Why I almost ditched Firefox for Internet Explorer

09:05.40 - Sunday 18th May 2008   (Link to This Entry)

As many people whose work revolves around the Internet I tend to stick to the same few sites because quite frankly I don't have time to sit at Google surfing for new sources of news all day. I recently added Digg.com to my list of sites to visit, and that's where Firefox started to get annoying.

Digg isn't the only site to highlight the problem, but in my little closed world of bookmarks it's the one that shows up problems the most because it sends you all over the Internet. After a few pages on the site, Firefox starts to seriously chug, weighed down, seemingly, by the sheer number of ads on the sites it links to.

This is partly my fault because I like to open a link in a new tab and browse for more links while those new pages load - I don't like sitting around waiting for a page to load. Sadly, Firefox would sit waiting for an ad to load from some random subdomain and that would hold up the operation of the entire browser - I would sometimes be unable to do simple things like switch tabs or scroll a document because m.blah.some.domain.com was slow in serving me a flash ad. It was getting so bad I almost switched back to Internet Explorer.

Thankfully, Firefox 3.0 RC1 was made available and the problem seems to have been resolved, or at least reduced so much as to be unworthy of note. It may simply be because pages load so much quicker now, but I've yet to run into the waiting-for-ads problem that plagues this new-fangled ad-funded internet. My gut instinct is that something in the whole multi-threadedness of the browser has been fixed big time, and it works like a charm so far.

CPU and memory usage also seem to be down at first glance, and the whole browser seems much snappier and faster. Applicaton loading times are about the same, but once loaded it positively flies along.

This is a major improvement for the leading OS browser, worthy of a download and no mistake.