Ah, but therein lies the problem. If Firefox didn't use XUL and JavaScript for it's UI, it wouldn't have extensions. Firefox's extension support is so good because Firefox itself is rendered by Firefox. Extensions aren't second class citizens, they essentially become part of the browser itself.

Also, tests on 3.x have shown Firefox using the *least* amount of RAM of all the major browsers (including Opera), so the talk of Firefox being bloated or hemorrhaging RAM is laughably retarded and has zero basis in reality. Seriously people, find something that is at least partially true to complain about.



I can't stand Opera. It has some of the stupidest default settings I've ever used in a browser and no UI to change them. I'm not going to dig through it's equivalent of "about:config" to change something that should at *least* be in the options menu if not the default.

Outside of it's default behavior that I despise, though, it's a pretty solid browser.

Just to play devil's advocate for a bit, a lot of people make similar complaints about Firefox and settings in about:config. They're not me, though, and there's only been one or two times where I needed to (painlessly) change an about:config setting.

I must be doing something wrong, then, as I am a web developer by trade and don't recall any major issues with Internet Explorer. Yes, older versions of IE certainly have their issues (8-bit alpha in PNGs, lack of :hover except on anchors, no :first-child) but these are widely documented and so trivial to work around. However, I haven't had to implement any workarounds for IE 8; it's only a few minor aesthetic issues in IE 7 (and a few more in IE 6, though this is becoming less important by the day) that I have to contend with, which usually take all of three minutes to write a patch for.

I have watched IE7 on 3 different computers render the same page in three different ways depending on whether or not it was installed on XP or Vista and whether or not IE6 rendering mode had somehow been forced by whoever set up the computer. Your claim for IE6 is patently false if you work for NPOs whose primary audience are at least quinquagenarian, particularly in rural areas. At least one of the websites I've worked on is still at around 50% IE6 visitors, and has been for quite some time.


And for the record, I set up Firefox to behave more like Opera everywhere I use it.

I've never had to use Firefox's about:config to change relatively basic behavior settings - really I've only ever used it once to tweak the HTTP settings.

Basically with Opera, if you don't like how it behaves out of the box you're SOL. And for someone like me who is using a browser at least 12 hours a day, that is a huge issue.

Personally I find using Safari to be my best bet. Though I try to use a wide variety of browsers anyway. I actually found some other lesser known browsers to be faster and more RAM efficent. But as I am technically on an outdated OS using outdated hardware. This entire post is essentially moot. Aside from me saying I do prefer Safari and it's extensions to Firefox. I think it's a placebo effect though.

Also, multibrowser for the win.

/me facepalms

Safari is very slow on our PC, how do you get to to work? O_O

or do you use a mac?

Can you be more specific than that? That isn't a very descriptive, useful, or constructive comment. CDI, it seems to me that that would be very useful for someone looking to test out their webpage, website, or webapp for cross-browser compatibility.

Yes qazz42, I use a Mac. Not that I ever had problems with Safari 4+ on Windows either. Safari 3 is a different story. But Safari 5 is pretty good on both platforms. It's aided greatly by OS X having a lot of built-in libraries. And because the webkit engine Safari makes use of is essentially a part of OS X itself, other browsers can make use of it. Actually... I think at least 6 of the 24 browsers I use make use of the webkit engine. Sunrise there, is only 2.9MB and Stainless is only 1.3MB so it shows. But I digress.

And yes Kerm, I have done quite a bit of cross compatibility checking. Unfortunately I cannot check for compatibility in IE ( except 5.2 haha ) nor in Chrome. And I can see other browser projects dropping OS X PPC here sooner rather than later. There are already a good few startups that are OS X Intel only, and it's sorta sad.

Oh, and interesting tidbit, minefield.app is in face, FireFox 4, and it is in face, faster than 3.6, but by no means is it better than just about anything else I have.

I quite like Safari on Windows, to be honest. It installs sanely and doesn't leave pointless background processes permanently running (unlike Chrome) which is a first for Apple as far as I can tell.

Safari sucks, hands down. I'm sorry, I just had to say that. Even Safari 5 is a slow dog. Chrome, although it uses a messy way, does the job.

Of course, there's a certain Firefox that is aiming themselves to also become the multiprocess nastiness. The only good thing with doing that is that I can kill Flash anytime with "pkill -f flash", and maybe some problematic page loading. But that's all - it's cluttery and annoying to see in a process list.

