Methinks this is a tad biased, but nevertheless an interesting run through the two contenders in the ‘browser wars’. The authors conclude that in five out of five areas Firefox is better than IE7. I’d like to believe it but, as I’ve said, I think there’s a bit of bias in there.
It’s funny though. ‘Product wars’ are a big feature of all writing on products – responding to some innate tribalism. But what’s going on here is so much more interesting when you’ve got two products not representing tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee but wholly different production systems. It really is of immense interest. Like the Hubble space telescope for looking at the heavens. I’m watching in fascination. And barracking for Firefox.
Well I’ve just had Firefox crash on a new computer (while IE 7 completely brought down my old ailing computer). But one thing that IE is definitely better at is using less resources. Firefox with 5 tabs open uses around 50 Megs of memory to IE’s 30 odd.
Nicholas, I recall from your previous post that IE reported the Intel graphics driver was dud. You should update that driver and possibly get more memory too.
It’s interesting how these things work: I have a 3yo old tower and having been using FF2 up to 12 hours a day for 2 or 3 weeks without crash.
It must be all those po*n sites you visit, Nicholas! :-)
When I do my e-banking at NAB, I always get a warning page when they realise I am not using IE. Are they on the M-soft payroll!? Yet, I cannot use IE at all for NAB banking because it’s somehow got a permananet pop-up blocker which I can’t turn off.
Also, as Nick will attest, FF is much more stable for editing posts at Troppo through WordPress.
I left a comment before but with a different email address, apparently resulting in it not showing up yet.
My suggestion, Nicholas, was that you update your Intel graphics driver. In an earlier post you mentioned that IE had flagged that driver as a problem. They are both good browsers and shouldn’t be crashing.
Chris you can turn that warning page off by clicking the box saying “Don’t show me this again”. I use Firefox on NAB internet banking with no problems at all.
Thanks Yobbo, I tried that. I suspect that IE has been hacked by so many viruses now that it is hard a pale shadow if its original self. I am upgrading my computer next month and we’ll see how it goes.
By the way, the reason you get the message is that a lot of web pages only check for IE/Non-IE.
The message is a safeguard in case you are using an obsolete browser like Netscape or some kind of non-graphical browser which you wouldn’t be able to use internet banking with.
I believe you can set Firefox to identify itself as IE to web pages to get around this kind of message, but it may cause some formatting errors as some pages can serve different CSS styles depending on whether you are using Mozilla/IE.