Um, duh? In addition to the add-ons you listed, I'd suggest trying out Stylish, NoScript, Foxmarks, Firebug, Flashblock, Aardvark and GooglePreview (and FlagFox, just 'cause it's fun). I've arguably gone overboard in the add-on category but those have all really helped clean up my browsing experience.

Welcome to 2005.


Maybe next week we can all hear about these newfangled iPods and how they're so handy.

And don't forget about that new Facebook thing everyone is talking about!

Y'all ever heard of usenet?

Aah, Usenet. The original file sharing mecca, even back for WaReZ SiTEs. Go for it, everyone. It puts The Pirate Bay to shame and isn't torrent based! CNS can't stop you!

Hope you don't get v&.

Write an article on THAT! Haha.

I use Firefox as it has the best tools for web developing (which I do very little of these days, but when I want it... it's there). I don't use anything else because I don't see the point in using many different browsers.

Firefox will most certainly let you run things which can harm your computer. Most of your comparisons are against IE 6, which admittedly wasn't built for today's Internet. IE 7 is much better in nearly all regards.

Firefox suffers from a myriad of problems. There are widespread reports of memory leaks (for the non-technical, this is when a program arbitrarily gobbles up more and more of your system's memory, hoarding it so others can't use it, until your computer becomes non-responsive. The only cure is to restart Firefox, or restart your computer). Many of the addons can cause leaks themselves.

Firefox 2 had a very poor Javascript implementation, and sites with poor Javascript performance could lock your entire browser for quite a long time. They later added an option to "kill" Javascript that runs too long, but it's still quite annoying.

They also use a (now outdated) model of threads for different tabs / Flash applets / etc. instead of processes. Picture it like this: every tab in Firefox shares the same memory, and all sorts of other goodies, in complicated ways. This means that whenever anything crashes or runs for too long, it will close your entire browser. Ever went to a site that had some complicated Flash, and it closed the 42 tabs you had open? More modern browsers (Google's browser, for one) use individual processes for everything. The net effect is that when something crashes, it brings down whatever crashed (the Flash box, a tab, etc) rather than everything.

Firefox, when you install all of the above addons, is quite slow. It's up to you to determine if you want your entire system to devote itself to Firefox. Other browsers generally have smaller memory footprints.

Basically, to sum up: Firefox isn't any better than any other browser out there, intrinsically. It's benefits lie in that it's cross-platform (others are, as well, notably Opera and Safari to some extent) and the addons system is well done. It's also clunky, slow, can hoard memory, and is inherently more unstable due to the threaded model.

I challenge the author of this article, and others, to actually legitimately try other browsers to see if they work for you. Browsers are like partners in life: none are perfect, but some are more or less better for you. You should try some out to see what works the best.

While I admit Chrome is better designed than most browsers, I disagree that its "better than" any "modern" browser, its just different; better in some ways, broken in others. While the idea of separate tabs belonging to separate processes sounds nice its not that wonderful and certainly does not make threads "outdated". By splitting tabs up into processes Chrome doesn't really have control over scheduling the tabs anymore and for whatever reason, doesn't render tabs in the background. The whole reason I open 45 tabs is so they load while I'm reading something else. If it takes the thing between 5 and 10 seconds to render a tab after I've switched to it, every time, then that sort of makes the "better" process model suddenly a lot less usable. Add to that the added overhead of context switching and process creation/destruction. Depending on the implementation, Chrome will either use shared memory or message passing to allow the tabs to communicate with each other. The latter destroys any security multiple processes would have created and the former creates yet more overhead. If you wanna see Chrome slow to a crawl, do The MySpace Test. Go to MySpace, and open about 10 or so random user's profiles and watch switching tabs in Chrome become impossible. It is nice, though, that I can kill those individual tabs which would be impossible in Firefox.

You're also arguing that processes are "the way" to create stability amongst tabs where I'd argue that you don't need that at all. If your JavaScript engine doesn't suck (admittedly, Chrome has the most awesome JavaScript implementation ever) then JavaScript isn't going to crash your browser. If you're worried about plugins crashing it, then install a signal handler for SIGTERM and SIGKILL and kill the relevant plugin when you get the signals.

FireFox is *not* "quite slow" when you install several addons. I challenge you to disable all of your addons and restart Firefox, guess what, its not faster. Now, if you go ape shit and install every addon you think might ever possibly be almost useful, then yeah, it'll die.

You admitted to using Firefox on a daily basis for totally legitimate reasons but I'll throw your challenge back at you. Go grab Chrome and IE7 and try using them for a time and see if its truly not better than both of them. To be perfectly fair, I *would* use Chrome over naked Firefox (if I were on Windows) but the lack of NoScript, /Find Bar/, and all the developer extensions would be suboptimal.