I just wish there was a way to get compensated for all the wasted time spent trying to get things to work in these lame browsers. Is there a class action suit I could join or something?

Although it looks nicer and it a fine browser for consumers it is as dreadful and hair pulling as IE6. I am a web developer and it drives me crazy writing tons of extra code for IE7. The height problems are in every page and positioning has got me going insane. Every time someone uses that browser it is added to a percentage and all of us web developers pray people will stop using IE and drop IE to under 30% so we don't have to worry about it and use anything else such as Safari, Firefox, Opera, Flock, Netscape, Camino, anything. Just not IE.

I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's a horribly written program compared to every other browser. Just for comparison IE supports about half of all CSS while Firefox supports over 95%. I found this page looking for more hacks in height issues and that is why I am commenting.

I'm glad you enjoy it, but it's a horribly written program compared to every other browser. I found this page looking for more hacks in height issues and that is why I am commenting.

I run a simple website tridi.com and judge how quick a browser is by the time it takes to, sign on and load, make a small change or three, preview and publish. Firefox is still much faster by 50 to 100pc. Other than that they seem even. Just don't feel safe with IE after all these years though.

You are right in one aspect but No. A standard is not what most people use. It's not like people goes, “Ohhh I want to use that “standard/function/tag” because Microsoft programed it”. No, they will use what ever Microsoft put out there so Microsoft's have been creating the standards for the web over the years and that's not what most like. Or to be more specific. Microsoft have been creating their own standards and not been following the real standards. They have been able to get away with it for a long time because of their size and it's not good when a company starts to ignore the rest of the world only because they are so big and think that they don't need to care. We have something called W3C. We should follow their standards to avoid that that web falls apart.

When it comes to the memory, yes Firefox eats allot of memory but I don't think it would if there was no purpose to it. I don't think we can see clear how much memory IE consumes for real since it's a such integrated part of the OS so not even MS can't separate them anymore. You need IE to use Windows. That's why IE is so fast at startup, it's already started when Windows is booted. And finally, is memory really a problem in our computers today? Most people want at least 1 GB in their computers and some may want 2 GB even if that's not needed other then for Video. Should we not use that memory? What's wrong with that? What's the point of having allot of memory in the computer that never gets used? I don't see the pint in that at least. Applications and games have always become more complex, bigger when the computers power have increased. That's how things work. If you have a powerful computer, the software makers use the power to add functions and more. I don't see the problem with Firefox using 150MB (right now 116MB) in RAM on my computer when I have 1 GB RAM inside and a swap-file of 700 MB. Be happy instead that some programs utilize all the extra RAM you got instead of whining. There is nothing good with RAM that never get used.

And last. I want to point out that maybe Firefox since it was one of the first browsers with tabs have had to take too much blame for being a memory eater. As I wrote in a post above I installed the final version of IE7 yesterday and it works great. But… IT EATS MEMORY!!!! Now what? Isn't that just a Firefox problem? How can Microsoft make a browser that bad that eats allot of memory? Can't be true :(
I started IE7 and opened the Yahoo homepage and just that single tab consumed 40MB in RAM. it's pretty much the same as Firefox with 1 tab opened. I tested to open a total of 10 tabs and IE7 consumes 154,5 MB in RAM and going higher slowly. I think that the “memory-problem” is more of a tab-problem then anything else. Before tabs I never heard anyone complain about Firefox or any other browsers. I think people have forgot that it was not long ago we surfed the web without tabs.

Mike.
Your post just made me laugh. You are saying that Firefox feels slow and bloated? Either you lie or there is something wrong with your senses. Firefox is not slow, IE is not slow either. All the browsers today are fast. Bloated? Wow, you are saying that Firefox is bloated? That's as far as true you can come. Firefox have no E-mail apps or IRC included as Seamonkey, it comes with a clean interface, it does not come with allot of extensions installed, if you want any you have to install them yourself. It's a small download, 5 MB compared too IE7. You can uninstall it if you don't like it. You can't uninstall IE, that's what I call bloated… Firefox is as far from bloated as you can get. If something is bloated it's IE then, Firefox is not bloated.

