I’ve noticed that Firefox is much, much slower than Internet Explorer (I have IE7, Beta 3) when browsing sites with inherently low latency. For example, I’m doing a bunch of website development on my home computer, and have Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. installed. So I’m continually hitting “refresh” in a browser on “http://localhost/something”. Where Firefox takes almost a full second to refresh the page and seems to be doing heavy processing, IE7 re-displays it instantly and effortlessly with no perceptible delay. I’d always chalked up this delay somewhat to PHP and MySQL processing speed, but apparently the browser has a lot more to do with it than I thought, and IE’s rendering engine is good.
I noticed that Firefox felt sluggish a while back, and went and un-installed almost all of the extensions I’d downloaded, save for the critical ones (such as Mouse Gestures and Tab Mix Plus) — this did help somewhat. Of course I also have Firebug for development, and that’s the reason why I do switch back to Firefox for testing. Each browser has its strengths and weaknesses. For daily browsing, Firefox is nicer — it saves my session (Tab Mix Plus), syncs my bookmarks and cookies between computers (using Google Sync), and it has far fewer security holes than, at least, the old IE6. I understand IE7 is much better in that regard, but I like the idea of the browser being more loosely coupled from the operating system.
The following is a completely subjective and non-researched, thoroughly incomplete comparison of different browsers:
| Item | Firefox | Internet Explorer | Opera |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page loading speed perception | Slowest | Fastest | Fast |
| Security – the chance that a malicious site can damage your computer | Good | Worst | Best |
| Integrated line-by-line Javascript debugging ability | OK (Using Venkman– debugging must be launched explicitly before starting a session) | Good, but very slow to launch a session. Need Visual Studio installed for the best debugging tool | Haven’t tried to find one; may or may not exist |
| Page error handling options | Very good, using Firebug extension | Bad – when “halt on errors” is on, the first code error triggers a popup; can’t inspect page elements; no built-in source viewer | OK, has Javascript console |
Argh, CSS problems.