Everyone seems to love Firefox. Everyone, that is, except for this man...

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

firefox sucks and thats that...

Seconded

People use it just so they can say they are different

[philip.j.fry]

Originally Posted by gary_580

Seconded

People use it just so they can say they are different

I use Lynx for that

IE isn't a choice for me but back in the days of IE vs Netscape, I went with IE because it was a good quick and easy to use browser. Now that I'm officially a geek/techie I can see many problems with IE, the biggest in my opinion being a disregard for hard won standards (Richard made the very good point about TCP/IP and what would happen if one company altered it so it was incompatible). Therefore I use Firefox and recommend it to others if asked.

On the point of security, it's not really about the number of flaws found because any piece of software will always have some exploit...it's unavoidable. What it is about is about how easy it is to exploit a flaw and the seriousness of it. Due to the nature of IE, with ActiveX controls and the fact that it is so closely tied with the OS, it is always going to be easier to attack the system than with a sandboxed browser. It's a sad fact that the mechanisms that make it easy for authors to write their pages and easier for the end user are always going to make it easier for people to create exploits.

[Richard M]

Originally Posted by Bifta

Correct, and Bifta isn't foolish enough to believe that a fair indication of browser share is available to view at W3. Let's think about it rationally for a minute, what sort of people visit that site? Technical people, a small cross section of the population, a small cross section that would have no problem trying out a new browser (no matter how rubbish it is). I've looked at some slightly fairer stats, on an Estate Agents site that pulls all sorts of different people and my stats differ hugely.

Apparently this is based on 3,898,985 page views, 80,788,375 hits.

Firefox has apparently got 0.4% browser share, based on fairer statistics.

Websidestory are a company who compile stats from the most popular websites, according to them Mozilla is at 6% (Suite and FF both at 3%).
IE is down to 92% now.

[Ramrod]

I thought you'd have fun with this thread

Originally Posted by SOSAGES

firefox sucks and thats that...

Agreed. FireFox uses far too much resources up, and most websites don't seem to work. IE on 2000 SP4 is secure any way, so why both wasting more space, bandwidth and CPU cycles on FireFox?

Originally Posted by Scott

Agreed. FireFox uses far too much resources up, and most websites don't seem to work. IE on 2000 SP4 is secure any way, so why both wasting more space, bandwidth and CPU cycles on FireFox?

Resources? You'll have to forgive me, I have a blindingly efficient OS myself so I never noticed. Firefox fairly flies on Mac. Perhaps you could quote some figures that some more PC savvy person than myself could query though? As for 'most websites' ... that certainly isn't my experience. I can think of only one occasion when we have had to use a browser other than Firefox to view a webpage, since switching to FF 0.9 a couple of months back - and on that occasion, we satisfactorily viewed the page through Safari, not IE

Well compared to memory usage, IE uses 10-20MB of memory, FireFox used 40-60MB. As for CPU cycles, FireFox kept making my system "lag" and my music kept "skipping" because it used 100% CPU just to load a page up. Even scrolling down a page did the same thing, which IE doesn't do at all

[philip.j.fry]

Originally Posted by Chris T

Resources? You'll have to forgive me, I have a blindingly efficient OS myself so I never noticed. Firefox fairly flies on Mac.

and on GNU/LInux The difference I think with Windows is that some IE components are already partially loaded in support of Windows so it only seems to use less resources. Scotts memory usage of about 40-60mb is similar to what I see on my own system (which is currently in a box ready to be moved tommorrow ), one thing to bear in mind is that this has dropped considerably since FF 0.7 (90-100mb) so we can only hope that this will continue.

Originally Posted by philip.j.fry

and on GNU/LInux The difference I think with Windows is that some IE components are already partially loaded in support of Windows so it only seems to use less resources. Scotts memory usage of about 40-60mb is similar to what I see on my own system (which is currently in a box ready to be moved tommorrow ), one thing to bear in mind is that this has dropped considerably since FF 0.7 (90-100mb) so we can only hope that this will continue.

90-100MB? Holy, that is a lot more than what the Climate Prediction software uses, and that is more demanding

Originally Posted by Scott

90-100MB? Holy, that is a lot more than what the Climate Prediction software uses, and that is more demanding

Note the version number - 0.7 was a far-from-complete Beta release. Making your software more efficient is part of the Beta process. I tried out FF at version 0.7 and deleted it as it was still some way off being a viable replacement for Safari. I tried it again at 0.9 and found it vastly improved. I started using it from that point, and when we got to 'preview release' I made that the default browser on my system.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Chris T

Resources? You'll have to forgive me, I have a blindingly efficient OS myself so I never noticed. Firefox fairly flies on Mac. Perhaps you could quote some figures that some more PC savvy person than myself could query though? As for 'most websites' ... that certainly isn't my experience. I can think of only one occasion when we have had to use a browser other than Firefox to view a webpage, since switching to FF 0.9 a couple of months back - and on that occasion, we satisfactorily viewed the page through Safari, not IE

Actually, on the Mac, I tend to use Safari.. Much quicker (and better) than the rather elderly version of IE used in OSX..

[Gareth]

Originally Posted by Scott

Well compared to memory usage, IE uses 10-20MB of memory, FireFox used 40-60MB. As for CPU cycles, FireFox kept making my system "lag" and my music kept "skipping" because it used 100% CPU just to load a page up. Even scrolling down a page did the same thing, which IE doesn't do at all

Actually, IE will be using a helluva lot more memory than that, it's just that it's inextricably tied to the OS, so you've gotta take, for example, the memory usage of explorer.exe into consideration too.

Of course, you'd still be using that memory consumed by the kernel even if you used Firefox, so mebbe a fairer statement would be to say that 'IE uses 10-20MB more memory than the OS'.

As for CPU usage, I gotta say that I've not noticed any worse performance than IE... but who knows, maybe my machine is more streamlined and leanly configured than yours...?

On another note, FireFox is the first step in my evil master plan of getting the missus to switch completely to open source. She's just about accepted FireFox (after having one too many problems with IE), and is even thinking about using OpenOffice to write all her college lessons. If she carries on going at this rate, I reckon she'll be using Linux 100% of the time some time early next year

[philip.j.fry]

Originally Posted by Gareth

On another note, FireFox is the first step in my evil master plan of getting the missus to switch completely to open source. She's just about accepted FireFox (after having one too many problems with IE), and is even thinking about using OpenOffice to write all her college lessons. If she carries on going at this rate, I reckon she'll be using Linux 100% of the time some time early next year

I bribed mine with a nice pink and purple KDE theme

[Mal]

People will have different experiences with software. Personally, I've been using Firebird/Firefox since August 2003 (whichever version it was then) and never had a problem with it.

I don't know if it was just me, but the few sites that I had problems with not accepting FF, like my online bank, now accept it.

If it doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it won't work for other people.

I have FF installed but don't use it often - in the forum it fails to insert smilies in the middle of text, and fails with hyperlink insertion in the same way (tagging it onto the end).

It also fails to draw the pages properly on many occasions (the page has dark lines across it in places, distorting it).