Kllrnohj: XUL is terrifying, and is certainly Mozilla's weakness. It definitely is nice.... for creating addons and such. But other than that, it more or less serves as something to be removed and replaced with a compatible, efficient toolkit. The sad thing is that Mozilla hates that, and even thinks that everyone would use it! (For anything else besides web development, aka as a toolkit) I recall the wxMozilla project, in which the devs asked for help with it (basically, a browser widget control). They didn't get any help, and were pretty much coldly rejected, since there was "competition". Guess where that project went? WebKit, of course! wxWebKit is the new project, and it works nicely. XUL and Mozilla's sillyness? Down the drain - the only thing(s) supporting it are Mozilla apps, and even they are having a hard time staying relevant.

I love Firefox, and I love their awesome addons. But I hate Mozilla's attitude, and their insistence on using their flawed toolkit, XUL.

[/rant]

EDIT: I've just tested out Fennec, and all I can say is: SLOW, HORRIFYINGLY SLOW, MORE HORRIFYING THAN XUL ITSELF.
Interaction is very sluggish, and nothing even renders correctly. Mind you, this is not even on a mobile device - a LAPTOP. 2.2 ish GHz, and they expect this to run on a slower 1.0 GHz mobile device? They even called this abomination a BETA. Beta quality software isn't this kind. If Mozilla thinks that way, they really need to wake up.

And a screenshot for your terrified viewing pleasure:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1016340/PublicPictures/SlowFennec/BadRendering.png

No wonder people aren't really excited about Fennec...

I have used a build of Fennec on my Palm Pre ( super duper hacked by some awesome guy, forget his name ) and it worked better than that. Perhaps your software meant for a phone running on a non-phone OS on non-phone hardware has something do do with your jump to childish conclusions?

Childish conclusions? You think I don't know how to use a mobile browser on any computer?

Fennec 1 is awesome, and if I were able to toss a resistive panel over my laptop screen, I would install it in a heartbeat. Fennec 2 B2? Err... no.

On any computer, it should run fast and render correctly.
Fennec 1 does that:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1016340/PublicPictures/SlowFennec/Fennec1Nice.png

Fennec 2? Not even close.

I had the opposite experience with Fennec 1 and Fennec 2 on phones. Fennec 1 I will admit I could run on my computer well. But putting it on a phone was a pain and an experience in crashing a phone. Fennec 2 is, like I said, the opposite. Perhaps Mozilla is simply taking advantage of things the hardware a phone has that a computer doesn't. It's not like my phone runs on an Intel processor and has an AMD Radeon GPU.

Not sure what a phone has that a laptop doesn't. An accelerometer? Not needed. Touchscreen? Not needed. And the ARM CPU is certainly weak compared to my sucky Intel Celeron M. The GPU is likely a PowerVR, which probably still isn't as good as a sucky Intel GMA 950.

Try a build from here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mobile-trunk/

Safari is fast on Macs, and that's that.
Internet Explorer just plain out sucks.
Firefox is ok, for some people.
Google Chrome is simple, and therefore fast.
I've tried out a couple others, but they just weren't notable.

I like Firefox, but everything is just too "bulky" if you know what I mean. It has extra customization options, and more styles. I don't like how downloading works, I personally *hides* like IE's method better then Firefox.

I use Chrome because there are no toolbars, or annoying extra stuff, but only the tabs and the one bar. It always renders correctly, and speed is great. My only Google problem is sometimes the extensions don't work properly. But this isn't Google's fault, as they are 3rd party.

I like Firefox, but it is my 2nd browser of choice.

Chrome is fast, but if you've ever tested the "Minefield" builds (FF4 trunk), you'd find that it's definitely catching up.

Want to track JS speeds? Look here:
http://arewefastyet.com/

Oh snap, googlev8 is slowest on all of them!

Yeah, your dumb meter is indeed 70...

Read it again. The benchmarks measure SPEED, which means lower is better. Google v8 JS engine is the best, followed by Apple's Nitro JS engine, and then Mozilla's engine. The purple line is the one that will be integrated.

/me facepalms himself so hard he falls out of chair.
Didn't notice >_<
Maybe I should of waited to dumb down myself. Thanks for pointing that out.

By looking *correctly* at the graph, moz JM+TM looks like it's getting there.