I use Firefox almost since the beginning, but it became very bloated and seems to have major issues regarding memory management. Sometimes I can close all tabs and memory usage is still over 500mb and response times from clicks etc. become very huge. Only a restart helps in such a case (but that takes a while since Firefox needs like a minute to close…).
I’ve also used Opera 10 from time to time, but I felt some features/extensions are missing (mainly dev tools and adblocker) AND the diff-view on Google Code was messed up, but it’s obviously fixed since 10.63. Now I tried version 11 Beta and it’s just awesome! It’s possible now to install/uninstall “real” extensions without restart. Overal performance is very good and (on the long run) much better than Firefox. Only cons for me are the lack of some good extension, but I guess they will come with time. Also the beta still has some small bugs, but they will probably dissapear in the final version.
What you think of Opera? You can try the beta here.
Some of my friends tried Chrome some months ago. When i saw the very clean and lean UI i gave it a try, too, and was pretty impressed of all the onboard developer tools. A week later if found myself not starting up FF at all anymore (something i did every day for about ten years or so).
There are tons of addons and the Addon API is pretty cool (think of an addon as a “hidden” webpage with some js attached). There are some drawbacks though: There’s nothing like the famous LiveHttpHeaders FF extension for Chrome. And the headers displayed in the developer tools are not the raw headers, but some filtered version of them (whoever made that decision ). The source code view also always seems to reload the page, which is nasty, if the current page resulted e.g. from a POST operation. But you can at least inspect the current page elements, so this is not such a big deal.
All in all i like Chrome for its "reduce to the max" approach.
Mainly it’s about Firebug. Though Opera comes with a pretty good dev-console called Dragonfly, it’s not as good as Firebug imo. But at least it’s inbuild and faster. For now there are only 8 simple dev-tool extensions for Opera 11.
@ Mike
I have Chrome installed for developing/testing, but I don’t really like it. Maybe too simple for me.
I have to say that I am a FF-Freak, but I do agree with you that, even in a Macosx, it have huge memory problems… you are right, it doesnt goes down of 500 MB and sometimes it even hangs but… I have yet not found a better tool that firebug or some of the extensions to debug, measure time loads, etc…
Yes, Chrome is ok, but not powerful enough… we Neeeeed to check HTTP headers, debug server and client values -no need for breakpoints (hated IE), manipulate CSS styles ‘live’ to see what the hell is happening with floats, variants or whatever our beloved browsers do with our cool designs…
I will give it a go… I did before when I was just programming in javascript due that its engine pre-compiled the scripts and they were flying as no-one has yet done.
Anyone know if there is a CSS way to get rounded corners in IE ?
Just answered my own question
Even Microsoft have promised, and demonstrated in their recent preview release, support for border-radius from Internet Explorer 9 onward (without prefix).
Maybe in a few years we can drop the -moz and -webkit prefix.
I use Google Chrome because it starts faster and it looks nicer, but Firefox is better because Firefox extensions can hook deeper into the browser (NoScript, better AdBlock etc.). I’m going to switch back to Firefox when 4.0 final is released. Opera 11 extensions seem to be “lightweight” extensions like the Chrome ones. However, I use Opera on my mobile devices because the “Turbo” mode saves bandwidth and traffic.
I use Opera for every-day browsing, research and IRC, Firefox for development and testing.
Currently i’m quite disappointed though, since Opera is frequently crashing on OS X, on two different systems. But the UI is still unmatched by other browsers in my opinion, so even this annoyance won’t make me switch.
Currently using Opera for browsing and using Firefox for main browser in developing and testing project. Opera is cool, only the main drawback from it is its javascript things. Sometime the Opera is so different with the other browser, that I can’t even use it on particular Web.
For example, I just can’t sending email with attachment in Gmail with Opera, and also in Google site and Google doc, there are some missing feature. But I haven’t tested Opera 11 yet, maybe it has done some improvement in its javascript??
). The source code view also always seems to reload the page, which is nasty, if the current page resulted e.g. from a POST operation. But you can at least inspect the current page elements, so this is not such a big deal.
to monitor incompatibilities.
