Firefox sucks.

[Charlie]

Well, I already pretty much knew this, but I figured I'd at least confirm it.

I've been an IE guy mostly ever since netscape decided to crap out on Version 4, they fubared it pretty well, and I switched over to IE, never really looking back.

I run a pretty standard bread & butter setup, IE6.0 SP2, updated, I run spybot every couple of weeks, never finds anything save for cookies. Nothing fancy. Coming from a mostly enterprise environment, firefox is a dirty word, so I don't play with it too much. I was building some web pages this past week, and for the sake of argument, I installed firefox on this box, just to see how they'd render. For shits & giggles, I decided to use FF exclusively. Seeing as a lot of you guys are gay for this, I figured I'd see what all the hype was about.

You all must be fucking smoking pot. I'm really curious as to what tanked up versions of IE you kids are running, but there is no way in hell that FF is faster than a standard install of IE 6.0sp2.

Rendering pages? FF chokes on it. The majority of sites I hit are PHP based forums, and FF is noticeably slower, and manages to hack up the page design on all of them. Standard news sites it doesn't seem to do much on either.

Bear in mind, this is a standard install, barebones. I didn't import any IE settings, and I haven't changed anything. No tweaks, no "fasterfox", nothing. Fresh out of the box.

2 days on this, and I'm less than impressed. It's definetly slower on anything scripted, and for shits and giggles, I wanted to see what it would do on an SAP CRM web interface.

HA!

I didn't expect much there, and it sure didn't deliver much.

Anyways, day three. I go to visit another PHP based forum, and BAM. Error message. okay. "send" to msft. Done. Go to reopen FF, hello netscape error message and "send" screen. Okay, done. Dies, again.

Okay, reopen, dies. default profile is corrupted. That's interesting.

Uninstall, clean out the registry, redownload FF (using IE6 which has been on this comp for 3 years with XP, no errors) Loads up, installs fine. Fine, play around a little longer, go to Gmail. Error, dead. Okay, close, reopen. Oh, goody, Netscape error help again, send. Dead. Profile toasted again.

Verdict? Slow, can't handle scripting, can't handle enterprise apps, buggy.

It's a kiddie browser. Stick with IE and stay away from Warez sites.

-Charlie

[nickmp0wer]

what version of firefox are you using? I just tried IE vs. firefox for this site and firefox seems to have the edge. Plus its so customizable. i dont even have forward or back buttons

[AndrewBird]

Is your computer running hyper threading? FF has a problem with hyperthreading, but there is a fix on eir website. Eurospeed was having the same problem but now has no trouble at all.

FF can be a good browser. I'm the type that doesn't like a lot of crap and special features, so I do like IE. The only reason I am runnin FF is because of tabs. But, once the new IE comes out, which is suposed to have tabs, I'm switching back.

[nickmp0wer]

the mouse things are just so great. I can go through the forums and use the scroll wheel to click on all the threads i want to look at. then they will all be opened in tabs for me. then just middle click on the tab to close it. also just click and hold the right mouse button and tap the left to go back and do the reverse for forward.

[Bavarian3]

Firefox hates you... lubs me.

[mspiegle]

If I were using windows, I would use IE. No question about it. I however use linux almost full-time (even on my personal laptop), so firefox is my best bet (I could run IE through emulation, but it isn't quite as fast).

In a default install of firefox, it doesn't render pages right-away. There is actually a set delay that firefox waits before it renders a page (after recieving the HTML data). I'm not sure what the reason is for the delay, but there is a configuration value you can add which will eliminate the delay. Also, you can bump up the number of concurrent GET requests sent in a packet to speed things up more.

The ONLY time I use windows is at work because our corporate infrastructure is built on windows and we use exchange. So, the extent of my windows usage is a windows box that sits under my desk with no keyboard/mouse/monitor. I remote-desktop into the box from my linux workstation just to use microsoft exchange. As far as all of your options on linux, firefox is probably the best web browser. The only one that comes close is opera because it seems to handle transparency better - but you have to pay for it.

[MR 325]

I've been using Firefox for 6 months or more and I love it

[Jon325i]

My dad has a Compaq laptop with XP Home on it (system is less than a year old). He read about Firefox in the newspaper and decided to install it since 'it was free...what a deal' (his words....exactly). Well, within a weeks' time his system is running so slow and doing a piss-poor job of everything in general he gives me a earfull about how ticked off he is with his laptop. I tried to make some sense of it....trying this & that. Made little progress there. Wound up saving whatever he wanted to a CD and reformatted his C drive then reinstalling everything back to day one when he bought it. Now, my old man just curses FF.

Jon

[hamann318is]

It's time for a reverse perspective.

I had Firefox on my Linux install and loved it. It's pretty much the only serious browser for Linux. I bought the Powerbook and installed Firefox as that was what I was used to. I never gave Safari a chance. Slowly, I came to use Safari more and more. Safari is less bloated and has tabs. It also seems faster to me. I'm sure other Mac guys will chime in, but my choice on a Mac would have to be Safari.

[Dave]

I took the Pepsi challenge. I installed Firefox @ home and on my PC at work. My observations:

Rendering - slower on Firefox

Number of sites that just won;t open: Firefox - I;ve found a dozen already, including Turner Motorsport - IE - none.

Drop down menu that disappears immediately requiring an extra click - only on Firefox.

Stupid scrolling that gets stuck - only on Firefox.

Back to IE for me.

[Jand3rson]

I love FireFox. I'm using an application with it called FireTune, it's a program that goes through and tweaks FF to all of it's optimal settings, by just selecting a few options when it starts. It's lightning fast for me, and I love the tabs, as well as the bookmarks toolbar, mine is full. The only issue that I've had with FF so far is that when someone posts a link to a streaming video in .wmv format, the video doesn't play for me. But if that's the only problem I have, so be it. Most of those sites are filled with spyware, anyway. I've completely removed IE from my system altogether, and until IE7 comes out with tabs, and I really get a chance to try it out, I'm sticking with FF. I'll never go back.

[e30sd]

im waiting for google to come out with a browser...

[A_325i]

Ff>all

[James Crivellone]

I stand by the fact that IE6 is crap, for 99% of the browsing that I do, Firefox is simply better.

However speed wise Firefox has slowed down a tad in later releases.

I currently run Firefox 1.5 Beta 2, and Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 1 and both serve my needs, I use IE for all my msft related items (sharepoint, crm, great plains etc) and everything else I use Firefox.

And no offense Charlie, but if you are having that many issues with Firefox you are clearly suffering from another issue that is simply hampering Firefox itself.

And firefox sucks because it can't work with Enterprise apps? Excuse me but I don't recall 100% of the population using enterprise apps.

As said, I use both, and Firefox will be my primary until Internet Explorer is better, and at this point IE has nothing on Firefox except for ActiveX Compatibility, and Shitty coding support.

Internet Explorer 7 is nice, really nice, its alot faster, works with everything, and does not fail. However Firefox can do the same thing, and is still a tad faster (1.5 at least)

my 2cents.

[Jand3rson]

Seriously, adding a program such as FireTune or FasterFox can make all the difference.