Firefox May Already Be Dead (PC World)

I do disagree.

Fast is not all I am looking for, customization and usability are far more important than speed in my opinion. Firefox meets all of my requirements and is to my liking. I have tried Chrome out of curiosity, removed it shortly after installing it. As for using Chrome or a fork in two or three years time, not gonna happen. Wonder if the author will admit being wrong?

 

There no browser that is as multifunctional as firefox though it is slow, closest to firefox is opera .Chrome is the fastest ironically that does not mean it would make firefox instantly useless.Let the kids grow up.

 

Funny thing. I think Opera's king of all the full featured browsers. It's just not extension easy like FF. And I say that's a good thing. All those 3rd party extensions, they're not intensely vetted. If one wants to do anything or almost anything in Opera the answer is out there. The Opera forum is excellent.

Another false reason people prefer FF is: ew Opera is a private company & makes money. FF is better, it's a foundation. Total hogwash. I bet FF makes 10x more money if not 100x more money than Opera.

 

You have to look at FF as an ala carte browser. You ad the features you like to the browser to make it function the way YOU want it. With the proper extensions it can be awesome.

 

When it comes to features, nothing even comes close to Opera. The only way Firefox can compete is by adding extensions. As far as customization is concerned, Firefox is the winner here. There aren't nearly as many Opera widgets out there as Firefox extensions. The major reason why people are sticking to Firefox is because of the flexibility it offers--something it won't have if you take the extensions away.

I think the other reason why people like Firefox (in addition to being a foundation) more is because it is open source. Opera is a closed source project, so there aren't nearly as many helpers for them as for Firefox. Also, Mozilla's marketing was pretty good--Firefox got a lot of publicity when it was launched. Opera has never done this as far as I am concerned, so this is likely another reason.

 

Personally, I can't say I'm a fan of the extensions concept.

The customizability is a plus, of course, but there are prices to pay: hundreds and thousands of third-party code that have undergone minimal quality testing and control, and are not checked for compatibility. Throughout Firefox 1.x and 2.x there have been numerous instances of extensions introducing crashes, memory leaks, and security vulnerabilities. A popular tab extension was, according to its author, written with such little quality control that it became too complex even for himself to check certain parts of the code anymore. And, of course, the more third-party code plugged in, the wider the surface area is for vulnerabilities.

To be fair, a lot of the above problems can be kept in check or eliminated entirely by conscientious installation of extensions. I used to have almost 30 back in the Firefox 1.x days, now I've stripped all but 5, and I make sure I use only those that have a reputation for quality and attentive developers.

 

The assertion that Firefox may already be dead is just stupid, IMHO. This browser is still under heavy development, and a lot of new features and improvements are in the pipeline.

Yes, at the moment Chrome is faster. But FF 3.1 final will be out soon, and its Javascript engine is considerably faster than the one in FF 3.0. The fact that Chrome is faster now is just a snapshot that may be wrong in the near future. Besides, as mentioned in other posts, speed is NOT everything that matters.

 

Having tried both, I can confidently say that this is not the case. TraceMonkey gives Firefox has a ~20-30% improvement in Javascript execution speed, but Chrome's V8 engine is at least twice as fast as Firefox right now.

From what I understand, V8 uses some sort of voodoo to turn Javascript into an equivalent of native machine code instead of interpreting it as-is. Unless Mozilla or Apple announce something new, this feat is going to be replicated only when Opera releases Carakan.

That's true.

I guess what I'm uncomfortable about (among other things) is how Mozilla originally planned to delay TraceMonkey and performance fixes in favor of extra features, and it was Chrome and its blazing-fast performance that made them rethink their priorities for Shiretoko. It just feels like they've lost track of what they set out to do in the first place when they forked the browser code off Seamonkey to create Phoenix, IMO.

 

Well, I've seen benchmarks that show other results.

But anyway - competition is always good. And since the developer edition of Chrome now has an extension API, competition will become even harder in the future.

BTW: I've just tried the native Linux version on my Ubuntu system. It's still a very early version and not yet convincing

 

PC World?.....

What do they know about computers and/or software??...

 

They know more than PCMag, imho. But anyhow, looks like Firefox is not the one ready for a coffin: http://www.pcworld.com/article/161805/ie_8s_poor_reception_not_a_good_sign_for_microsoft.html.

Now that DOESN'T shock me. I've not tried IE8, so I'm not going to make any negative comments about it itself. But I personally think Microsoft tried to "catch up" too late in the game. Maybe usage will skyrocket, but again, imho, it'll only be because it ships with Windows 7.

 

So far, IE8 is doing far better than the FF 3.07 I have on my Ubuntu, I have also tried FF 3.06 on Windows and the results were same, IE 8 is quicker compared to FF even with heavy browsing.

 

Yes, I have to agree. IE8 is visibly faster than Firefox 3.07 in Win. I will say that Firefox x64 on Ubuntu x64 performs better, but for Win, I have to put Firefox last in the speed comparison.

 

IE is faster on a cold boot than FF because it is already partly loaded in the OS before you click the icon to load it. FF will load just as fast on a subsequent session when it has been loaded the second time after a boot up. If IE was a stand alone, I wonder how long it would take to load cold.

 

I meant the rendering and browsing performance overall, I am aware that IE engine is already loaded into the OS.

 

My copy of FF has great rendering and performance. Maybe I don't browse heavily.

 

I wasn't talking about load time, we all know Firefox is pretty slow in that regard, but I was more referring to just general browsing performance in use. When I use Firefox in Win, it just seems sluggish in general, in all regards, and that's with just one extension for mouse gestures installed. There really is no comparison, the others are faster overall. New PC, triple core, 4 gigs ram, plenty of horsepower. Sorry, but it's just Firefox that's lacking IMO. Since I don't use but one or two extensions, I opt for faster browsers instead. I have tried Minefield btw, and it's better, but still no x64 flash for Win, so that's pretty much a no go for now. FF in Linux is another story, it does better there.

 

Are you using Vista? Because if you do, I have to agree that Firefox can sometimes be sluggish. When used in XP, however, it's a different story. I use 11 extensions, and the browsing performance is just fine. It's even better with the latest beta.

 

Yes, Vista x64 here. It IS much better in Linux, for example Ubuntu x64 with Firefox x64 and flash x64 alpha. But then again, it should be due to x64. Minefield is better in Win also.

 

Rendering as opposed to IE8?

 

I haven't installed v8 yet. I still have v7.

 

Of check it out with IE8 and report back if possible.

 

It doesn't look too dead to me!!...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7963302.stm

Could that be wishful thinking??...

 

I'm holding out installing IE8 as long as I can. I don't want to be a volunteer bug finder.

 

As I said previously, I installed IE8, but left the authorities set to ? (Ask)