Is Firefox really faster and IE

I've been running firefox for a couple months now
and I've come to the conclusion that it is not that much better than IE
in terms of systems resources

e.g. I have firefox and IE set to the same homepage
When I turn on my computer I click four icons from my quicklaunch menu in
this order
1. Firefox
2. Outlook (email)
3. outlook express (for news)
4. Internet Explorer
I've done this over a few days and every time I do it Firefox is a last one
to launch
so I've concluded that is does not launch faster than IE

Next I look at the process windows to check the memory usage when my
homepage is loaded in both browsers
Firefox.exe Mem Usage 41800K
Iexplore.exe Mem Usage 30932K

In every other observation I've made firefox is using at least 5000k more
memory than IE

For now firefox is still my default browser but I am not quite convinced
that it is that much better than IE

 

Remember though that IE is completely interwoven into the OS. Large
parts of it are running at all times, and you don't even see it. Taking
that into account, FF uses fewer system resources then IE.

Lee

 

I guess that's the parts of IE that are running at all times, is main
reason why I'm "adviced" at Windows Update to install patches also for
IE, even if I'm not using the browser?

 

that's crap. ie is not 'completely interwoven' into the os. the only reason why ie loads faster is
that some of the dll's it is using are already loaded by other processes. iexplorer.exe just doesn't
have to load them from disk. that's the only reason why ie is usually faster then ff.
ff and ie have a quite similar architecture. the difference is that ie's rendering engine is used by
other products, the most popular beeing the windows help system.

 

I've found the same to be true. As others have stated, MSIE is embedded
into the Windows Op System. But apparently giving up speed using FF is
one trade-off we must suffer to gain the benefits of less MSIE browser
pop-ups, etc.

 

That's weird... I hear so many people saying that Firefox is slower
than IE, but I have the total opposite experience. One of the main
reasons I use FF is that it kicks IE's ass for speed on my system. I
have mine pipelined, but it was fast before I did that.

I find FF opens far faster than IE, and pages load somewhat (but enough)
faster.

???

-Drude

 

| I've been running firefox for a couple months now
| and I've come to the conclusion that it is not that much better than IE
| in terms of systems resources
|
| e.g. I have firefox and IE set to the same homepage
| When I turn on my computer I click four icons from my quicklaunch menu in
| this order
| 1. Firefox
| 2. Outlook (email)
| 3. outlook express (for news)
| 4. Internet Explorer
| I've done this over a few days and every time I do it Firefox is a last one
| to launch
| so I've concluded that is does not launch faster than IE
|
| Next I look at the process windows to check the memory usage when my
| homepage is loaded in both browsers
| Firefox.exe Mem Usage 41800K
| Iexplore.exe Mem Usage 30932K
|
| In every other observation I've made firefox is using at least 5000k more
| memory than IE
|
| For now firefox is still my default browser but I am not quite convinced
| that it is that much better than IE
|
| --
| Please remove the word REMOVE from my email address to reply to me
|
|


If that's how you're judging your Browsers, then you're probably right. it probably
isn't much better than IE.

So go back to IE for the little extra memory, (except for
the few MB that the spyware uses). Go back and enjoy IE for the quicker load times
(Oh yeah, minus the ads loading in the background). I truly hope that you have a more
enjoyable experience (Ignore the pop-ups, they're not THAT bad). Don't listen to any
of the Mags?experts?government, who are all trying to tell you that FF is safer, and
better. Don't listen to Secunia, who log 'Holes' (IE has 70-something criticals,
FF-4).
Go back to IE and have NO idea what's being loaded onto your system at any given
moment.

No, go back and enjoy your virus ridden, insecure, hacker open, ad/spyware infested
browsing experience. Really. Enjoy.

 

Am I dumb? (And I can already see a flurry of flaming messages
confirming that!)

But, ah, it's not the speed that "browsers" or "readers" LAUNCH on a
system but how fast they process or LOAD data from the World Wide Web.

My experience shows that Moz (currently v1.7.5) and Opera (v7.11) far
outperform MS Internet Explorer.

 

:
: If that's how you're judging your Browsers, then you're probably right. it
probably
: isn't much better than IE.
:
: So go back to IE for the little extra memory, (except for
: the few MB that the spyware uses). Go back and enjoy IE for the quicker
load times
: (Oh yeah, minus the ads loading in the background). I truly hope that you
have a more
: enjoyable experience (Ignore the pop-ups, they're not THAT bad). Don't
listen to any
: of the Mags?experts?government, who are all trying to tell you that FF is
safer, and
: better. Don't listen to Secunia, who log 'Holes' (IE has 70-something
criticals,
: FF-4).
: Go back to IE and have NO idea what's being loaded onto your system at any
given
: moment.
:
: No, go back and enjoy your virus ridden, insecure, hacker open, ad/spyware
infested
: browsing experience. Really. Enjoy.

