fed up with firefox suggestion?

[nemesismk2]

Anyone remember that Fishtank test?

Chrome appears to be running it @ 60 FPS (Vsync On) w/ 1000 fish onscreen (Firefox & Opera miserably fail in this one, haven't tested IE). Well done Google. Hardware acceleration in full use. Too bad it still can't use its own YouTube Full HD videos, appears to be hogging my CPU cycles instead

I get 5fps with Firefox 15 with 1000 fish

 

[cheez]

And you have some serious issues if all you use your web browser for is streaming Netflix.

I don't watch netflix movies from my computers... but my parents do with theirs. The HTPC is made specifically for netflix streaming and DVD movies, and some pron sites (j/k on the last part).

So my parents have serious issue? Ha you funny.

I forgot all about the Sliverlight..... Silverlight and FF need to work together to sort this out cause it's ridiculous....

Don't disagree with you (don't watch netflix on browser myself), but many people watch netflix religiously and it takes up most of their browser time. So you can't really discount that as a feasible usage, not to mention version 15 shouldn't have broken this in the first place.

^ well said.


.

 

[CA19100]

I get 5fps with Firefox 15 with 1000 fish

Must be hardware acceleration issues. I get 60fps with 1000 fish on Firefox 15. Same with IE9 and Chrome. 3fps on Safari.


Edit: It's also working just fine with Netflix. Not sure what the issue is on your system.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I have no idea what's wrong with your system but I just tested netflix streaming and it worked fine.
I haven't had any problems with that site in a long time. You may have to make sure your silverlight is the latest version and that cookies are enabled because the site doesn't work when disabling cookies.

No the version 15 is a fail. Version doesn't support Netflix downstream movies... You'll have to use old version of Firefox to watch this. That's a big time fail.

Internet Explorer is superior. Heck, even the ancient version 6 you can downstream Netflix movies.... talk about superior coding. :thumbsup:

 

[cheez]

^I didn't touch cookie settings. Perhaps the silverlight got crashed? It was working fine with older version of FF. When the modem device crapped out I had to restart the device. Since then FF went haywire. I will try reinstalling Silverlight when I get to his house next time and will let ya know how it works out.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I get 5fps with Firefox 15 with 1000 fish

I get a few frames more but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable for me Ironically, this is the release where the developers have enabled Hardware Acceleration by default. And the saddest thing is, you have to manually disable it, to "get the speed back" if you still plan to use it. Disabling HW acceleration makes it about as quick as Chrome. Thanks goes to one gentleman in Firefox forums for suggesting me that:

Firefox Safe Mode disables hardware acceleration, which on many computers (almost every one I have seen) makes Firefox faster. You can, in normal Firefox mode, disable hardware acceleration yourself by going to options -> advanced -> general and unchecking "use hardware acceleration when available".

But apparently, it is working for some people:

Must be hardware acceleration issues. I get 60fps with 1000 fish on Firefox 15. Same with IE9 and Chrome. 3fps on Safari.


Edit: It's also working just fine with Netflix. Not sure what the issue is on your system.

This just proves one thing, there is no perfect browser. Wide range of hardware, software and standards make life impossible for those involved in this business to get everything right.. Oh well, there is always Lynx

 

[CA19100]

Just as a data point, the fast result is on a Radeon 6870 card, using the new 12.8 software on Win 7 64-bit.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I just tested and got 60fps w/ 1000 fish, so perhaps it is your video card?

 

[Magic Carpet]

I just tested and got 60fps w/ 1000 fish, so perhaps it is your video card?

Geforce 640 is one of the best cards you can get for HTPC / 2D usage. It's the software that either makes or brakes it. I suppose, my daily browsing doesn't include Fish Tank activities, so I could live with that.

 

[nemesismk2]

Must be hardware acceleration issues. I get 60fps with 1000 fish on Firefox 15. Same with IE9 and Chrome. 3fps on Safari.


Edit: It's also working just fine with Netflix. Not sure what the issue is on your system.

I will rerun the test because i just remembered I am using onboard video lol

Just installed a radeon hd 5770 and everything is working fine now.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Yeah, if it doesn't noticably impact performance, then I could live with it.
I barely remember that test anyway.

Geforce 640 is one of the best cards you can get for HTPC / 2D usage. It's the software that either makes or brakes it. I suppose, my daily browsing doesn't include Fish Tank activities, so I could live with that.

 

[hclarkjr]

I get a few frames more but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable for me Ironically, this is the release where the developers have enabled Hardware Acceleration by default. And the saddest thing is, you have to manually disable it, to "get the speed back" if you still plan to use it. Disabling HW acceleration makes it about as quick as Chrome. Thanks goes to one gentleman in Firefox forums for suggesting me that:


But apparently, it is working for some people:

This just proves one thing, there is no perfect browser. Wide range of hardware, software and standards make life impossible for those involved in this business to get everything right.. Oh well, there is always Lynx

i tried the fishtank test with hardware acceleration on and off and got 5fps in both tests. not sure if hardware acceleration is working on my system for some reason.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I got sick of FF and switched to Chrome and Opera only to end up going back to Firefox. On my new machine with Linux and a SSD it's a non issue. but yeah FF seems to have become very bloated, but I still find it better than the alternatives. I can't really put my finger on it, I just find it's better.

I say try each one for a month or so and see which one you like best.

The nice thing about FF is that it's open source and not in it to make money unlike most of the others.

It would be a nice project some day to take the FF source, strip out all the bloat and make a "lite" version. Kinda like in the days of Mozilla (the actual browser that was based off Netscape), Firefox was the "lite" version of Mozilla.