Sept 2006:
IE7: 2.5%
IE6: 55.7%
IE5: 4%
Firefox: 27.3%
Mozilla: 2.3%
Nestscape 7/8: 0.4%
Opera 7/8/9: 1.6%

Firefox has garnered a large amount of users now.

Tough question, browser market share is reported by so many and results vary quite a bit. IIRC correctly, the last post I read on Slashdot was 18% for Firefox. Which is biased IMO – they see more than 70% Firefox browsers hitting their site and they seem to not like MS very much. Other articles I've found stated Firefox is as low as 10%.

I have a feeling Firefox usage is going to slide a few percentage points for a while, now that there is yet another browser that can compete with it.

As for people that automatically think that Sun has nothing to do with Javascript, get some facts before just blowing people off. If you did a little research, you'd find that
Javascript is a registered trademark of Sun. Netscape was the first company to license JAVA.

Brendan Eich invented Javascript while working at Netscape.

Sound a little confusing? It is.

Some urls you can check:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript“ title=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript
“JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape.”

http://inventors.about.com/od/jstartinventions/a/JavaScript.htm“ title=”http://inventors.about.com/od/jstartinventions/a/JavaScript.htm“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://inventors.about.com/od/jstartinventions/a/J…

back to firefox, i guess

Thanks for the honesty. Like I said I like FF too (I use it at home) but just wanted a fair analysis of both browsers.

Any clue what the market share percentage is for both browsers? Last I hear FF was gaining on IE.

You're quite right…FF Fan boy here! The big reason for this is that I've had my OS installed for over 2 years and I haven't yet had to re-install XP, or even revert to previous working state. I've encountered minimal spyware/malware infections since using Firefox as well.

Don't get me wrong, vulnerabilities are found in every browser. Microsoft's are just more visible due to `market share'. It just takes the Firefox crew less time to fix holes.

Firefox 2 beta: not a huge improvement versus 1.5. A little slicker UI, but that comes with the price of extra `browser bloat' and plug-in incompatibilities.

I will say this thought: IE 7 is damn fast at rendering pages.

Thanks for the info, that is good to know. Since the vulnerability has been there since IE6 (which I used), I am not too worried about it now.

While Rob may sound like he really likes IE7, he at least posts valid reason's why it's better than IE6. You just seem to be a FireFox fanboy IMO. It would seem like you should encrourage people to try IE7 since you know that FF is better, you would have nothing to lose.

But using a “so called” vulnerability that has been around since IE6 as a reason not to use IE7 seems pretty weak.

And I agree that IE7 is too integrated with Windows XP, I think thats pretty lame. I do like FF, but some of the internal sites I access will not use it, I am stuck with IE (as Rob pointed out).

How good is FF 2.0?

Gone back to IE6

IMHO, Internet Explorer no matter what version will always be vulnerable since:

1 – It's the most used browser therefore it becomes the biggest target for hacks
2 – It's too tightly integrated with Windows and in turn makes inroads to the operating system that much easier to find.

The Secunia vulnerability I posted has existed since IE 6. I only posted it due to the blatant ignorance in the artical. He must be on MS payroll.

While the IE 7 product is a HUGE improvement versus previous versions, I'm still using FireFox as my default browser. It will take a long time for me to trust MS on security and it takes them far too long to fix issues found in their products.

How does this page look? I'm running Windows 2000, so I can't try IE7, but the inability of older IEs to render CSS element positions properly was one of the biggest display bugs IMHO. If IE7 has fixed this I'll be greatly impressed.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/glassy.html“ title=”http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/glassy.html“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/complexspiral/gl…

IE7 is a significant improvement over IE6. No doubt about it. But it's also still very far behind Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The only “new” feature that IE7 brings to the table is it's handling of RSS feeds, although built-in RSS support for standard mail tools is far better than any browser-based RSS reader anyway.

Every other significant feature is copied from other browsers. Tabbed browsing? FF, Safari, and Opera have all had it for years. Chrome-based, customizable search? Same.

Lastly, I have to question the qualifications of the writer. Javascript improved because of a good relationship with Sun? You have NO idea what you're talking about. Java and javascript have very little in common other than their C-like syntax and the same first 4 letters used in their name.s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript“ title=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript“ target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript

“JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape.”

What I want to know is whether its better than FireFox 2.0 and why?