The Best Browser yet or at least the best Firefox

Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 shipped on the Thursday and it seems to work faster, has user changeable skins and is no more appear to be buggy than 3.5 which is faint praise.

Considering Microsoft’s continuing problems with IE, it is no wonder more people are switching to Firefox. Microsoft IE 7 and 8 are said to have 63% of the browser market while Firefox has 24% (Market Share.) Safari and Chrome have 4.5% each. Those numbers are reversed for people who read NJN Network: 54% use Firefox, 32% use IE and 7% use Safari.

Upgrading was a cinch: just click on the upgrade link and within a minuter or two Firefox was asking me if I wanted to put some personality on my browser, AKA skins. My browser is supposed to be sporting a musical motif but it feels like 60s psychedelic. The choices are vast.

Is Firefox faster than IE?

Firefox 3.6 is supposed to be 20% faster than 3.5 and 300% faster than IE 8. ComputerWorld tested the browsers with SunSpider JavaScript and Firefox 3.6 beats everything except Chrome. Chrome however is not a complete browser which explains its speed.

SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results. Times are in milliseconds. Smaller numbers are better. chart - Computerworld

In a real world test, with a stop watch, I bench marked Internet Explorer 8 against Firefox 3.6. This was a real user test doing things you might do again and again. I ran the same events several times and the results were accurate in terms of perception.

The computer was a Q9300, 2.5 GHz, Windows 7 64 bit, 8 GB RAM on a 1 Gbit LAN connection with the cache cleared.

The tests were: load the  home page in the browser, re-load it, load NJN Video and Hulu, re-load, start a video, re-select, load YouTube, play a video. NJN Video shares the same site template (a look and feel) as Hulu so we tested both and results were essentially the same.

For initial loading, Firefox is about 2 seconds faster than IE 8 ( 6.5 seconds versus 4.5 seconds) but IE 8 closed the gap the second time on the same page (5.1 seconds versus the same 4.5 seconds for Firefox.). When the response time is longer than 2-3 seconds you will notice it.

Loading the video site, IE 8 took 8.5 seconds versus Firefox’s 6.1 seconds. Both of them were faster the second time the site was loaded – IE 8 4.5 sec. versus Firefox 3.7 sec. Firefox was still faster.

Playing the video, IE 8 bested Firefox – 3.5 sec. versus 5 sec. Again, each was faster starting the second video.

IE 8 loaded YouTube and played videos faster than Firefox – 2 sec. versus 3 sec.

So some things are faster and some slower. IE Compatibility mode can slow it down.

Compatibility Mode

When I was testing IE 8, which is not my normal browser, the mouse cursor was jumping all over the page. It felt like I had the wrong drivers on the laptop touch pad. It made it very difficult to edit in WordPress which is the platform of this blog.

There is a small icon at the end of the address bar in IE 8 that indicates if a site meets all the latest standards in HTML5 and CSS2.1. Some of the larger websites are compatible but many sites don’t including WordPress itself are not compatible. WordPress is becoming the defacto standard for blog sites. The Washington Post and CNN are now published with WordPress. We assume WordPress will revise the codebase but for now it’s not a big issue since fewer than 20% of users are on IE 8.

Internet Explorer 8 compatibility mode

You can turn on a protected compatibility mode which stopped the cursor from hopping around but that slowed down the screen refresh. I’ll stick with Firefox for now.

Stability

Both browsers will crash. Firefox crashes when you load large numbers of tabs in the same window but it has good recovery. I have a Firefox session with 16 tabs open that has crashed twice but it restored them all with one click.

IE 8 crashed when I tried to preview this post, which is probably related to compatibility mode. Getting back to where I was took an annoying number of screens. Did I want to report the problem? Block the site? etc.

IE 8 is actually better at protecting sessions since a single tab crash does not bring down the whole session. Firefox provides less protection and a big crash can take down multiple windows. So far it’s been a minor annoyance.

Firefox has memory leak problems. When you close tabs it doesn’t free up all the memory. I find it’s a good idea to close everything once or twice during the day. Sometimes it needs a computer reboot.

All in all, Firefox 3.6 seems a tad faster and still works better for me than Internet Explorer 8 but to each his own taste.  The customized skins are cool but not worth a switch.

I won’t likely switch back to IE 8 since it drives me batty when I am editing.