Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer

Firefox is SLOW. Ver 1.0 preview release, and IE is faster on my box. XP, 2 x 2400+ AMD MP, 1gig ram.

Tabbed browsing? WTF? Never used it, even in Opera. If you need IE tabbed browsing, just enable "Group like icons", there, you got it for IE as well. Sheesh. Oh, and FF takes xxK total, and IE xxK per window? SO WHAT. GO BACK AND READ THE SPECS, THERE'S RAM FOR DAYS. Size doesn't matter.

Yeah, FF is probably fun for those that like to tweak more than actually browse... but I rate on out-of-box, not after I've tweaked it to death.

The fastest, hands down, is Opera. Try going back to visited pages, ESPECIALLY ones that have had form information posted. FF and IE choke, asking, "...duhhhh, should I send again? ...you sure? ...super sure?" Geez, just show me the page as it looked a few seconds ago!

Sorry, but FF didn't wow me. Opera did, and I'll be going back to it.

group like icons? doesnt that huddle things in the taskbar? doesnt sound like tabbed browsing

Tastes are different and i think group like icons is not really the same as tabbed browsing. ;P

IE Rocks! also alot of download sites dont work with anything other than IE.
IE is simple, but works well for me

ben

(sigh) People of cdfreaks, do i have to keep explaining why IE is so popular amongst the more gullible netizens?

The main popularity issue of IE comes from one thing only : It's pre-installed when you buy a pc. Yes. You buy a pc, you get some form of Windows on it and therefore you have IE. The normal user doesn't need more, so he (where i type he i mean he,she,it,aliens,borgs,fluffy animals and a couple of swedes) will not download.

The main compatibility issue of IE comes from one thing only as well. It can handle ANYTHING. It doesn't handle it good, but it can handle scripts, active-x, java, flash, you name it. It can even handle INCORRECT HTML.

This last one is the most important one here. More than 90% of all websites DO NOT follow the standard international rules of HTML. As with any decent program, you should get an error when something doesn't apply to protocol. Mozilla does, Opera does, FireFox does, Arachne does, but not IE. IE ignores everything and can read any crap HTML. IE can even use .ASP, .NET and all other fun things Microsoft reinvented. It's so "inventive" it can be used as a filescanner, mailer,msn notifier and so forth.

This is also the fundamental problem of IE. Because it accepts and reads anything, it also automagically installs dangerous scripts and is very susceptible to malicious plugins (Auto Dailers, Porn scripts, toolbars, you name it).

So, there's three things you can do :

1 : Learn how to browse (as in "learn how to drive a car")
2 : Protect IE (www.windowsupdate.com)
3 : Use another browser.

i recommend doing all 3

so, i just tested the latest firefox (0.10.1) on a dsl 2048kbit connection and compared to IE it is SLOWER!!! noticeable slower...
nevertheless, just for this pc here, which is @ my working-place, i will leave it installed, but it's not that great as some ppl are still saying...
and i don't like the dl-manager, which cancels the dl's if you exit the browser...
what do i need a real download manager (like get-right) for? to resume dl's even if i shut my pc down for a while...

so, as a result i will stay using IE...


Raz

For all of those whining about the "slow speed" of FireFox: Have you tried to enable HTTP pipelining yet?

To do so, search for the file "prefs.js" in your FireFox profile folder (location depends on your OS, for Win2k/XP: "C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.wsi" with [User Name] = your windows user name), open it in the editor and add the following lines to it:



You can edit the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" value as you wish, of course, but 8 should be more than sufficient.


If all this is too much hassle, download Computerbase Mozilla Optimizer 1.63 (freeware; unfortunately German only, but pretty self explanatory) and unpack it to a folder of your choice, no installation needed. Start the .exe (make sure you have shut down FireFox first) and choose these options:





(if you check "Computerbase.de als Startseite", you'll set "computerbase.de" as your homepage)

Now click "Anwenden" to enable HTTP pipelining and a few other tweaks. By doing so, you'll add the following lines to your "prefs.js" file:



If you want to add these settings manually to your prefs.js file, without using the tool, you can leave out (or edit) the last line, unless you are German that is.

If you should face any problems after using the tool (unlikely), you can revert the settings back to default by choosing the same options as can be seen above, with the exception of checking "Entfernen" (= remove) instead of "Hinzufügen" (= add).


This tweak should speed up page loading times considerably in most cases.

you can edit all of those by typing about:config in the address bar, and changing them manually. just look for each setting without the user_pref(" in front. firefox will automatically generate the prefs.js file for you.

Yeah, that's an alternative way to do it. Thanks for the addition.

Thought you were going to forget the swedes for a while there

I like firefox and use it almost exclusively. When I began using mozilla (1.0) it had a lot of problems with pages that would only work in IE but that rarely affects it now (mozilla and firefox are based off of the same code). And to all of you, Firefox is still not final, hence Preview Release. And to you that claim IE is faster remember that IE does more "incomplete rendering" meaning that it starts rendering before the page is fully downloaded so it looks like its faster or at least something happends.

