Firefox

Just installed mozilla firefox, and i gotta tell u, it feels great. Its like im surfing the net for the first time again.

*drools*

Yeah I like it too.

Thumbs-up to Firefox..

I don't mean to start a war here, but Opera is absolutely the best browser evah! ;)

Oh it's ON now! Hehe.

paaleeeease, i'll take firebird over opera anyday

no wayz internet explorer all the way you guys! ...:uhoh:... *hides*

haha.

Opera was good I used to use it. Switched to firefox recently. I must say it's much better.

opera is a nice little browser.. it is probably the most "fine-tuned" when it comes to "user feeling" (but FF is catching up *fast*).

but opera lacks a couple of important things that make FF superior to opera:

1) the gecko rendering engine -- without a doubt, the best, most standards-compliant html+css rendering engine today. period! (nothing comes even close)

2) opera doesn't do xslt (and even IE does this -- shame )

3) mozilla as a platform (i am thinking primary about XUL).

this makes it sooo easy to write extensions for mozilla/firefox. for example, at the moment:

a) i am using a spel-check to check the spelling of this post i am writing

b) in the lower right corner there is a google-PR bar showing PR:3 for this page of codewalkers

c) one extension adds mouse gestures to the FF

d) another one blocks ads from pages

e) webDeveloper extension, simply a must for (guess?) a webdeveloper (tools too numerous to count)

f) i just coded my copyTinyURL extension in like about 15 minutes (the extension adds an item to the context menu for links. when selected, it creates and copies to the clipboard a tinyurl for the link that you right-clicked on the page).

g) and many more..


the point is that i know that opera has mousegestures built in, but opera can't have everything i need built in. neither can FF, but with FF you can install/develop function that you need very easy (all you need is to know javascript, and read a couple of sites about xul).

What was said about gecko, is entirely true. Gecko would be a good reason to switch from Opera to FF, but there are also reasons to stay in Opera.

First of all, I have never needed to have any extensions. That's what makes Opera good for me: It has everything vital for me "out-of-the-box." Even an RSS feed reader.

I have tried FF, but there's a big problem with it I can't stand: It takes ages to start it. Double-click Opera on your desktop, wait a little (less than a second) and it's running. Double-click FF on your desktop, wait a couple of seconds and it might be running. Yeah, they say that broadband owners are impatient, but with a 2GHz machine I expect a web browser to start immediately!

Its gotta call the XUL interpreter everytime you load Firefox. Also, Opera is more compatible with the DOM. All of its rendering engine code was rewritten and the legacy code was thrown away in the Opera 7 release. Speed boost there too. Thats why Firefox is slow in comparison. Your talking interpreted vs compiled too I believe, which also adds to the overhead. Pick your battles my friend.

i don't think that's true.. maybe you never knew that something is available, but you probably needed something more than what opera has to give (and opera/any other software can't give everything you/and everyone else might need).

1) do you have a spel-checker in opera? maybe you don't need it, or you don't think you need it, but i know i do..

2) do you have an ad-blocker in opera? maybe you don't need it (because you are on broadband, or you just like looking at ads), but i sure do..

3) if you do stuff about the web (php/html/css/js/...), than webDeveloper is a must (plus liveHttpHeaders). if you do web stuff, you can't tell me that you don't need it..

4) and just about anything you can imagine. if the extension doesn't exist, you can roll your own..




if that is "more than older opera versions" than that is ok, but gecko still #1 (the best, fastest, most standards-compliant, etc..)

i forgot to note, gecko is in fact html+css+xul+xsl+js(dom)+... engine/render..



well, i don't know what "interpreted" is referring to here, but.. gecko is a pure c/c++ component, and is very fast.

the slow thing about mozilla/firefox is XUL (but that is not "interpreted", it is "rendered" by gecko, just like html), that is the rendering of the browser UI (also lots of the UI is coded in JS, so that is interpreted).

also, the gecko is a bit bigger (size/memory concerning), so it takes more time to load (but it also has more features, so that is ok).

I think I don't need it. Isn't that spell-checker with a double l by the way? Or should I take that as irony? ;)



There's a built-in popup-blocker, and that's practically all I need. I've learnt to skip other ads.



I do do web stuff, but not very much. Mostly server side stuff so the browser doesn't matter so much there. That extension sure does look like a useful tool, but some of the features are already built in to Opera. Not all of course. By the way, why does webDeveloper add the possibility to clear browser cache? I thought FF could do it without any extensions.

I don't know what causes the speed difference, but the difference does matter to me. If there's ever a version of Firefox that starts up fast enough, tell me and I'll be happy to at least try it. Otherwise it's all OK. Or perhaps there's an extension that makes it faster ;)

Btw, I didn't post my original post in this thread just to try to convince everyone that Opera is better (and that's also useless because the majority is driving the FF way.) I wanted to see how long it takes for the war to start.

Well, not very long.

I liked that opera had a built-in mail client. That was awesome. Otherwise I don't see any reason to use opera instead of ff

how did you tell?



there are features for the server side too.. like, cookies/caching/authentification/session stuff, request/response headers (but liveHttpHeaders is even better), and other stuff..



probably so that it is just a click away.. ;)



do 3 seconds really make that big difference? do you start your browser like hundreds of times per day? (and even than, that would be like 5 minutes of "lost time").

anyway, FF is only slower while it loads. when it starts, it is as fast (if not faster) than any other browser..



this is not a war.. a flame-war would be if i shouted "opera sux". i didn't, because it doesn't (i could say "IE sux", but we already know that.. ;))

i just wanted to hear why anyone would not use FF today.. for me, browser is like one of 3 most important tools on my computer (file manager, editor and browser), and i don't know why anyone would settle for less..

and FF (like the other two tools) is always running on my computer, so i (re)start it only like two or three times a day -- and it takes like 5 seconds on my computer each time (man, that is over an hour during one year.. i am going to sue them for the lost time of my life.. )