The Anti-Firefox Thread.
 

We have a ton of threads about FF in here and I used to be a major proponent of the Browser and still admire it for it's addons and functionality. However, I got extremely sick of it eating 60-120MB of RAM at all times. I mean lots of games dont' even use that much! I also hated opening linked attachments in vB forums as it would force to dl it manually and open it in Irfanview which was a pain. Sites are learning how to beat FF's popup blocker now, namely xdccspy. Javascript popups would take as long as 20 sec to load on a 1.8Ghz system. The browser is just not fast enough for me.


I cant' use "naked" IE for the same reasons I started using FF in the first place; It has more holes than swiss cheese. I dont' like the way Opera looks and feels at all. I tried Avant, which is an IE shell with numerous improvements over IE but it was crash-happy and still didn't have all I wanted. Then I tried SlimBrowser. It was everything Avant was and much more, plus it's much more stable. As I write this SBrowser is eating 28MB with 10 tabs open. FF would be eating about 80-120 with this many windows open and after closing those windows to one it still would hold aabout 60MB..



If you still like FF, great. Feature wise, I still think it's a great browser. I'm just sharing why I left the fold and wanted to make this thread a place for ppl who chose "none of the above" to have their say as to why they use the browser they choose.

I'm still a Firefox fanboy, but as long as people are moving away from IE on Windows, I'm happy, for two reasons; (a) fewer people becoming spam zombies, and (b) a reduction in browser monoculture, which should increase standards-compliant website design.

Yeah - my comp is WAY slower with Firefox and it does totally eat ram. I like it though - so I just ordered another 512mb. I will be up to 1gb and that should take care of THAT!

Right now I have 4 FF windows open, 99,200k memory useage... I've never crashed this box, but have 2 gig of ram... I'll look at slimbrowser...

*listens to the chirping crickets* ;)

Your points are valid but it's free software. I find it hard to complain about anything given away with no strings attached.

I'm with you on that one. I've stopped using firefox as of last night.

It's got a great feature set, but the actual functionality IS buggy and lacking. What really did FireFox in with me was the fact that I rarely get a completed file download. 9 times out of 10, the file will simply stop downloading, finish but be corrupt or unreadable, or simply not start downloading at all. And no, it's not the files or the server I'm pinging, as I can open up IE and nab the exact same files with no problems.

Too bad, as it does have an excellent feature set. But as rubicon states, it is free software, and in this world, you get what you pay for.

I agree with everything said. Firefox is a good looking browser, but some webpages simply don't load right with it. Internet Explorer is a target for adware creators because Microsoft made it. IE itself isn't a bad program. I love it. The only bad part is even after taking huge precausionary measures to prevent adware, spyware, and viruses, I still get them with IE. I wish a company would make a browser as functional and good-looking as IE. My IE looks better than Firefox if I set it right.

-Lasereth

I agree somewhat with you. I mean, the Mozilla devs do make a good free product and they should be recognized for giving something for users to have as an alternative to naked IE. But the point of being an advanced user, IMO, is to get the best stable apps that don't eat tons of resources. No browser should use this much RAM unless you're viewing a 100 jpgs in a thread on the Titty Board.


Really cool things about slimbrowser:

It has the google toolbar like ff but it does one better: you can very easily create your own search engine plugins. I have a plugin for TFP's Search, one for [H] forums, one for the password thing (the mk.php thing) from Links Board, and I made one for IRCspy to replace the one from Mycroft in Firefox. I can search forums from any page and save a couple clicks (and page loads) for those forums in the process. Granted you can do this with a jscript bookmarklet but this is much easier to do.


Close a window or group by accident? go to Edit and Undo Last Close or undo last close all.


It has a little FTP client for uploads to your site with it's own little UI.


You can restore the last group of tabs that was closed if you had to quickly close your browser for whatever reason-It doesn't have to be bookmarked or from a crash like FF.

It supports Skins.

You can add trusted popups easily by Recover Popup in the toolbar and add it with a whitelist in a single click instead of having to go into options like in FF.

A built-in script pad that can edit HTML, Jscript, VBscript, or plain text for notes on the sidebar. You can copy and manipulate etext without having to switch to notepad and have the page you're copying right there.




You can hide windows that are open so your gf or roommates can't see a tab you want hidden if they get on your PC.

You can select Proxies without using Proxy Switch Toolbar like in FF.


These are just a few things I like most about this browser. There are much much more and it has almost everything FF does, and definitely everything important.



I also would would like to hear from others who choose the alternative to the alternative as well. I know being "anti-firefox" isn't a popular thing these days.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I take all the correct precautionary measures as well, but I'm still getting the occasional crap downloaded to my machine without my being warned. suckage!

Microsoft tied the browser to the operating system, which makes it much easier for a malware writer to dump the spyware onto your system. Microsoft (historically) has always chosen features over security when a choice had to be made. They say that they are changing their philosophy, but we'll see. For that, I consider IE to be a bad program.

