Firefox 4 vs. Internet Explorer 9 - Head on!

Hello,

Fanboys worldwide, unite! I am gonna kick up the fire, ready your scythes. For I have written a long, objective comparison between Firefox 4 beta and Internet Explorer 9 beta, including categories like availability, portability, installation, looks, speed, responsiveness, memory usage, hardware acceleration, W3C compliance, Acid3 test, HTML5, Flash, addons, tab management, search, and more. Do not read if you love your browser more than your mother.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/comparison-firefox-4-vs-ie9.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

Whilst I generally agree and like this review, there are some parts I object to.

Firstly - Hardware Acceleration. In this section you have done nothing other than replicate the "Installation" section, you're simply telling us what platforms they both run on. If this section was truly about which methods of acceleration were the best, it is a fact that the winner is IE9, due to full hardware acceleration.

Secondly - Memory usage. Both browsers start at more or less the same usage dependant on system, but Firefox still has memory leaks after all these years. I downloaded the zipped version of minefield 64 for windows, extracted it, executed it with task manager open and did nothing whatsoever. The memory usage you will notice climbing after about 10 seconds by at least 10mb, 20 seconds later, another 10mb. Leave it for 10minutes and come back, on my system, it was at 130mb. IE should win this.
edit: Also due to the fact IE has isolated tab processes which is known to increase memory, yet still competes with memory usage on a browser that doesn't isolate tab processes.

Thidly - WC3 compliance. This in my opinion should be a tie. Both Firefox and the IE team purposely left out a few outdated "technologies" unlike Opera/Chrome. These have been under debate for some time whether they should be removed from Acid3. More info here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/...latform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

Fourth - Tab management. IE9 has both tab grouping and tab overview. For example when you're reading wilders and see an interesting link, you open it in a new tab and you'll see how IE groups them together with a specific colour.

In IE8 there is a "tab overview" function. The icon looks near enough the exact same as firefox's icon, and shows you thumbnails of all the tabs. Firefox took this idea and expanded upon it with "tab candy". But this feature is still in IE9, they have simply removed the button. At the time of writing this I cannot recall the keyboard shortcut for accessing it. Again in my opinion, another tie.
edit: I've been informed that the shortcut is Ctrl+Q but you need the quick tabs option enabled - Thanks to forum member Defcon!

 

As I will be using them both with a slight emphasis on FF, any and all improvements in each are welcome. Neither have something that will make me chose to use one or the other exclusively

 

Compact toolbar in Firefox 4:

 

Just a note towards "full hardware acceleration" with IE9 and Firefox 4.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/09/full_hardware_a.html

http://www.conceivablytech.com/2702...itches-about-firefox-4-hardware-acceleration/

 

A better comparative:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-9/compare?T1=tab2

 

http://speely.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/firefox-4beta-is-horrible/

 

Ahh, how I love when the posts start coming that link to a rant blog or single opinion At least you didn't have the nerve to offer it as "proof" of anything, you get brownie points for not doing that.

 

As you do on the other browser thread , you go smear your opinion with charming regularity from time to time, no proof needed for you. Its all about single opinion, ain't it. Anyways not my browser, not my thread, I am outta here.

 

At this point it's uncertain (at least to me) whether Firefox 4 will support GPU acceleration on older integrated Intel cards. A bunch of related bugs have been marked as fixed lately, but about:support in Firefox 4 consistently tells me that Direct2D, DirectWrite, and GPU accelerated windows are disabled. No such problem with IE9 and Chrome 7.

I'm not sure if it's a related issue or a separate problem entirely, but Firefox 4 has a MASSIVE performance regression on my machine. Chrome with a dirty profile, 2 HD YouTube videos playing in other tabs, and a bunch of extensions that inject scripts into webpages (and hence cause slowdowns) is almost twice as fast as Minefield with a completely fresh profile, at least according to Peacekeeper.



Note that in the screenshot above, the Firefox button is not aligned with the top edge of the window. This seems to happen when you use custom visual styles in Windows; another bug that has not been marked as a stable blocker AFAIK. The irony is that Mozilla brags how Opera stole the app button idea from them, but Opera got it done right months ago while Mozilla is still trying to reproduce and triage the issue.

The biggest issue for me right now is that I've more or less lost faith in Mozilla's vision and ability to build a good browser and compete with Microsoft/Google, for various small reasons accumulated over time that I won't bother to list here. Fx4 seems set to be an excellent browser IF Mozilla manages to accomplish everything they promised and iron out major bugs, which I doubt. Not to mention that it's anyone's guess how far the competition would have pulled ahead by the time Fx4 is ready for public consumption, especially given Mozilla's typical inability to meet their own deadlines.

 

Tab thumbnails in IE9 shortcut is Ctrl-Q but you have to enable 'Quick Tabs' in tab options first, its off by default.

FF4 is unusable IMO for anyone using Firefox. Extensions don't work, its not noticeably faster and offers nothing beyond some fancy developer features and the Panaroma/Sync support which doesn't work well enough for me to use it.

IE9 is a very pleasant surprise and looks like its very well thought out in its UI, the defaults and the performance. The combined address/search bar is fantastic and the whole browser is snappy.

 

!!!
Thank you!

 

I share pretty much the same objections pointed out by elapsed.

Another thing: Mrkvonic didn't talk about the reliability features in IE 9 Beta which make it more robust than Firefox.

Also, Mrkvonic may have forgot about an important feature that Microsoft didn't release with IE 9 Beta 1: a proper spellchecker. I'm a bit surprised that he didn't complain about this. Anyways, I hope to see a proper spellchecker in IE 9 Beta 2 or Final version.

For those wanting a comparative with Internet Explorer 9 Beta, Firefox 4 Beta and Chrome 6, here is a much better Microsoft one.

 

Mrk, I'm interested in what you think of my opinions, good/bad/terrible etc ^^

 

I cannot confirm. I'm using beta7 right now and it runs very well.

I cannot confirm. I recommend to install the Add-On Compatibility Reporter which helps to selectively enable/disable extensions. Many of my extensions work even if they are still marked as incompatible.

Not true. It's significantly faster than FF 3.6 here. This is also confirmed on http://arewefastyet.com/?machine=4 . Look at the violet line which represents the TraceMonkey JIT + JaegerMonkey JIT - the difference to Safari and Chrome has become very small.

 

Firefox in PcLinuxOS is extremely slow. In fact you could
say it's the pits. I really don't think Version 4 will be any better.
It's probably becoming like Adobe. Bloated to death.

 

Becoming? It has been for a long time. I was hoping they'd clean out some of the bloat and sluggishness in v4. Will wait and see when the final comes out. The beta hasn't particularly impressed me so far, although I do like it.