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I have been trying lots of internet browsers lately. I had IE, but after hearing some woeful things about it I thought it was time to switch. Safari didn't do it for me, so I downloaded Firefox.
I like Firefox; I think it's better than IE for lots of reasons. I noticed that it’s significantly slower for some reason though, and it is getting kind of bothersome. Is Firefox generally slow for everyone, or is it something on my end? Any help here is appreciated.
it uses a different rendering engine, so there will be differences in performance in different areas. (that is, javascript and images will be different in their differences between browsers from each other)
You can try to gauge whether you're imagining this delay by using a site like Stopwatch (make sure you don't have anything cached?) or you can just keep trying browsers. A lot of people say Opera is really fast, and it has many of the same features firefox does.
When I tried that just now, with a random link (the link to the wikipedia article on randomness! Randomness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) I got the following numbers:
firefox3: 1.875s
IE 5.2: 6.416s
Safari 3: 3.883s
Opera 9: 1.567s
IE6 (in x11): 3.308s
But I'm positive if you chose another webpage, maybe one with a lot of javascript, or one with a lot of images, and it also would depend on what kind of images, those numbers would change. There might be a page where IE 5.2 wins, but I hope not because it's old and broken.
There's also Google's Chrome browser if you want to give it a try :p
I prefer Firefox myself though - I don't really notice any difference in speed between firefox and IE at work (the only place where I use IE and can make a comparison) :p
I notice a definite difference in rendering time between Chrome and all other browsers except maybe the new Opera, that's pretty blazingly fast. Chrome beats all other browsers in its Javascript engine speed too. Though I guess I'm not using Chrome technically, I use Chromium sometimes but mostly Iron now. :p
As for Firefox being slower than other browsers, it does have a large memory footprint but I've never noticed it to be slower than IE before.
*checks out Iron*
It's Chrome for the tinfoil hat crowd! :p
Get the addon Faster Fox for Firefox.
chrome lacks adblocking and some other features, isn't it?
There are ways to get ad blocking functionality into Chrome now, I believe. I have a feeling they're still hack-jobs but I tried a few and they seemed to work ok.
I've been using it for the first time since that announcement that the security on Internet Explorer went down. BTW is it safe to use IE again?