Firefox 4 vs. IE 9: FIGHT!

[Lemur]

Interestingly, Ars Technica has reviews of Firefox 4 (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/03/ars-reviews-firefox-4.ars) and IE 9 (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2011/03/the-most-modern-browser-there-is-internet-explorer-9-reviewed.ars) up pretty much side-by-side. Anybody using the new kids on the block? Thoughts?

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/viva_firefox_eats_ie.jpg

[Tellos Athenaios]

XUL is still utterly horrid on KDE (you know something is wrong when the old Windows NT 4.0 look is back), and what is with Firefox copying the Opera 11 look on Windows but doing a botched job of it? Those attempts are odd, and only moderately pleasing on the eye. Looks fancy, until you try reading white text on a translucent window background colour set in small font sizes against a backdrop of some landscape... Especially nice with a small pixel pitch: i.e. typical 20, 24 and 30 inch screens. On the browser side Firefox just works. It's a step up from 3 but nothing less than expected really, all the real changes happened way before 4.0 was pushed out. More of the same but faster, really.

Anyway IE has come a long was since the day of asking a crayon wielding toddler to draw an impression of your website for you (IE6) and has progressed to a somewhat more sensible adult which can keep its bouts of creativity to itself (IE9) considerably speeding up the process. The adult is none too smart about people though: the TPL's are convoluted even by MSIE standards mainly because when two lists disagree it is up to you to decide which site you trust. Of course you knew that the lists are going to disagree and of course you knew what the lists were all about in the first place, did you. So while the idea is definitely nice, the execution needs a lot of refinement.

The main thing why IE 9 fails to excite is not because it is such a great browser. It is because all the others have generally been at that standard or (subjectively) better than that for the past two/three years now. On the other hand, it is certainly good to see MS finally catching up even if lacks modern features and API support, at least in the performance & coding websites department it no longer makes you attempt tearing your face off.

What both browsers do is send/support some new HTTP header (do not track). But AFAIK Google et. all don't, so good luck with that. By contrast the EU bureaucrats appear comparatively smarter about solving this sort of thing: make it illegal and see who refuses to comply.

[LeftEyeNine]

A fight that Chrome oversees, I say. For fun.

[Lemur]

On the browser side Firefox just works.
Indeed, that has been my experience for the last few years. But now I feel less scared when relatives or friends are using IE; Microsoft does seem to have upped its game.

As for Chrome, meh, it's a great browser, but Google already owns my searches and my mail, and if I ever get a smartphone they'll own me there too. And I've gotten very used to the fox, so I'm what they call a "sticky" user.

[Xiahou]

I like Firefox's new interface and as always, customization ftw.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

What's great is that the Firefox release coincided with me getting unlazy enough to fix my router (and the problems it was causing with my wireless). So now it's like I'm getting the internet directly injected into my eyeballs, in a slick and customizable package.

[caravel]

Well IE is not really an option for me... but I've been running Iceweasel 4 at home for quite a while and no trouble so far. It seems faster and start up faster than 3.5, but I don't see that much of an improvement performance wise over 3.6 - but that's probably just me.

At work I run Minefield, which just went up to 4.2, when 4.0 was released, just for the hell of it really, no trouble so far apart from the odd little bug. I don't use any add ons apart from noscript and adblock, so add on compatibility isn't really an issue.

Performance wise, I would still have to go with Opera. I have an old "spare" laptop (celeron 866 with 256MB of RAM running Debian Sid and openbox) that suffers from very jerky scrolling in Iceweasel when browsing any forums that use the newer vBulletin software, i.e. the .org and the .com. When the page is loaded in Opera, it's as smooth as anything.

Second performance wise for me would have to be chromium. You can download a snapshot here (http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/) if you want to avoid all the extra corporate bling and tracking that comes with the chrome. If you go into the "under the hood" options and pretty much untick everything apart from the SSL settings, you won't be sending any more info to google than any other browser.

In terms of aesthetics, it's not my priority as such, but it does seem that the Mozilla project have been concentrating on copying other browsers. If you turn off the menu bar you get something like Opera 11's menu button, but with chromium's "tabs on top look". In earlier 4.0 beta releases there was even a progress bar inside the address bar layout, which personally I could not take to at all - thankfully that was scrapped - but the new "pop up status bar" in 4.0 is almost a carbon copy of chromium's...

[HopAlongBunny]

Firefox forever

I wish there was some sort of "mind-link" for NoScript so I wouldn't need to adjust it so often.
But then I would probably be eaten alive on a porn_site (just say yes! yes!! yes!!!)