BTW, I get zero spyware on my Win box, with Firefox.

okay, holo... i just downloaded slimbrowser, and so far it's fine, but i'm having smart tabbrowser extensions withdrawal and i'm wondering if there's any way to import your firefox bookmarks to slimbrowser... it imported my ie bookmarks automatically, but i've made signifigant changes to my bookmarks since i migrated from ie to firefox.

i'm really digging the slimbrowser, holo, even with 768 mb ram firefox was slowing me down, especially if i was installing or compiling anything. i'm keeping firefox and ie, if only for pages that won't load in one or the other, but i'm definitely using slimbrowser. thanks for the tip

I'm going to sit on the fence about this and just say whats on my mind. It isnt a big deal after all.

Slimbrowser is just a wrapper for the main IE object so whatever IE doesnt support in the way of w3c standards, slimbrowser isnt going to support either. For example, after just 30 seconds of using slimbrowser i found it doesnt support the "border-spacing" standard CSS property just like IE. Chances are, slimbrowser probably has any vulnerabilities that IE has too. I guess time will tell. I wont be using this post as a soap box for my opinions of MS's lazy and bratish approach web standards.

Firefox has only been in development for about 2 years, its already matured enough to be compared with IE and its likely going to lose all of the negative issues that you nice people are talking about in future versions. Its only on version 0.9.x at the moment after all. What i'm saying is, dont lock it out of your minds totally just because you're having trouble with the current version.

As firefox stands at the moment in its current version, yes i believe it has a few faults and yes it needs a smaller memory footprint and yes the download manager is a bit pointless. However, i'm sticking with it because it sticks to the standards and is the best browser for my personal needs.

To add to my previous comment, I am going to stick with FF and hope that it gets better on keeping memory clean / use of system resources. The neato thing about it is that you / we are not the only ones who see these types of problems. In this case, something can be done about it.

If enough people think FF is bloatware or a resource hog, then the open source comunity has the chance to respond. That is a pretty cool feeling. It is too bad our elected officials are not "open source". . .

I dunno why your Firefox is taking up so much resources... I have 4 windows up, one with 6 tabs. It's only using about 32 megs. Anyways, it's much better than IE, so it's all good.

Just go to Favorites-Import and it has a popup prompting you for your Bookmarks.html file that you should find in your Firefox Aplication Data under Docs and Settings.

@Welshbyte: You are right about SB being a wrapper,just as Avant is...however it gives you at least 90% of the functionality of FF as far as extensions and popup blocking plus it has the ability to block banners, Flash, and easily disable Active X unlike IE. It's like IE Done Right IMO. I really don't care about standards. I mean I am keeping FF on my box in case something really looks screwy in IE but I usually find the reverse to be true since IE is so ubiquitous.


IE has always been faster than FF. Go to the Titty Board and open one of those big ass jpg threads and try super fast scrolling with FF. It anemically jerks about and trudges rather slowly in the direction you point it. IE screams thru it like it's nothing. When I minimize SB it drops RAM usage right down to 3MB even with 13 tabs open. FF starts up eating 45+ MB and as soon as you start opening tabs it just keeps chowing down on RAM. You close all but one tab in FF and it holds the 60MB and doesn't let go. Right now SB is eating 15 MB typing this post with 12 other tabs in use. It has several security options IE doesn't have or does have but are difficult to initialize.


Don't get me wrong, I called this thread Anti-Firefox as a critique more than a slam. I'll keep FF on my PC and try new updates to see if they've fixed things, and I may need Magpie occasionally which at present SB doesn't have something comparable. I'm glad ppl gave SB a try, but I still would like to hear from ppl who use another browser as well, and the resource usage of those browsers.

This slimbrowser program sure does look like Maxthon (formally MyIE2) hell even the homepage looks like myie's former homepage...or perhaps its vice versa...in any case Ive been using Maxthon for quite a while, and it is better then firefox imo. Tabbed browsing in good stuffs.

http://www.maxthon.com/en/index.htm

Hmm...this slimbrowser is only available in windows, so I guess I won't be trying that anytime soon.

Yea I am pissed off at firefox memory usage as well. I have a gig of ram in my box and for most everything it is fine but firefox kills it. Especially when it comes to having pictures open it will grow to over 300mb of memory usage. When it gets high it can then not refresh the current page like it will just freeze the image but when you scroll links and some things come back, kinda hard to explain unless you have seen it.

Anyways I do not have much hope for it to be fixed. I used to use Mozilla, the standealone, before firefox came out and I experienced the same things. I will never go back to IE as I loved the tabbed browsing mouse gestures, etc but I am not at all happy with firefox.

Memory is a problem for the program, just glad I got 1 gig.

With all the features, I will take that problem.

FireFox is a good backup for me, but Opera 7.5 wins every time for me on features, speed, looks, and basically everything else. IE has been ripped out but is still available on the win2k crashbox if some evil site or webmaster makes me use that POS.

I don't see the memory problem. I had 3 windows and a combined 10 tabs open, with content rich sites like foxnews loaded, and it only used 50 megs. Where do you guys get "60-120 mb at all times?"

