Whoa, wait, what the hell are you smoking?! and please god all might don't tell me you're going back to IE or else I'm going to have to hunt you down and hit you in the head with a keyboard. I'm betting you're probably using one too many extensions.
I find Firefox slower than Safari, but faster than IE on a windows machine. I think Lech could be right. Do you have many extensions running? What else do you have running with FireFox? They could all be factors.
I have 8 ff windows open with about 6 tabs each and have done for a couple of weeks and its only just starting to get noticably slower than i'd like it to be...
After bothering counting, flx, i have 30. But i still wouldnt want to think of it... Back when i still used IE i longed for the multi desktop feature of kde/gnome so i could have one desktop for browsing, one for msn, etc. Then i found tabs and the world is a better place.
Heh, I remember an old ATI card my brother had allowed for "scrolling" of the desktop area under a single monitor as if it were several monitor spaces in one. It was a fairly nifty feature. However, Mini, if you own a nVidia card, there is a multi-desktop feature (ala *nix desktops) in the driver settings. I don't personally use it, but I'm told it's fairly invaluable to others who are used to that kind of environment.
Yeah lech - i've seen it but ...meh. Tabs work for me. I dont like using too many in one window though - i like to get a bit of the title of the page so i know which is which. I also use them to group stuff.
It makes me sad, but I have started to notice FF taking more and more resources, gone are the days of FF 0.9, at the moment I have just restarted my computer at work, I have only FF open and three tabs on it and it already takes 44KB memory and 40KB of Virtual Memory, usually when I have more programs open like Photoshop that can usually take around 300KB memory and up to 500KB vMemory killing FF really helps.
But then again, I really think that any browser would have similar problem, so meh, I don't bother.
44kb of memory? honestly, if you have at least 512 mb of memory running under a decent cpu and it takes less than 5 seconds for the app to start up and you're complaining, you're spoiled. Honestly, I can see if there's a problem where it takes more than a couple of seconds between tab switches. It's not the most perfect software, that's a given, but it works :)
With all the features and extensions firefox offers, it's no suprise it leaves a fairly large footprint in memory and swap space. I'm sure if you could truely gague how big of a footprint IE uses, in addition to it's embedded components you might be suprised. The only reason you don't see a hit is because it's running from the time you boot up your machine :/
I don't use IE because my IE is full of some porn popups and shit like that, and the strange thing is that I haven't opened it once since I made a clean install on this comp.
In a foolish mood I once tried to delete IE from my computer compleletely... but it's still there... and I get this mad thing where sometimes when I open it, it forces a tab to popup in Firefox, which then launches a download dialog for some mad system cleaner... scary!
launching some Help depending on applications also ...
I use FF and it's pretty slow on startup with one of my computer (256MB of Ram, old system HD), no problem with another more recent. But it's loaded with many extensions (I should consider using 2 or more profiles) so I can't really compare with the old crappy simple fast IE or the way faster free Opera 8.5.
A program exists that pre-load FF in memory. The boot is 3 seconds longer of course, but FF then appears instantaneously. Not to be used with less than 384MB I think
FF does take up more resources than I'd like but its wtill better than IE. IE blows in soo many ways. If FF is getting sluggish drop your bazillions of extensions (which is the cause 98% of the time when the "Im dropping FF" topic goes up).
Or try a new profile, still slim down on the extensions if you can (if you have any.). Or try a reinstall. Make sure you delete the FF folders.
I find firefox a little slow at times, especially starting up.. although I use custom themes and a few extensions. I would never switch back to IE because of it though.
i'm not a huge fan of safari for some reason. i haven't been able to pinpoint exactly why. personal preference, i suppose.
i used to have to use safari for my online bill pay because for some reason my bank is too stupid to realize firefox has the same security as netscape. then i found the user agent switcher extension. that thing's great. it fools the website into thinking i'm running ie6 on winxp. huzzah for shoddy programming!
I think the fine line is cross the moment the user either wants the application to stick out or blend into the rest of their operating system. After that it's down to the features offered and quirks/bugs that seperates it from it's similar sister-products.
Which version? I still don't have 1.0.7 (and also not 1.5b/tc) but it works with a slightly older one. And there should be an extensions like tabmix+ or whatsoever that corrects the problem. Well, I hope so because that is the reason I didn't like the free Opera: tab behavior. :-D
Middle Click stopped working on one computer yet worked on another for me. I didn't get it. Changed my work computer now and it's working again. I'm happy.
i have the super duper brand newiest version (1.7 or something i think) and the middle click doesnt work on my mac at home, my mac at work, my pc at my old job, or my moms pc at home. its so lame.
The upgrade from RC1 to RC2 sped up the loading of some pages that contained JavaScript noticably for me.. which was a regression from 1.0.* as far as I could tell.
I haven't noticed anything about RC2 that bothers yet. Hopefully they'll drop 1.5 next week?