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Explorer Vs Firefox

L

loic2003

Diamond Member
Hey there, I'm sure I watched an apple keynote a while back which compared Internet Explorer, firefox (or whatever it was called then), opera and safari in terms of speed. A friend of mine is convinced that Firefox is really slow compared to IE, but I can't find any online reviews to demonstrate this.

I appreciate that there won't be much of a difference between them and that a slow connection or laggy windows computer is more likely to affect the performances of the browsers, but it would be interesting to find a thourough review.

Does anyone know where I could find such a review, I've had no luck with goooooogle today 🙁


Thanks, people!
 
http://ctho.ath.cx/browserbench/index.html
It's just a (long) slashdot comments page with a scaled image added to it.

Load time in milliseconds:
~500-600 for me in Moz.
~500 first load in IE, but then IE caches even if you shift-reload, so ~350 for the successive loads

http://ctho.ath.cx/browserbench/index2.html
Forums front page. Since Zuni allows retarded flash ads, and I disallow the installation of stuff, IE prompts me to install flash on every page load.... but I get about 2 seconds for both moz and IE.

Note that net traffic fluctuations will affect load speed (of course, if the internet delays are significant, that pretty much proves the browser render time is irrelevant).

Personally, half a second plus or minus doesn't really bother me much, given that using Moz makes me significantly less vulnerable to IE exploits and crash bugs.

edit: Oh, I'm using a "debug" build of Mozilla to help track bugs (compiled myself with some patches that aren't in the "officail" builds yet. This means mine is a little slower than normal.
 
Or instead of worrying about speed you can take CERT's and DHS advice and drop IE because of security.
 
Firefox initially load slower for me. But after that it seems to be the same or faster. Firefox has popup blocker built in, so it won't load all that extra craps. That is why it seems faster for me.
 
I'd bet that 95% of the "slowness" while "rendering pages" is just connection variability. I mean how long does it take a 3 GHz processor to render some html?
 
Originally posted by: silverpig
I'd bet that 95% of the "slowness" while "rendering pages" is just connection variability. I mean how long does it take a 3 GHz processor to render some html?
Click to expand...

But Intel says you need a high-end P4 with NetBurst architecture to experience all that the Internet has to offer! 😉
 
From my impression of using IE vs Firefox, comming from a long time Mozilla user and a never time IE user....

Seems like Firefox and Mozilla (or at least used to) takes much longer to load.

IE seems like it takes shorter time to load, but it looks f-ed up for a while. First a big blank screen, then some widgets and stuff gets rendered, the spaces gets filled in. etc etc. while Firefox you get nothing for a little while then it leaps up fully rendered. Then after that both begin downloading the home page.

Then on new webpages Firefox renders the text, then starts placing the pictures, occasionally pausing to rearrange the text. However IE will stop and then chug on the disk some more, like it's not loaded up all the way, and needs to activate peices of itself to render the webpage. But the rendering bits come up fast after it gets done.

Now on both browsers a modern machine all this is very fast. So it's hard to say.

To me speed isnt' all that important. For my Debian box I can have the entire OS boot up, me log in, and have a full on Gnome 2.6 setup get going and then open Firefox and still only be utilizing 90-100megs of RAM. And I know from that lots of that is cached for programs not running anymore (unused ram is wasted ram, if you need those programs again then you don't have to re-read them from disk). So I know that bloat isnt' a big deal.

Now when things get annoying is from when programs like O😵rg open up vs MS Office. Thats a huge difference (O😵rg can seem to take forever) and can be annoying, but both seem to be just about as fast when they are actually running, with the advantage going to MS Office time to time for the more oddball features, otherwise they are about the same in responsiveness. The difference isn't worth the 100-300 dollars though! (I like O😵rg personally, but I use Abiword a lot also).
 
I just noticed something odd, on Amazon IE uses 128-Bit SSL while Firefox uses 256-Bit AES for the exact same page...
 
tabbed browsing. Dear God do I love it. I personally use Firefox and find it about the same on page loading but I am not picky about 2 seconds or 2.5seconds. I just like not having to worry about security as much. I find that I have to use explorer when paying bills online, ironically, because firefox isn't recognized as a later enough version. Also, pdf's in firefox always cause a 30 seocnd or longer freeze of firefox and the pdf.
 
I would suggest you to go ahead download and try firefox. You won't lose anything by doing it, you will only realize how much you love it after using it for a week or two. Also tab browsing is one of my favorite features, besides their modular engineering model, plus the fact that is faster than IE.
 
The main advantages that Firefox has over IE isn't speed. It's tabbed browsing, standards compliancy, security, extensibility, flexibility and the fact that it's open source.

I don't think you'd be able to find consistent benchmarks showing Firefox being faster than IE or vice versa. However, there ARE optimized builds for various architecture, as well as speed tweaks that can be applied to Firefox to make it faster (perhaps faster than IE), but that wouldn't exactly be a very consistent/fair comparison.
 
There is Plus and Minuses to every application.

IE's minuses is Security, Non-compliant HTML.

Firefox, Mozilla minuses are that they will generally
take issue with most webpages designed with IE in mind (actually a +).
 
I use both. There are some sites that demand IE. Personally I like the feel of Firefox. The tabbed browsing is nice and I have far less problems with persistent pop-ups with Firefox. You should experiment with both. Try loading your favorite sites with both. Check out the differences in the way some pages look. As for speed I don't really care if one loads in 2 seconds and one loads in 3 seconds, I'm not in that much of a hurry. They both load quickly enough for me. I also use Thunderbird for my mail program. It works as well as any that I have used. Been using both of these for months and still no problems.
 
Download Firefox, then get tabbrowser extensions, adblock, and other extensions you may be interested in. (but I"d just do a couple at first). The great thing is, you can configure it exactly how you want it. What I love is how I can have my sessions saved, so when I open the browser again it will reopen everything I had when I closed it. one of many options.

But the tabs are the "killer app feature" for me, I always have 5 - 10 open. It's also awsome konquerer and shell windows. I just like tabs 🙂
 
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