Why is Firefox so much faster than IE???

Hey guys,

I had been running IE 6.0 for years and even upgraded to IE7 Beta 2. Then, by accident, I came across Firefox. I love Windows and the Internet Explorer had always worked beautifully, but I was STUNNED at how much faster Firefox is. I mean, not just a little bit. Night and day. And then there's even an what they call "extension" to make it even faster.

I notice it most with ebay. When I design listings and go back and forth when I need to edit something, IE would just drag its feet. With Firefox, it's virtually instantaneous! Maybe I need to tweak IE to make it faster. But then why should I? Firefox comes like this "right out of the box ".

 

Hmm...Interesting...I have an IBM Thinkpad T43. Fairly new. P M 750 1.86GHz, which is the equivalent of a P4 2.5GHz. Do these facts make any difference? By the way, would you happen to know how to "save a session" in FF? I mean when I shut down Windows, I'd like all the open tabs (11 at the moment) to come back. It does that when I make it crash, but I'd like a cleaner way! Thanks!

 

If you think Firefox is fast, have a look at Opera!

http://www.opera.com/

I am firmly of the belief that Opera is the best browser, if all you want is the fastest rendering of standards compliant websites.

However, there are still those site that rely on IE to render correctly or use IE only functionality, so you still have to go back to IE occasionally.

Saying all that, what do I use most of the time: Firefox! Why? The extensions.
They let me customise the broswer the way I want it. It can be as simple or as complicated as I like. The options I use are my choice, not that of some faceless corporate entity.

And with the IE tab extension I can get good performance (without it being the best) and render IE only pages correctly when I need to.

So Opera and Firefox are both good options. I just pity the poor 80% of users who still put up with IE.

 

Yea, I know what you mean. Opera is awesome, too, but using two different ones are good enough for me for now. I also looked at Netscape, but didn't like it that much.

I do run Opera Mini HiRes on my Treo 650, though, and it blows every other browser away. Amazingly fast even in the high resolution mode.

 

Opera running with Firefox's "Web Developer ", "HTML Validator" and "IE Tab" extensions and I'd be a very happy chappy.

Then all I'd need to do is get everyone else to use Opera and I wouldn't have to write all the hacks to get things to appear the way they should in IE

 

Crunch Dude, there are two extensions for Firefox that allow you to save your sessions: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2324/ is the first one that came up. To find the other, go to addons.mozilla.org and search for the extension named session saver.

Welcome to the Firefox family.

As far as the Fasterfox extension (which is what I think you were referring to by the extension that makes it all faster), your mileage may vary. I tried a few of those hacks before that extension came out and didn't notice anything. The only thing I've found that makes your internet experience go faster is more CPUs and much more so, a wider pipeline. I've found I curse a lot less since I've switched from dial-up.

 

Because it is the ALPHA BROWSER!


Just kidding around, honest, or maybe the devil made me say it, or it could be my often uncontrollable sense of humor!