PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Opera 7.51, noting: 'Security concerns aren't the only reason to seek an alternative [to Internet Explorer]. IE's slow rendering engine and dearth of privacy features may plant the thought in some iconoclastic minds that it may not be the best browser for everyone.' 4 stars for Firefox and 3.5 for Opera, so looks like a Firefox win, although the editors do point out FF's troubles with DHTML as well as Opera issues with JavaScript."

Comments

Mozilla, Opera and Firefox...

[shackma2]

Mozilla, Opera and Firefox, from my unscientific perspective, seem to load web pages quicker than IE, but what really bothers me is how slow the mozilla opera and firefox load times are. I can either get to the web quickly with IE, or wait a while with firefox for a minute page load time diffrence.

Re:Mozilla, Opera and Firefox...

[spectecjr]

That is because IE is part of the OS unlike Opera and Firefox. If you use WinXP or 2003 open the process manager and set the firefox/opera process to realtime, might do the trick.

1. IE is a set of components that provide HTML rendering support for the OS. It is not loaded with Windows.

2. Setting Firefox/Opera to realtime will cause other system functions to slow to a crawl and/or possibly crash.

3. Mozilla and Firefox can be loaded exceptionally fast on Windows. It's very simple. DO NOT install QuickLaunch, but allow the Mozilla build process to correctly bind and rebase its DLLs. When it's done, you'll have a version of Mozilla which loads AS FAST AS Internet Explorer.

If the dll binding procedure did not make it into the Mozilla installer, that explains why people are still seeing it launch slowly.

This crap about "IE runs faster because it's part of the OS" is a myth propounded by people who really just don't know anything about how Windows loads processes and DLLs. Any time you have an app that loads slower than its competitors, consider this:

1) Is it loading ALL of its DLLs into memory at startup? Or does it dynamically load them as needed? (The latter is faster).

2) Is it loading a lot of potentially unnecessary COM components at startup instead of as needed? (As needed is faster).

3) Are its DLLs rebased correctly so that they don't need to be fixedup by the Application Launcher when they load? Does it have a clean memory map? (Most non-Microsoft apps do NOT take this step - which is fully documented in MSDN - which means that their load times will be 10 to 20 times longer than apps which DO rebase their DLLs).

4) Are its DLLs bound at install-time? Binding DLLs reduces the time necessary to load and patch the import/export table of processes and DLLs, by pre-patching the import/export table and attaching a signature to it to catch if the external DLLs change. (Most non-Microsoft apps Do NOT take this step - which again is fully documented in MSDN - which means that their load times will be another 4 to 7 times longer than apps which DO bind their DLLs).

Sloppy development practices lead to sloppy performance.

Re:What about IE?

[marnargulus]

IE 6.0 got a 4 out of 5 on their reviews site. Click on "more reviews" and it lists all their reviews.

Ingrained attitudes

[robogun]

From the review of Mozilla/Firefox:
CONS: Default installation doesn't include many functions; you have to download additional features via the Extensions Manager. Will not load ActiveX and VBScript; this prevents certain kinds of attacks, but also disables the normal functions of some sites.

Those are PROs if I ever saw one. Drive-by software installs and buggy Active-X is the reason I spend ten hours a month cleaning up computers of friends and family. WHo subseqently receive Mozilla and are forbidden to run IE except for Windows Update forevermore, on pain of no more free computer work.

Re:User-Agent stats?

[Anonymous Coward]

our site was roughly 95% internet explorer 4 months back...we've started plugging firefox fairly often(has to be repeated - people that use IE are too slow to get it the first time, no?) and it's now at 30.3% moz/firefox users.

To Really Speed FireFox/Mozilla Up

[ironwill96]

The only issue I had initially with FireFox and Mozilla is how slow they seem to load picture-heavy sites such as www.cnn.com

To speed up the load times of all sites add the following to your user.js file (if it doesnt exist - for Windows users, go to the run menu and type: %AppData% and then browse through the Mozilla folder and any sub folders until you get to your profile folder - inside of this create a new text document and call it user.js):

// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q =");

// Instead of annoying error dialog messages, display pages:
user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);

The other two changes are ones i've found useful as well - the second one changes the browser to do a normal Google search from the location bar instead of doing an "I'm Lucky" Google search (this is more useful in Mozilla than FireFox since FireFox comes w/ the Google search bar built in).

The third change makes Mozilla and FireFox display error pages like IE instead of annoying dialog boxes when an error occurs (such as page not found). This helps a TON when doing tabbed browsing.

Hope those tips are helpful for everyone else as much as they were for me. For more of them go to http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html

Re:Alright Mozilla

[Smidge204]

I've always equated FUD with the use of disinformation to gain a competative advantage by invoking fear, uncertainty and doubt in the public about your competitor's product. In this case:

1) The information ("IE is insecure" etc) is verifyably true and reported by many different people and organizations.

2) The people behind Mozilla and Opera are not the one generating the reports about their competitor's (Microsoft's) products.

3) The people involved with 1 and 2 (The ones finding and reporting the security issues, and the ones championing Moz/Opera) have no (apparent) vested interest in seeing IE lose it's market share.

So I'm not convinced this article coutns as FUD in that respect.
=Smidge=

How to make Firefox render pages faster than IE

[Jack Zombie]

To make Firefox render pages faster than IE, start by typing "about:config" in your FireFox address bar. Look for nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to 0 (zero).

The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page. By default it is 250 milliseconds, and even though by setting it to 0 (like Internet Explorer) makes it _seem_ to display pages faster, it ends up taking more overall time than with the default value.

You can also make Firefox faster by:

1.) Setting network.http.pipelining to true
2.) Setting network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
3.) Setting network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a number between 1 and 8

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The "maxrequests" is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. 8 is the maximum Firefox allows it to be, but it may bog down yours, or the server, connection, so it is best to leave these options on their default values.

More information about these and other tweaks are available at the MozillaZine's Firefox Tuning Thread.