One point i forgot is that firefox os not a browser where you must dl every week a new security fix *fg*
Sure IE is ok when a site doesnt work with firefox (that happens not often)

http://redmondmag.com/features/artic...itorialsid=439

Another Contra when it comes to IE they wanted to make the IE better and simple with the new updates and sp2 but what happened ? GUess ? The IE is more complex then ever before more code more MB more things to search holes. XD
Ok someone mentioned what about not being able to use getright or a dl manager ?
There are tons of extensions and plugins out for this tiny browser called firefox and they do work without much modifying on the code. :P

i don't like firefox still, but with newest getright (5.2) even firefox should be supported...

Prior to the latest version there was a extension for firefox called "download with" which gave you the option in the download window to use Getright ot Flashget for the download. but that extension has not been updated for the new build yet.

If that doesnt work try flashgot (plugin)

This is my preferred browser,it is so much faster and stable

i would reccommend firefox to anyone (running windows) over IE or netscape - I havent tried opera, nor any others.

If you apply the about:config pipelining tweaks, firefox is WAY faster than IE. and it seems to be a lot more stable to me.

every box in my house (5 of em) uses firefox exclusively. I manually deleted every shortcut to IE on each box. as a result, my weekly deleting of up to 300+ assorted spyware hits in adaware and spybot has reduced to about 2 a week.
that's reason enough for me.

and no more mystery IE toolbars. or homepage redirects. or search hijacks.

The story of a former IE-loyalist...

In the beginning, there was Netscape 1, and code65536 loved it.

And then came Netscape 2 and 3, and code65536 loved it.

Then came IE 4 and it swept code65536 off his feet. Slick interface, fast browsing, and, unlike Netscape 4, it actually knew how to render pages.

Time passed, and code65536 became more and more of a die-hard IE fan. Eventually, he went from using IE 4 and Netscape 3 side-by-side to eliminating Netscape 3 all together. He found himself writing rants against Netscape 4's poor rendering.

And then came Mozilla 0.7 in 2001. And it was... interesting. The popup blocking and tabbed browsing was nice, but the interface was poor, uncustomizable, unattractive, and it was slow--very slow. And so code65536 remained a IE fan, firing up Mozilla only once every month or two. A year later, came Mozilla 1.0, and it was still bad. code65536 was beginning to lose faith in Mozilla and remained a strong IE loyalist.

And then came, another year later, Firebird 0.6. code65536 was skeptical, having been dug into a deep, deep habit of using IE for over half a decade, and also having been dismayed by Mozilla. But despite all that, code65536 was impressed by what this little-known makeshift browser had to offer. And so Firebird began to live on code65536's machine, as a secondary browser. IE was still the primary default browser.

Time passed, and code65536 found himself using Firebird more and more often. The popup blocking was nice. But it was the tabbed browsing that he eventually succumbed to. Having discovered the handy "middle-click" shortcut (click your middle mouse button--i.e., the scroll wheel--on a link to open it in a new tab, and middle-click on an open tab to close it without having to reach over to the "X" button), he found himself inadvertently trying to middle-click the links in IE. It became increasingly frustrating to use IE's back and forward buttons when exploring Google search results instead of opening the results in separate tabs. And so one fateful day, when Firebird 0.7 spread its wings, IE, after so many years of loyal service, lost its default browser status.

Now, code65536 cringes at the thought of IE. My, how far we've come.

Moral of the story: Give Firefox a chance. It'll take some getting used to at first, but it'll grow on you. And soon, you'll find it hard to live without it.

As for speed, the early versions like 0.6 were fairly slow, but I'm finding the newer versions to be on par with IE's speed, and on certain pages that IE takes an inexplicably long time to render, FF is faster.

if only you had tried opera circa 2000, you would have dumped IE then

Rats! Forgot to add Opera to my story. Grr. And no edit button.

The first time I tried Opera was in 1999, IIRC. And I tried a number of versions of Opera, but I never liked it. First because it was expensive (I got Netscape 3 on the free academic license) and I didn't like the ads. Also, back in the day, it had pretty buggy CSS and JavaScript support. Not nearly as buggy as Netscape 4's, but certainly more so than IE's. So I guess that biased me against Opera's engine. The interface was also too cluttered and noisy--not very clean... and the ads didn't help with that bit. Subsequent versions fixed the rendering problems and cleaned up the interface somewhat, but by then, I had already had enough bad experiences with Opera, and the interface still wasn't as clean as what I would've liked. Firefox, on the other hand, packs all the features and had a nice, clean interface from day one.

once opera's designers finally decided to stop being less than 1mb to download, it got much better, imo.

plus, my uni license for opera got rid of that annoying banner

Think I'll have to try FF, I do like Opera but IE works with everything IME.

One simple reason why IE gets more hacks it's a bigger target cos more people use it, must be more fun to bring down a giant like MS than something 99% of people have never heard of. Juts look at the holes now being found in things like Linux now it's becoming more widespread and a higher profile target...

Yea. I personally don't think that the whole security thing is 100% fair. IE is probably a bit more dangerous inherently because of its tight integration, though. But I've never gotten infected with a virus. Never had a spyware problem. I mean, common sense can save people from a lot of these problems. But the browsing experience and the interface, IMHO, is better with FF.

(PS: The recent nightly builds have some cool features like forcing all new windows opened by external apps to open in a new tab.)