IT Professionals

Does Firefox Need A Diet?

Posted by on May 17, 2007 | 6 Comments

There has been some recent speculation that Firefox is simply too bloated these days. Reports state that the once thin and lean browser of 2003-4 is now a big, huge resource hog, complete with a caching ‘feature’ often confused with a memory leak. Speaking for myself, I love Firefox, but have already begun exploring alternatives. I have tried Opera, IE 7, Epiphany, and Swiftfox (based on Firefox) to see which offered the best fit. For me personally, I have been fairly happy with Swiftfox, as it has been designed for your system’s specific architecture and does in fact, offer a slight performance boost over Firefox proper.

With that said, I am still toying around with giving Epiphany a serious look for my Ubuntu box and Opera a look for all platforms. Both are fast and have been impressive on the performance front. But the underlying issue is missing those wonderful and often bloat-giving extensions that make Firefox so much fun. Until I can overcome that hurdle, I think I will be sticking to Swiftfox for the time being.

[tags]Epiphany,firefox,swiftfox,ubuntu,internet explorer,opera[/tags]

  • marc klink

    I used to use Firefox until 1.5.0.7, but I got tired of its slowness on startup with less powerful machines. I guessed that it might be all the extras I had installed, but then I performed tests against Opera with Firefox in safe mode. Opera was still faster! I also became used to the fact that even assorted betas of Opera just don’t seem ragged like betas of Mozilla projects. Opera betas just seem to implement new things without problems. I just yesterday finished removing Thunderbird 2.0.0.1 from my machine as I had installed it to use as an rss reader. That was a big mistake as it has so many flaws it really should be called an alpha, not a finished release. It makes me wonder what the change of the last 2 years has been with the coders at Mozilla.

    As for Ubuntu, the very first thing I did after installing Edgy was to go get Opera. It seems to just work better, and presents pages it renders, and itself, more consistently across platforms.

  • Alex Wieder

    After having used Firefox since version 1.0.something, I’m seriously considering going back to IE. Why?
    - Firefox is freezing on me a lot these days, and I can’t find a solution anywhere.
    - Some sites still rely on IE’s html mis-rendering, which means that most of the time I have to have an IE window running next to Firefox.
    - The only reason I got Firefox was pop-up blocking and some immunity to spyware. I think IE7 has it.

    Why not?
    - I don’t trust IE.

    Alex Wieder

  • anonymous

    SeaMonkey, kids. If you don’t use pop3/imap mail just don’t install the mail part of it and you’ve got your “lean and mean” browser. Firefox is and always was superfluous.

    Also note that SM is incorporating those few things Firefox did right. Unhampered and un-idiotproofed, SM is all I use.

  • http://a.amishhosting.com Paul Ding

    I use SeaMonkey, too, not because it’s “lean and mean” but because it’s more capable.

    If you have multiple username/password combinations (such as if husband and wife use the same site), SeaMonkey will allow you to select the username from a pop-up dialog, but FireFox demands that you type in a username. (If you have only one user/pass combination for a domain, both browsers automatically fill in the info for you.)

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/eldergeek/ eldergeek

    In Debian Sarge it was called Mozilla Navigator. In Etch it’s become IceApe. I’ve no idea whether it’s Seamonkey, IceApe or Mozilla Navigator in Ubuntu but, either way, I like it as well or better than Firefox/IceWeasel and because it’s a Mozilla browser, there are lots of plugins out there for it. the only thing I really like about Epiphany is the “up” button (which truncates the URL back to the preceding forward slash). I really wish all of them had that button.

  • I-user

    Although I’m planning to try SeaMonkey & Swiftfox soon I currently enjoy using Firefox esp. over IE. I do agree it is slow starting on Linux (Mandriva 2007.0) and even slower on Windows. I especially do not like the duration that the downloads sidebar takes to show. Many times the download is long finished before the sidebar shows.

    I tried Opera and liked the efficiency of it esp. the memory clearing ability when minimizing its window, but hated losing the extensions of Firefox, esp. autocopy and No-Script.