For the past few months, I have not been happy with her
performance of any of the web-browsers I’ve tried. As more and more sites become
Flash, and JavaScript oriented – ala Web 2.0 – the browsers have to adapt to
run those at optimum performance.
Firefox
If I have Firefox running for 12 hours with 5-10 tabs open, that contain HTML webpages with Flash banners, its memory footprint grows to over 250MB. This is unacceptable. My computer is not the newest and fastest, but the performance I get from Firefox 2 is terrible. After Firefox has been running for a while, it refuses to play online video clips for more than 5 seconds before stopping their play. On those occasions I’m forced to load up those pages in Safari.
Safari
The reason I switched to the newly released version of Safari 3.01 was because of its performance benchmarks that were touted all over the internet. Sure, it’s fast enough at loading pages and handles all the Flash/Javascript sites with ease, but its interface is horrible and not very customizable – at least for the Windows version. Speaking of Windows, it uses the settings from the IE preferences window – such as the proxy and security settings… therefore at start-up, it takes about 30 seconds to a minute to detect those settings and finally bring up the webpage. Some of Microsoft’s websites don’t support Safari, so ultimately I have to load up some of the pages in IE.
Internet Explorer
My Ideal BrowserWell, not much to say here… the lack of tabs in IE 6 is the ultimate killer. I can’t switch to IE 7 because I keep to be able to test the websites I create thoroughly on IE 6… since it’s still the most used/installed browser.
I like to customize my interface, and with Safari, I cannot.
I use Firefox extensions like Tab Mix Plus – with Session Manger, Colorful tabs, and Mouse Gestures. They are extremely continent. Also changing the theme once in a while feels good. I don’t want the default brushed metal look all the time.
Microsoft has made more of their websites compatable with Firefox. This is good.
Firefox has an extension called Firebug... It's a God send for any web developer.
Firefox handles Bookmarks/Favourites very elegantly. I love the keyword feature for the bookmarks.
One last thing - Google Search I can type it into the address bar, or I can type it into the Google Search bar in Firefox. Safari and IE simply don't.
With respect to performance, Safari is ahead of the pack by leaps and bounds. But the above shortfalls are stopping me from completely switching over.
So until Firefox 3 comes out of beta, are there any other browsers that fit the above criteria that I can try?
Sat, 04/05/2008 - 07:42 Hello my friends, I do understand what you are complaining about... Safari isn't really running natural on Windows and it has a heavy interface the last time I checked. It seems clumsy to me, if you understand what I'm trying to express. :) On a mac though, it has the fastest GUI, the best loading times (if you ask me) and most importantly, the natural speed of OS X. This is unique. I love Firefox 2 on Windows, it's the best we can get at the moment, or am I missing a better application for daily surfing?
Sat, 04/05/2008 - 07:41 Hello my friends, I do understand what you are complaining about... Safari isn't really running natural on Windows and it has a heavy interface the last time I checked. It seems clumsy to me, if you understand what I'm trying to express. :) On a mac though, it has the fastest GUI, the best loading times (if you ask me) and most importantly, the natural speed of OS X. This is unique. I love Firefox 2 on Windows, it's the best we can get at the moment, or am I missing a better application for daily surfing?