Friday, July 07, 2006
Firefox Rant
Okay, Firefox is really starting to annoy me. Don't get me wrong, it's a fabulous browser, and I could go on for hours (almost literally) about why it's better (yes, it is unarguably much better) than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Some of the nicest things about Firefox are:
Okay, so there I've named off exactly (wow) 10 points that I like about Firefox without really even trying to think of much. Now why am I going off on a rant about why I dislike it? Well, maybe because my laptop has 2GB of RAM in it, and Firefox is using TWENTY-FIVE percent of it! (see screenshot to the left) I currently have FIVE tabs open in Firefox, nothing special, no big images, no embedded flash objects, no media player objects. Just text, some basic images in the respective web pages, and that's it. Why in heaven's name would Firefox be using 512MB+ of RAM for five tabs? I've read stuff on this phenomenon before, and people say it's not memory leaks, they say it's because Firefox caches stuff in memroy. That may or may not be true, but all I know is that I really don't appreciate Firefox using up 25% of my RAM; That's not caching, that's either a memory leak, or they need to fix the amount of caching that Firefox does. Also, did you notice the 6 hours of CPU time there? My laptop has been running for 16 days now, and Firefox has used 6 hours of CPU time. The system process on here has only used half of that, and everybody complains about Explorer's use of CPU time, and that's only 24 minutes. Firefox is a generally good browser, but talk about a resource hog! I wouldn't recommend people with computers older than maybe a year or two to use Firefox ... it's either that, or when Firefox is open for a while, you might as well kiss other program's access to system resources goodbye. Anyway, make your own judgments about Firefox, but I'm seriously thinking about trying Opera for my daily browsing tasks. It seems to run a lot quicker, and there isn't lag opening tabs after a while like Firefox has. Okay, I'm done.
¶ 11:45 AM 
- The about:config page that allows you to configure almost anything
- Tabbed browsing
- Search as you type :: I love this
- Clear Private Data :: Keep your personal data secure
- Nice bookmark manager
- Keyboard shortcuts to open/close/switch tabs, and more
- Extensions :: I use Forecast Fox, Adblock, and SessionSaver (not using SS right at the moment though)
- Page source viewer and nicely organized Page Properties window
- Resizable text :: This is great for my laptop's high-res LCD panel, ouch on the eyes
Okay, so there I've named off exactly (wow) 10 points that I like about Firefox without really even trying to think of much. Now why am I going off on a rant about why I dislike it? Well, maybe because my laptop has 2GB of RAM in it, and Firefox is using TWENTY-FIVE percent of it! (see screenshot to the left) I currently have FIVE tabs open in Firefox, nothing special, no big images, no embedded flash objects, no media player objects. Just text, some basic images in the respective web pages, and that's it. Why in heaven's name would Firefox be using 512MB+ of RAM for five tabs? I've read stuff on this phenomenon before, and people say it's not memory leaks, they say it's because Firefox caches stuff in memroy. That may or may not be true, but all I know is that I really don't appreciate Firefox using up 25% of my RAM; That's not caching, that's either a memory leak, or they need to fix the amount of caching that Firefox does. Also, did you notice the 6 hours of CPU time there? My laptop has been running for 16 days now, and Firefox has used 6 hours of CPU time. The system process on here has only used half of that, and everybody complains about Explorer's use of CPU time, and that's only 24 minutes. Firefox is a generally good browser, but talk about a resource hog! I wouldn't recommend people with computers older than maybe a year or two to use Firefox ... it's either that, or when Firefox is open for a while, you might as well kiss other program's access to system resources goodbye. Anyway, make your own judgments about Firefox, but I'm seriously thinking about trying Opera for my daily browsing tasks. It seems to run a lot quicker, and there isn't lag opening tabs after a while like Firefox has. Okay, I'm done.
¶ 11:45 AM