Would also be nice to force flash and all that junk to run in some kind of sandbox so it cannot write to the disk outside of a set temp folder or something. Hard to do something like that in Windows though, it's just insecure by design and easy to privilege escalate.

 

[hclarkjr]

I got sick of FF and switched to Chrome and Opera only to end up going back to Firefox. On my new machine with Linux and a SSD it's a non issue. but yeah FF seems to have become very bloated, but I still find it better than the alternatives. I can't really put my finger on it, I just find it's better.

I say try each one for a month or so and see which one you like best.

The nice thing about FF is that it's open source and not in it to make money unlike most of the others.

It would be a nice project some day to take the FF source, strip out all the bloat and make a "lite" version. Kinda like in the days of Mozilla (the actual browser that was based off Netscape), Firefox was the "lite" version of Mozilla.

Would also be nice to force flash and all that junk to run in some kind of sandbox so it cannot write to the disk outside of a set temp folder or something. Hard to do something like that in Windows though, it's just insecure by design and easy to privilege escalate.

have you considered palemoon or waterfox?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Never heard of those, but now that I'm using Linux I find the issues I had with FF are completely gone. Probably has to do with the machine too but I find even when I had windows on this machine I had some issues like flash always crashing. The flash for Linux is more stable and FF itself is more stable.

 

[nemesismk2]

Never heard of those, but now that I'm using Linux I find the issues I had with FF are completely gone. Probably has to do with the machine too but I find even when I had windows on this machine I had some issues like flash always crashing. The flash for Linux is more stable and FF itself is more stable.

If you don't mind me asking what type of Linux are you using? How have you found getting games software running? Sorry that is two questions lol

 

[Red Squirrel]

Using Xubuntu. Unfortunately for games I still have to dual boot and go to Windows though. :/ I wish more games were cross platform.

I still have a learning curve to do with stuff like Gimp instead of Photoshop, and other such apps.

 

[nemesismk2]

Using Xubuntu. Unfortunately for games I still have to dual boot and go to Windows though. :/ I wish more games were cross platform.

I still have a learning curve to do with stuff like Gimp instead of Photoshop, and other such apps.

I have been using Ubuntu 12.4 and it's running very well on my pc. I have only just started using it so have loads of testing to do.

 

[Magic Carpet]

i tried the fishtank test with hardware acceleration on and off and got 5fps in both tests. not sure if hardware acceleration is working on my system for some reason.

Are you running Windows XP by any chance?

"Fishtank acceleration" only works for me in Chrome and but it lacks adequate Flash support in YouTube, so anything HD taxes my CPU needlessly. FF/Opera work fine in YouTube but flop the Fishtank test. Erm... it's hard to get my head around this stuff, now. Too many things, change so often, it's no longer fun.

Anyway, I suggest you to play around with the settings, first... type in Chrome, "about:gpu", see what's it like now... and then try "about:flags" and see if you can enable things that might make the difference for you.

Using Xubuntu. Unfortunately for games I still have to dual boot and go to Windows though. :/ I wish more games were cross platform.

Loki used to port games for Linux, not sure what happened afterwards. I suspect, "business model" didn't survive. But hey, now we have so many games we can play in a web browser. Not quite the same, is it?

I still have a learning curve to do with stuff like Gimp instead of Photoshop, and other such apps.

I started using Gimp in FreeBSD and continue doing so in Windows. Great app.

Hint: try out also Blender. It's free and quite powerful.

 

[BlahBlahYouToo]

Pretty sure Safari on Windows is dead now, so that's a non-starter.

Chrome is okay, but it's not as "light" as people like to think. You also are rather limited by what the extensions are capable of. Something like NoScript and AdBlock Plus are not possible with Chrome on the same level as Firefox.

IE is a massive security risk, and it's probably best people pretend like it's not even there. Same goes for the various shells on IE, like Maxthon. They aren't browsers, they're just different front ends on the IE rendering engine.

Opera I have used long ago and it's nice, but it seems like the developer is always kind of on a knife edge of going out of business. I like that Opera is willing to try new things, and eventually some of those ideas make it to other browsers, so I hope they stick around, but last I checked it has no real extension capability.

So that basically just leaves Firefox, or some Gecko based browser. It's not perfect, but for me, it's the only one worth considering. Chrome might well be able to unseat it if Google makes it so extensions can actually interrupt the rendering engine like they can with Firefox. NoScript and AdBlock Plus can literally prevent the rendering engine from even downloading parts of the web page. With Chrome, you are stuck with having to download the page, then the extension kicks in and reloads the page without the filtered content. Better than nothing, but given Firefox offers a far more comprehensive solution, that's where I will go.

Yup, extensions on ff are a class above chrome. No mouse gestures on the home screen of chrome pretty much kill it for me.

 

[ultimatebob]

I'm a fan of Chrome. It doesn't have a ton of extensions, but it has the ones (like Java, Flash, and Adblock) that I use.

And it's kind enough to WARN me before disabling outdated extensions, unlike Firefox that assumes that I'm an idiot and automatically shuts them off of me.

 

[69mustang]

Firefox for me, I'm a creature of habit. I've been using it for years now and can't even conceive of having to get used to a different browser/addons.

 

[Rottie]

I told you to stick with IE but you won't listen…..

 

[RU482]

using Firefox today is like using IE in 2008

 

[jimmybgood9]

I think they're all too "featureful" shall we say, as well as most of the webpages it tries to render. Firefox comes integrated into my distro, it's 64 bit and, more importantly, the software is open, I can change it (and have in the past) and can redistribute my changes (and haven't).