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We love the web.
Are the days of Firefox being the infallible savior for web browsers coming to a close? This Wired blog post raises the question of whether Firefox is a necessity or a necessary evil. The liberation that Firefox symbolized for people entrenched in the Internet Explorer universe is not to be understated. Here was a lightweight, fast browser with functionality that well exceeded Microsoft’s browser by years. But now that Firefox is all grown up, gaining user acceptance every year and currently in its 2.0 phase, is it time to reevaluate its position as the browser of choice? Wired cites problems such as the size of the program itself, 49.5MB vs. Safari’s 16.8MB, and its tendency to suck down RAM as the primary complaints.
I’m more concerned with the latter. The memory leaks in the program have troubled me for some time. As a spot-check, my Thinkpad has been running for a little over 24 hours and Firefox is currently using 162MB of memory. This seems incredible and while I do have a few add-ons this has been a problem even with basic installs. What do you think, is this a Firefox problem or something larger to do with the evolution of the web?
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I still use it without reservations on Windows, but it’s ridiculous on an Intel Mac with the Rosetta RAM overhead (They say a program running under Rosetta requires 50% more RAM).
For development, it’s still hard to beat, thanks to the web dev toolbar and Firebug especially. But I’ve taken to using Safari for browsing. Text rendering is better on a Mac as well.
On Windows, there’s not much for a better alternative. IE7 is much nicer than 6, but arrives bloated out of the box.
Lately I’ve found myself migrating to Safari. I like Firefox a lot but the fact that it exhausts my memory is getting old very fast. I’m hoping that Mozilla figures out this issue.
The hard part about leaving Firefox is the amount of useful extensions that I use in my normal web browsing. If Safari had even a few of the big ones that I use, I probably would give up using Firefox as my main browser.
I’m all for browsing on Safari as well! Firefox is especially slow on older G4 macs. But Mike’s point is definitely well taken: the web developer toolbar and firebug plugins have become instrumental in the development process, it would be terribly hard to part with those two particular tools at this point.
I totally agree, Ryan. While I still use (esp.) Firebug for debugging, for everyday-browsing I’m more or less switched away from Firefox since it’s just getting a real pain on my Powerbook G4 after a few hours.
Safari is a fine browser and the only reason I use Firefox on my (Intel) MacBook is the bit at the bottom of the screen when you mouse over something in Safari -or, rather, the lack thereof. Safari doesn’t seem to display the destination address on mouse over in English and I do a lot of browsing in Japanese so this is unacceptable.