A good subtitle for this post might be, “Why I’m still using Firefox.”
I’m not happy with Firefox’s performance; it should not, under any circumstances, take up 1GB of ram and another of swap space. That’s ridiculous. I suppose the colossal list of extensions I have running might be half the problem, but after playing around with nine other browsers today (Opera 9 isn’t listed below), I’m pretty sure Firefox is the best thing around for me. If anyone can tell me how to get the functionality of the AutoPager and Adblock Plus Firefox extensions in Opera, I’m pretty sure I’ll switch, but until then… no dice. Below are my oh-so-objective comparisons after trying them all out today, ranked by score on the Acid3 test. If a browser didn’t beat my current Firefox on the Acid3, I didn’t even continue to test it.
- Acid 3 Test: 100/100
- No Silverlight
- Flash doesn’t play nice w/PulseAudio
- No extensions; SpeedDial is awesome, but Firefox has Fast Dial, which is the same for all intents and purposes
- UI not compactable
- Acid 3 Test: 100/100, LINKTEST FAILED (Windows XP)
- No packages available for Fedora (just Debian), and I’m not into unpacking and repackaging .deb files for an alpha release
- Acid 3 Test: 94/100
- No Silverlight
- Flash doesn’t play nice w/PulseAudio, crashes on close
- No extensions
- UI not compactable
- Runs slow compared to Opera/Chrome/Firefox
- Acid 3 Test: 71/100
- Moonlight for Silverlight
- Flash doesn’t play nice w/PulseAudio, crashes on close
- Extensions: AdBlock Plus, AutoPager, Delicious Bookmarks, Download Statusbar, Fast Dial, FlagFox, Ghostery, Greasemonkey w/Greasefire, Last.fm, Tiny Menu, VideoDownloadHelper, Wolfram Alpha Google
- UI completely compacted
- Memory Hog
- Acid 3 Test: 71/100
- Actually a music player… not even a real browser
- Acid 3 Test: 71/100
- Acid 3 Test: 70/100
- Acid 3 Test: 70/100
- Acid 3 Test: 20/100 (Windows XP)
- Emma: “Yeah, I’m sticking with Firefox.”