I use chrome exclusively. I for one welcome our google overlords.

I use both IE9 & 10 (using 9 in XP and 10 in Win7) and Firefox. Practically, I do not see much difference in performance among them, if any at all.

The notable difference is the loading speed of the programs. IE starts instantly when clicked. Firefox takes a few seconds longer to load (I have 10 add-ons currently).

In Firefox, I like the add-ons with the active add-on developing community. I use the DownloadHelper to download Youtube and Adblock Plus for blocking adds.
IE has Tracking Protection addons too. But I couldn't get a worthy video downloader for IE.

When some sites do not load well in one browser, especially with missing stuff, I use the other browser.

IE10 is having some difficulties with www.sierragamers.com, inspite of turning on the compatibility mode - the left navigation menu is missing.

Am I the only one experiencing hard drive thrashing when using FF?

To speed up browsing experience it is good to turn off swap file. And turn off browser's disk cache.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Am I the only one experiencing hard drive thrashing when using FF?

I get it too, but only when running plug-in stuff that's processor demanding, like Java things.

On the topic though, I have both IE and FF as my two primary browsers and switch between them depending on which one works best with a website. Oddly enough, there are a couple pages out there that don't work properly with EITHER of them. :P

As for other browsers: Opera was OK when I was still primarily using Windows 98 as Opera was the only major browser still being updated to work with 98 at the time. Chrome bothers the heck out of me because of how "viral" the process of getting it is. (Several installers out there for other programs have "Install Chrome" as a checkbox that's pre-checked.) I should note, the very first time I tried to do anything with Chrome, it crashed when attempting to do a search on Google's actual website... Seriously. XD

I've yet to encounter a "perfect" browser. I don't think such a thing will ever exist given the way the net works. :/

My working PC is fairly shitty, but the only serious problem I'm experiencing with FF (v19.0.2) is when I close it down. *IF* Firefox happens to be using over 500mb of swapfile, closing it down results in severe thrashing and an unresponsive pc for minutes on end (even the mouse cursor barely responds). This doesn't happen below that limit.

Going to check out Palemoon... it definitely sounds promising.

FF v.20 works nice for me. I have several programs openend (Total Commander, Winamp, FF) and FF is using about 350MB RAM.

Are you sure memory comsumption is FF fault? Or could it be the Superfetch service on Vista/7 (which I have disabled btw)?

PS - I am on an old Phenom 1 (Agena, with TLB erratum present) and 4 GB of DDR2 800 RAM - Win7 x64

Agree that there's nothing like a "perfect" browser, but Firefox's features seem hard to beat. ATM I use it on all my machines except my Tualatin retro rig- Opera being my browser of choice on low-end systems.

Firefox works great for me. I tried switching to Chrome or use Safari as main browser (I'm on OS X) but something is always bringing me back. Since I killed the system wide flash (Ijust don't want to take part in the endless security updates again and again...) I'm using Chrome for the few things that still need Flash. Not that many anymore.

I AM annoyed at the update frequency of Firefox...

This is what I do to make PaleMoon go hypersonic (works equally for Firefox).

- Move the whole PaleMoon/Firefox Profile folder to a ramdisk.

- Move PaleMoon/Firefox disk cache to a ramdisk.

- Tactical touches in about:config :

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests ····· user set ····· integer ······· 99

network.http.proxy.pipelining ················ user set ····· boolean ····· true

nglayout.initialpaint.delay ······················ user set ····· integer ······· 0

In my 440BX Tually I use the 'legacy' PaleMoon 3.6.32 version with the above tricks, works like a charm.

I'm quite happy with FF these days. I used to have problems with jerky frames a long time ago, but that's when I had a lot more tabs open, and nowadays I use the "Don't load tabs until selected" setting, so resource consumption appears to remain reasonable. Really, every browser should have had that option ten years ago.

I was using Chrome for a while, but it loses points in two respects: One, there seems to be no way in more recent versions to cause tabs to expand to a reasonable size and/or use a scrolling tab bar. And secondly, it is the only application I've seen so far that has managed to bring Windows 7 to a screeching halt. Several times, I've managed to get it to choke just like the bad old days of Win9x and limited GDI resources. I'm not quite sure what, exactly, was getting depleted, but I reckon the multi-process model had something to do with it.

I use Firefox too, can't stand Chrome (or Safari).
It is *supposed* to scale memory usage according to the amount of RAM you have installed; but it also depends on how many tabs you have open, the amount of javascript and the extensions you use.