FF ain't perfect, but it's pretty damn close.

First of all, this is a really interesting thread.

One of things people should be aware of when discussing Firefox and its memory usage is that is has to "load" a lot of the functionality each time it runs. IE, being part of the OS, already relies on some of the code that is preloaded each time Windows starts.

In other words, the reason IE uses less memory is that a lot of it is already used in background services (like services.exe) etc. This is another reason IE loads so much quicker than FF.

This is what I've heard from those more technically familiar with the Win32 environment than me.

I stopped using FF, as I simply didn't like the download manager, and I went back to Opera. I'm amazed no one here has mentioned it yet. But Opera has its problems too, just like FF.

I'll check out this slimbrowser. Thanks for the suggestion.


Mr Mephisto

As with a lot of software, I think the existence (or lack thereof) of problem with Firefox, is system dependant. Not that those who have problems with FF don't have fine systems. It's just that for whatever reason, there are some programs that work great on some systems and blow on others. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones where FF is concerned. I've had no problems with it; resources or otherwise.

As an example, I once had a small application that added the day and date to the clock in the system tray. I believe I was running Win98 at the time. Anyway, I had used the program forever, with no problems, but when I gave a copy to a buddy of mine (also running Win98), it completely screwed his system.

At any rate, having tried a number of browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Slimbrowser, Opera, IE, FF, and probably a couple of others) I always recommend FF. For me, it is simply the best browser out there and it's still only in development.

In light of the criticisms in this thread, I would say give FF a try and if you do have problems, well, try something else. I don't believe, however, that everyone will experience the same problems discussed here.

I'm wondering what's different with my firefox program vs yours in regards to RAM usage. As an experiment I opened 30 tabs and chatzilla but i'm only at 100K memory used, and my system hasn't slowed in the least. I'm running 2.5 Ghz, 512 RAM. The tabbar is so crowded I can only see icons :P
Edit: 100 tabs = 175K

Personally I'm having a lot of fun with firefox, no problems except that occasionally when I open a movie link it'll open it as Html.

two small things that ensure that FF is relegated to backup for me are the clunkier download manager that is still falling short compared to Opera - no desire to use a 3rd party program for that now again - and the clunky mouse gestures. I could spend more time with the gestures extensions and this may be one reason but so far I have yet to see them work exactly like the default 'out of the box' Opera settings that are indispensable to me for any browsing.
but that is just my opinion, if people are willing to at least give the more viable (IMO) Presto and Gecko based options a solid try before sticking with IE then I have no problem with that. Never have been a diehard fanatic for browsers; that always has seemed pointless to me.

Not a fan of Foxfire, but i do like Thunderbird for my mail. Thanks for the link to slimbrower, i'm going to check it out now.

I absolutely love Firefox.. However, I am generally in Linux and it doesn't seem that bad on my memory with that client, and in windows, I typically am only browsing the web if I have it open so I am not hurting for memory..

although, for the laptop, this might be a good switch, since the ram is a huge issue there (max 386mb... so ram is precious...my precious).. thanks for the link :)

and i agree with the previous post about any move away from the current big dog is a good idea in my opinion. Having everyone using one browser causes some web pages to target that one and then the other 10% that use something different just get screwed..

make webpages Lynx friendly!! *grin*

Firefox ate my ram too so I use opera 27 pages open 80 meg ram used.

i dont know where you guys get your numbers but i just opened 35 tabs with 7 extensions installed and the my max memory used was 56mb. i love firefox!

Firefox is great for me... and as far as memory usage goes... Firefox isn't eating up much RAM considering I've got the NFL.com Gamecenter, this page, another forum, and a class website open. My typical RAM usage from FF runs about 30-40mb, and for all the functionality and the fact that it doesn't have portions preloaded in the OS, that's pretty damn good. I'll take it any day over IE or any of its skins.

Firefox and Opera have the same issues for me. I can't acess my online classes, I can't look at java, flash, streaming video or any of the stuff I can look at with IE. With IE I don't have to think about it, I don't have to configure plugins and I don't have to download an app everytime I want to watch a video.

Furthermore, neither Opera or Firefox load page layouts the same as IE. They have their own way of interpereting the HTML (or whatever) which is not neccesarily better than IE.

Firefox and Mozilla are only browsing companions for me. They are only useful when I know I'll be looking at dangerous content. In their current state they cannot replace IE.

I removed IE once... and I had to reinstall it. There's just too much things those other browsers won't load.

You mean the way it is supposed to look? IE is a good excuse for sloppy html programmers. M$ have decided (once again) to create their own standard. Unfortunately, in this case, one already existed :(

people saying they are not seeing the large ram usage, keep FF open for an entire day of browsing. You probly are not browsing enough to see the usage climb.

FF memory usage should be fixable, it appears to be they are not freeing memory. This is also probly why it crashes for me alot. Right now I have about 13 tabs open and Im using 87mb ram and 152mb vm.