Opera user here. Spent a lot of time using firefox but finally got fed up with the number of sites that didn’t render properly because they were built for IE, the memory leaks, and that damn pdf lockup problem. Tried opera again and found it was much better than last time I tried it.
Well, since they killed Netscape they haven’t had any competitors, hence they’ve felt no need to spend money. It’s not like standards compliance or security actually matter :dubious: , it’s all about whether people are straying from the MS enclosure.
As soon as Firefox came along and started getting some attention, all of a sudden IE7 was on the cards, copying all the advances made by other developers over the last few years, and no doubt promising to deliver all those wonderful things we’re always promised.
As much I love Firefox, it has a BIG memory leak. If it’s been up a day or two, with frequent tabbing, it gloms over 100mb of memory. I’ve seen 180 megabytes. This is even after killing all but one tab, so it’s not releasing memory from the tabs like it should be doing.
Mainly Firefox at home (both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux), but occasionally I’ll use Opera too. I"d be using Opera full time if I could drag, drop and edit bookmarks inline instead of having to use a bookmark editor.
At work, I also use Firefox. We have admin rights on our computers, so we can install any program we want, as long as it isn’t warez.
80% visitors to my site use IE. When asked why, most responses were along the lines of “the IT department won’t let me install anything else” or “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Stats show a LOT people are using old versions of IE, too; versions 3, 4 and 5.
As I posted earlier, I’m running Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, but it’s on a Mac so I know from nothing about the Windows leak, other than it’s so famous it must have been addressed in Firefox’s next big thing, 1.5. The beta has been rock solid on my machine, so maybe you could try it.
Mozilla’s forums are a good source for answers to questions, and tracking down and discussing problems.
Before Firefox, my default browser was the Mozilla suite, now going by the name SeaMonkey. I have the relatively up-to-date Mozilla 1.3.1 on my System 9 partition. Being open source, anyone can offer their own builds of any of the browsers, email programs and Composer, the web-page builder.
Mozilla ended its System 9 support with 1.2.1. But WaMCom picked it up and bumped the thing up to 1.3.1. All of these browsers have never caused a problem and many of the extensions — the ones I can’t live without, anyway — work on all of them, including the ancient 1.3.1.
This is an even bigger reason to use Firefox – my mom and dad use Firefox now (dad even uses tabs!) and they love it. Just as simple as MSIE, but you aren’t penalized for mistakes as badly. That is: accidentally visiting a poisoned site doesn’t hurt you as badly. Go get the installer and try it out for a week; you don’t even have to make it your default browser. If you’re not convinced in a week, the uninstall process is painless.
I did try 1.5, but I forget to check if the memory issue was solved. I had to go back to 1.0.7 because the Google toolbar didn’t run on 1.5, but if the memory issue is solved I can go without the toolbar for that. Good idea, thanks!
Another Opera user chiming in here. I’ve been using it since v3.0 and it works great! I also use Firefox as a backup as well as IE for those sites that just plain won’t work with anything else, but only when I absolutely have to!
I used to use Firefox, but I’ve since gone back to IE. Why? Popups. I had the popup blocker installed for Firefox, but the damn things started creeping in eventually. Neither SpySweeper nor Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware program found any malware, but I was getting popups up all the time. So I went back to IE, which now has a built-in popup blocker. I’m getting about 1/3 of the popups I used to get. The only thing I missed from Firefox is that extention that lets you look up words in the dictionary. I used to use that to check my spelling when composing posts. However, I just installed the Google toolbar, which has a spelling checker. The search feature is cool, and there’s an extra layer of popup protection.
I agree with the people who say that Firefox’s only significant advantage is its obscurity. And that advantage is disappearing fast.
Same here. I’ve been using Firefox since whatever its name was before Firebird: at first just for the look-and-feel, but for the past year or so I’ve also been taking advantage of its customizeability. All of my Firefox instances now have several custom keyword shortcuts … which only sucks when I’m using Firefox somewhere else and I try to do a Google search by typing “g <search term>” in the address bar (or when I try to go to my homepage by typing “me” in the address bar).
I keep a copy of IE installed for the one or two work applications that don’t quite work right on anything but IE (like our timecard system).
I’ve never found a need for the Google toolbar in Firefox, between the engines and the custom shortcuts. YMMV.
Yes, I love that extension for unexpected “IE only” sites. But if the IE homepage is set to the app I primarily need to use it for, there’s no advantage to opening it in Firefox and then sending it to IE.
Here’s the Secunia advisory page for IE6, and here’s the one for Firefox 1.*.
Some interesting numbers:
29% of current IE holes remain completely unpatched, vs 13% for Firefox.
Of the vulnerabilities that Secunia calls “Moderately Critical” or worse (eg, level 3 or above), IE6 has 10 with non-existant or partial patches, including an ActiveX overflow vulnerability that’s been completely unpatched and public for two years.
Guess how many Firefox has.
One. And it’s a partial.
Symantec put out the report upon which the 18/8 number is based, and it made a helluva lot of headlines. Unfortunately, they require you to register with them to view it. Anybody got the relevant portions of the text? Thanks.
So I’m the only one using Maxthon? I tried Firefox and loved the tabbed browsing and plug-ins but at work it would eventually hog up all my resources and at home it would take way too long to log into my.yahoo.com. So I looked around for anything else that had tabbed browsing and found Maxthon. It’s based on IE but has many of the Firefox features (tabs, blocks popups and ads, plug-ins, etc). I love it!
OmniWeb (as of the last time I used it) has the capacity to load the current page in any of your other browsers. When I was giving it a trial run, I had it set up to load current page in any of about 5 other browsers. (I was looking for a replacement for iCab, which I was giving up on at the time).
I ended up not going with OmniWeb (much too slow and unresponsive for loading multiple pages in the background which is how I browse the board), but that was one sweet feature.
