Firefox usage

Haven't wanted to use IE ever since I got Firefox back in december :D, but I have been forced to use it ever so often as a huge percentage of the web is not w3c compliant :mad:. That being said I hope that more of the web complies with w3c so we can finally completely discard IE. :p
 
To be honest: I can't wait until IE updates to tabbed browsing. FF can be very irritating. Copy / paste to excell files is not working properly; FF goes into a coma if left dormant for too long. And there's another problem w.r.t. gmail, but I can't remember what ...
 
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Can't say I've experienced any of those problems beyers ?
Then again, I haven't tried copying and pasting to excel yet.

One thing that does bug me about FF is the input forms in the phpBB forums, where it does erratic things when trying to auto create links and stuff like that.

Anyhoo, who wants to make bets on the size of the iexplore 7.0beta download ?

I reckon 70meg

Considering ie6 is 50meg - 10 times more than FF.

Heh, I know which browser I'll be sticking with !
 
beyers said:
To be honest: I can't wait until IE updates to tabbed browsing. FF can be very irritating. Copy / paste to excell files is not working properly; FF goes into a coma if left dormant for too long. And there's another problem w.r.t. gmail, but I can't remember what ...
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I don't really have a problem with the excel thing...I don't do that:)

The coma thing is probably not FF but one of the extensions.

gmail seems fine with me...no problems at all.
 
The problem with GMail is probably related to the proxy u're using.
With freeproxy, I get problems, and have to bypass the proxy for gmail.com.
But at work (proxy=squid), there are no problems.
 
OK I retract the gmail comment until I can substantiate it. I will set my gmail notifier again to open in FF by default, and see what happens... for some reason I changed that to IE earlier because of some irritation ...

Regarding the "coma" thing: it is real in my case ... but possibly it is because I have such a slow machine (pls dont ask for details).

One further problem I experience is when I open a link in a new tab: it happens with a rather high frequency that the new link opens only after a second or third try. Does anyone experience that?
 
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No hassles on this side Beyers. I do everything you do with no worries on FF.
 
If I am not mistaking you for another Beyers then I will come to your house and help you figure it out.

:)
 
One thing wrt Fifefox versus IE, IE starts faster than Firefox *but* this is because IE is because IE is basically Windows Explorer which is already running. So to get a proper comparison open Firefox, close it and then open it again and its pretty instant.
 
it is... but IE has a very cool feature which is update this website on every visit.. .which is cool for developing... esp in flash... but I think that may have been Sentech's fault cuz doesnt seem to happen at all with iBurst.
 
ic said:
Ok here is a question: does Firefox have a Browser/WebBrowser object that can be used to integrate into your own apps, and if so how does it compare with IE's?
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ic, I have done work on exactly this, i.e. integrating the browser component into an application of ours. Firefox definitely DOES have such a thing, it is designed to do this, and that is what Gecko is for, it's the underlying browser *component*, and Firefox is just a browser app built with the component. There is a Mozilla ActiveX control which wraps Gecko: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm. Actually Mozilla and Firefox are two totally different browsers but both built using Gecko. The new Netscape is also just a Gecko browser. Anyone can build a browser using Gecko; they'd all just be "Gecko browsers" .. pretty cool actually to have a standards-compliant cross-platform browser component (IE is not standards-compliant and not really cross-platform either, unless you count the Mac IE implementation which is an abomination (I mean IE not Mac)). There are also Gecko wrappers for x-platform APIs like wxWidgets, e.g. wxMozilla.

I have tried integrating both IE and Gecko into our app via ActiveX. What I've found is that both of them were buggy or incomplete, but in different ways. IE has some very serious bugs that make it virtually useless in certain cases for embedding (in particular when the data source is a memory stream instead of a URL or file, it often renders the HTML as text without parsing it, even the latest versions have this problem, and I haven't found a way around it; my HTML is valid (checked with w3 validator) and specifies the correct doctype). The Mozilla ActiveX control was worse (for our case), as it didn't handle memory data streams at all. Unfortunately using memory streams for HTML data is necessary for us, although it may not be for most other applications.

I last tested the Mozilla ActiveX control at least six months ago, some time before FF1 came out, so this problem might have been fixed by now, I don't know. Actually I see now they are "post version 1", and when I tested they were still pre-1.0 and labelling themselves alpha, so maybe memory streams have been implemented .. gosh I sure hope so, I will make a point to check again.

The IE control has a number of other irritations, e.g. various focus-grabbing problems that require painful tweaking to work around, you can't turn off selection of text, it's a pain to disable right-click etc. Actually I hate the IE control.
Gecko's "embeddability" is actually a pretty cool feature; combined with Linux, you could customize and embed an OS plus browser into e.g. just about any appliance.
 
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MansoN said:
Never heard of or experienced that problem.
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FF tends to be quite memory hungry, and it may be that FF is getting swapped out to disk while doing other things, especially if you don't have much RAM, but even if you do, Windows memory management is awful and over-aggressively puts things into swap. Then it takes a while to switch back because it has to load pages from swap back into memory. This is actually a general Windows problem and happens with many apps, particularly those that tend to use a lot of memory like FF (not to sleight FF, I like FF, but have to be honest here!) ... having lots of RAM will definitely help this problem though, but not get rid of it, the lousy memory management is one of the things I dislike most in Windows.
 
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