and the various Developer helpers make Firefox the one to use for me.. and I’m glad that they update it regularly, but I fear their updates are starting to suck a little..
I do like opera, but its a different flavor of icecream in some respects.. I may have to use it more just to get used to it.. I do have the opera browser on my phone and have forever.. Works great!
I do like the server sent events and I’m pretty sure thats the next big thing we will see in all browsers.. or atleast I hope.. but this is just my point – remember when FF was leading the way?