Slashdot Mirror
IE9, FF4 Beta In Real-World Use Face-Off
An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."
Try one of the Chrome forks, such as ChromePlus, SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, or a pure Chromium build. They're just like Chrome, but without the questionable Client-ID and RLZ modules that Google put in Chrome. I typically use ChromePlus since it has several features that I like builtin, but I've been trying the IE 9 beta and I like that as well. It's faster than Firefox in my opinion and I absolutely love the UI layout.
Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
I use Ubuntu 10.04. I have mostly switched to chrome (not completely; there are still sites that don't work properly with it). My problem with firefox was memory usage. I tend to have *lots* of tabs open and I often don't reboot for weeks. Firefox memory usage creeps up over time and my laptop slows. I keep reading that this is no longer supposed to happen, but it happens to me. Chrome with a comparable number of open tabs does not slow everything else down.
If Firefox were better behaved I would stick with Firefox.
SRWare Iron was created for the sole purpose of earning the "creator" some money on ad revenue. To borrow from my previous post on the subject:
Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron. The article and the linked IRC log tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.
The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.
Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
Alternatively just go to the Options page in google's Chrome version, and uncheck "Use a suggestion service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar". Crome stops the 'snooping' then.
And on this very site the exact article you linked to was dismissed as being pro-Microsoft FUD. And I ran a couple Google searches and I still saw little more than FUD from Microsoft sponsored research or security companies grouping vulnerabilities from all Gecko based browsers as "Mozilla" (which as we all know the average person will read as meaning "Firefox").
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Clearly you have not used Opera recently. I've personally been using it as my main browser for about 2 years, and the sheer degree of polish in the windows version is just totally unsurpassed by any browser, aside from it being bloody quick. Use it for a week, you won't go back.
(note: That is the windows version I am talking about. The linux version's UI is a bit off and it is a little slow to load)
Bartab + FF 4 beta = almost instant restart with 100+ tabs.
Oh, actually, looks like bartab like functionality is now the default in the latest builds, as per the anonymous coward below. http://blog.zpao.com/post/1140456188/cascaded-session-restore-a-hidden-bonus
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.