I see a lot of folks are starting to get defensive and worked up.
I am not here to promote or disparage any browsers I am just listing an
observation.
spyware would run on computer regardless of what browser you use since a lot
of them are bundled with programs
that people download.
And only users who are not careful about protecting there system get viruses
and such.
What does IE has to do with someone opening an email attachment that
contains a virus.
What does IE has to do with someone who fails update their AV software
IE is not the reason, uneducated users are the culprit.
but I am not here to argue which browser is safer, just that I find at
firefox takes longer to load that other programs
on my computer and it uses more memory than other programs on my computer.

 

: Am I dumb? (And I can already see a flurry of flaming messages
: confirming that!)
:
: But, ah, it's not the speed that "browsers" or "readers" LAUNCH on a
: system but how fast they process or LOAD data from the World Wide Web.
:
: My experience shows that Moz (currently v1.7.5) and Opera (v7.11) far
: outperform MS Internet Explorer.
:

I disagree, that was the same thing said about Netscape 6. (it rendered
faster than Netscape 4, but I did not notice any difference between Netscape
and IE 5)
I have not notice any increase in the rendering speed of FF on websites that
I visit, over the speed that IE renders the same site.
Frankly I've seen the opposite. e.g. www.msnbc.com
can you give me a website where firefox noticeable renders a webpage faster
than IE?
as I said before FF is my default browser but many times I've had to switch
to IE because some pages just would
not display properly in firefox, even some without activex content.

 

As you can read, I do not use FF specifically... only Moz suite and
Opera.

Both these render significantly faster to my unscientific observations
on a number of site including <stuff.co.nz> for example.

 

Apart from the million and one reasons I could go into that make FireFox
a better browser there is one obvious problem with IE from a web
designers point of view. IE translates code and gives out an awful
rendition to the screen. Coding with standards compliant code a webpage
looks exactly how you told it to in FireFox bit in IE it is a real pain
in the ass having to constantly use code hacks to get things to work and
render properly. As for page load times, there are a few examples of IE
loading pages quicker but these are few and far between. There was a
study into this testing 1000 of the most popular pages on the Internet
and FireFox loaded something like 950 of them quicker than IE at about
an avarage of 2 seconds.

 

Are these pages listed anywhere? How on earth were they determined to be
the "most popular" - what methods were used?

 

I think they were the 1000 most visited sites from google's search.
I'll try and find it for you people but it's very obvious that FireFox
is the much faster browser at displaying a page - even Microsoft said
so. Making IE7 fast is one of the things that they must do to compete
with open source - that was said by a certain Microsoft development manager.

 

IE app seems to load faster for me, but i don't think there's much diff between page loads, EXCEPT when there's all kinds fo
activeX junk messages i have to click donw in IE6.. that's when FF or Moz loads pages MUCH faster

 

Another unscientific experiment. I have three computers hooked up to a
Linksys router. I tested two of them.

1) Dell laptop with a 1 GHz P4, 30 GB HD & 256 MB RAM running latest
Firefox & Thunderbird.

2) Dell PwerEdge SC420 2.8 GHz P$, 80 GB HD & 256 MB RAM running latest MSIE
6.0 & Outlook Express

Tested opening webpages for CNN, ESPN & MSNBC. Firefox opened MSNBC & CNN
about 15 seconds faster than MSIE 6.0. It opened ESPN about 30 seconds
faster than MSIE 6.0.

The sites were accessed by clicking on icons on each browser at the same
time.

I am happier with Firefox than with Thunderbird. Still have not figured out
how to get Thunderbird to display the message body text, and not just the
header only with the "Click here" message.

I will compare some more websites later this evening.

Regards,

Alton

 

What kind of connection do you have? It takes about 3 seconds to load
my start page (BBC News mainpage)in Firefox, and about 7 or 8 in IE.
That includes actually opening the programs.

Drude

 

I also use a Linksys router. As far as speed goes, when I begin and
first open up FF and TB, that is where I see the slower speed compared
to MSIE. Seems like it takes 4ever from the time I double-click the
desk top icon until the start window pops up,

-Hherb

 

I don't understand this ... ?

 

Drude,

I have a cable modem connection to a Linksys router. Tonight I compared
ABC, CBS and MSNBC websites. I got the following times:

Internet Explorer CBS 10 secs, ABC 19 secs, MSNBC 14 secs; and (after I
read your message, had already shutdown Firefox) http://www.bbc.co.uk 6 secs

Thunderbird CBS 11 secs, ABC 15 secs, MSNBC 11 secs
..