FF works flawlessly for me on my I7 Win7 machine as well as on my ancient XP laptop. Most of the complaints about FF mentioned here can be caused by a bad or outdated extension. I have experienced many of the same things ion the past, which were solved by making sure that all of the extensions were up to date and if an issue still persisted, I simply disabled the extensions one by one until the problem went away.

The extensions are both one of FF's greatest strengths as well as one it its greatest weaknesses. As to Flash, I use Flashblock so no flash object loads unless I click on it.

I use an old version of Firefox (3.0), because I prefer it. Unfortunately some web sites are starting to break on this version though. Currently I use a separate machine with a newer Firefox for the occasions when I need a newer browser. Eventually I might have to use something newer on my main machine though.
The only annoyance I have with 3.0 is that when any browser tab gets stalled for some reason, it freezes up the entirety of all of Firefox, including all tabs and all windows. Maybe newer versions actually have a useful implementation of SMP, but I'll be skeptical until I see it. As a programmer, multi-CPU setups have always been interesting. As a user, the reality of them has always been underwhelming, not just with Firefox.
When watching youtube, I sometimes run out of space on my partition that I use for temporary files. I wish Firefox had an option to assign an overflow folder for large files (.flv's in this case).

I've ignored Chrome as I don't like Google in general, but I may look into it.
Palemoon sounds interesting.
Something I must say I hate about the newest Firefox versions, as well as Thunderbird, is that by default they will automatically update themselves, and any addons you have installed, without asking. It's literally a race to disable that behavior before it's too late. And with the newest versions I think even the disable option is hidden away in that "about:config" thing. Mozilla has developed a paranoid nanny-state attitude that I can't stand. I want a browser that treats me like an adult.

My main complaint with web browsing today is the way web page design has become excessively and frivolously client side scripted, but that's not something I can blame the browsers for, at least not directly.

IE6 was fast, I never agreed with the widely reported claims of Firefox being faster. I even tested this claim using a web page which was making this very argument. On whatever machine I was using at the time, probably a Pentium-II, it scrolled and operated quickly and easily on IE6 but was straining and lagging on Firefox (1.x or 2.x at that time). As my computers got faster it no longer mattered though.
The automatic prompts to install addons for IE6 was incredibly dumb and was the primary cause of it's virus problems. That behavior can be disabled but it's not a convenient process - you have to hack one of the DLLs to get rid of a popup message that will otherwise keep appearing. I think XP SP1 or 2 fixed that.

I'll look into the ramdisk stuff. No experience with it at all but looks like a good way to make use of the wasted RAM on my PC...

d1stortion wrote:

I'll look into the ramdisk stuff. No experience with it at all but looks like a good way to make use of the wasted RAM on my PC...

I have 32 GB of RAM, which is a complete and utter waste except in some tasks where I'm not in front of the PC anyways. I've been using this solution for a while and works great in Chrome (with some tweaking), Firefox and Calibre. I'd wish I could use a RAMDisk on more scenarios.

I just have 4 gigs in my PC. Two years ago you could buy this amount for €15 ($20) but the prices seem to have doubled now. Meh...

shamino wrote:

I've ignored Chrome as I don't like Google in general, but I may look into it.

I'm not sure I understand, but there are many options for Google-haters as far as Chrome is concerned. SRWare Iron, for instance.
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

Isn't using a ramdisk for a browser by definition the same as disabling disk caching entirely? Admittedly, I've never been too find of Firefox's insistence on keeping around urlclassifier3.sqlite, which is presently consuming 56 MB of space and seems to constantly be growing – apparently it is used for nothing more than storing FF's database of phishing sites.

When I disabled disk caching while having plenty of ram once, it only complained that I ran out of virtual memory......... despite having gigabytes and gigabytes of RAM unused.

I use 4 different browsers all opened at once:

Firefox for some sites with 5 or 6 tabs at once.

Chrome for other sites, mostly google sites, again 5 or 6 tabs open.

IE is used only for my VMware server apps due to the plug-in.

Maxthon 2 and 3, uses the IE engine/core so it can be seen as an IE clone.

Again, 5 or 6 tabs open.

Personally I have done some testing to find out which sites behave best with each browser and have setup starting tabs for each accordingly.

Wiith 16GB of RAM I really do not care too much about memory leaks but still have to exit and reload the browsers from time to time.