(Yet another) Firefox update

[Alyeska]

IE6 was better than Firefox 1? I question your sanity. Security wise, add blocking, and popup blocking; Firefox blew away IE back in the mid 2000s.

[Aniron]

What a piece of shit. Chrome has never been respectable.

Has Chrome fixed the way it allows ad-blocking, where adverts are blocked outright instead of being downloaded and then blocked?

[HeadCreeps]

Which IE version was the one where it stopped handling large javascript pages ineffectively? I know there for a while it really struggled to keep up with FF. Was before Chrome existed I believe.

Not that I really care which browser is better - they're all acceptable enough that it's down to people whining about tiny little quirks in the system which get fixed within days instead of entire versions (with year long release cycles) like it used to be. I've definitely heard good things about IE since its latest version release that had people on various boards admitting it may very well be unquestionably better than FF at the moment.

[Alan Bolte]

I recall I switched to Firefox 1.5 from IE6 primarily because I was tired of the lack of PNG support. I'm still on Firefox, mostly because I've been too lazy to try anything else.

We're still stuck with IE7 on WinXP at work. It crashes reliably every 3-5 hours and takes every window with it. I guess that could mostly be blamed on our Silverlight application, though. I dunno.

[Ford Prefect]

I didn't like Opera 9, but opera 11 was even fucking worse. It was so abysmally slow I couldn't even stand it for the few minutes I had to use it.

I have the invincible Newtype quantum reflexes of youth compared to whatever decrepit meatspace wetware your withered and ancient body is running, and I don't understand what you're complaining about here. One second to open new page = fast enough for everyone not named the fucking Flash.

[Lord Baal]

I use both Opera and Firefox without any trouble at all. Right now I'm at Opera. I quite don't like Chrome but out of personal tastes not performance issues.

[HeadCreeps]

I just took a look at your IE release dates post. It seems I had issues until IE 8 then, because I distinctly recall IE 7 being released and not solving the issue. It could have just been an anomaly (and is an anecdote), though.

[Enigma]

I've got both IE8 and FF7.01 and I'm sticking for the time being to FF. I've been using FF for so long that I've forgotten why I stopped using IE. But when I wanted to upgrade IE8 to 9, I can't, I need to have Win7. Sorry but I think FF is the way to go for me despite daily Flash crashes.

[Skgoa]

In my experience IE was slow, prone to crashes, was a prime vector for maliscious software and often didn't have the features or add-ons I wanted. So I switched to firefox very early on. (We had been using Netscape's various browsers before, so it was no big change.) And to this day NoScript, AdBlock and a couple of other essential add-ons are what keep me using FF.

[Skgoa]

Regarding the faster drawing: Yeah, thats exacly what I meant. I love that FF does that. I am someone who likes to get on with his browsing; I often close tabs before they finished loading, if I see they don't have the content I was looking for. Really, its the difference between starting to read the page, but having to wait, until it finished loading to read all of it and having to sit there watching a blank tab for a while. To me, that was the single biggest reason to use Firefox.

Regarding safety: I don't care what I could have activated in some menu. I liked that I didn't even have to, since in the early days I wasn't even in a viable target demographic for hackers. IE crashed (and still does) or gets maliscious code onto the system from webpages that other browsers just shrug at. Have you never gotten one of those "funny" links that, e.g., spawn 10k browser windows? More than once I heard or read IE users cry out in exasperation when all I thought was "is something supposed to happen?"
And what you describe one should do is several orders of magnitude more work than installing two add-ons. AdBlock removes all ads and NoScript removes all that unneccessary JavaScript web developers seem to love - and I can choose what parts to switch back on very very easily. Add to that add-ons like GreaseMonkey, BetterFacebook, etc., and its just that much easier and plain more fun to browse the web.

[Executor32]

Speaking of Chrome and not displaying things right, I went to a service call the other day where the customer (using Chrome on a MacBook) was having issues with streaming video, namely Youtube and some 'make money online' site he was getting into. Mostly the problem was a faulty wireless router from Comcast, as Youtube worked fine after switching out the router, but the Flash videos on the other site still weren't loading. I tried loading the video page in Safari and, lo and behold, they loaded perfectly fine there.

[Xon]

I've always been dubious of wc3 "standards". These are the same asshats who thought xhtml 2.0 was a great idea.

[Xon]

You touched on one of the largest complains I have against wc3 as a standards body, that reference implementations and compliance tests appear to be something they hate and refuse todo.

Any standard which refuses to have an actual reference implementation to actually demonstrated that the standard is implementable in the first place is an amazingly dubious one.

[Skgoa]

Hey, if you like it, that's your choice.

But it doesn't change the objective facts about security or features.

Thats kind of my point. IE might very well be better when configured right. Just as BSD is more secure than anything else. But still, I prefer Mac OS and Firefox, due to several entirely intangible reasons.

edit: Mozilla has gone round the bend with their open source crusade/browser war 2.0 wankery, though.

[phongn]

You touched on one of the largest complains I have against wc3 as a standards body, that reference implementations and compliance tests appear to be something they hate and refuse todo.

What do you expect from an organization full of academic-types who hated the idea of HTML+CSS doing precision layout?

Any standard which refuses to have an actual reference implementation to actually demonstrated that the standard is implementable in the first place is an amazingly dubious one.

Isn't WHATWG supposedly doing that?

[Xon]

What do you expect from an organization full of academic-types who hated the idea of HTML+CSS doing precision layout?

The exact clusterfuck that was xhtml 2.0 that every major browser ignores.

Isn't WHATWG supposedly doing that?

Yeah. But W3C needed to be dragged practically kicking and screaming to the table with them.

[zipster]

As a web analyst I have to say the constant releases for FF have seriously hampered our process. Every update we have to add yet another testing stream and I cry at the hours of work they are creating for us.

I must say Chrome is by far the most pleasant to test on, we don't even update our test process for it as it is so seamless.

The worst by far is that demon IE7 which we are still forced to support because 5% of our users are currently on it.

I cannot wait until the day we get to drop those dummys, I will be doing the dance of joy.

[Isil`Zha]

Yeah, I just updated to 7.0 a couple days ago, after ignoring it for a couple weeks until my addons were updated. Now it's bugging me about updating to 8.0, with some 7-8 updates incompatible with it. Really, with this new release schedule, you'd think addon authors would just make maxversion=10 or something and release bugfixes in the event that something breaks.

Install the add-on compatibility reporter add-on - it will allow you to enable all your add-ons even if they're listed as "not compatible." Most of the time, the "problem" with the add-ons is that they simply are coded to not work with a version higher than they were last updated for (IOW, just a number.)

You may of course find that some simply don't work until updated, but in my experience a great majority of them continue to work just fine.

[Isil`Zha]

Warning! When you first install it, it will enable nearly any and all add-ons, even ones you know should not be enable anymore. Be sure to check your list of add-ons and re-disable anything that should be disabled. If in doubt, just disable everything that says "...will be enabled after you restart FireFox!" and start enabling the ones you want to test.

(Waited too long to edit this in.)

[Executor32]

You're about a week late on that, but thanks anyway.