Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Firefox vs I.E.

OK, I know there is Chrome and Opera, et. al. but this post is regarding Firefox vs I.E.

Many have their favorites. I prefer Firefox for many reasons, but, unfortunately, there are times that Microsoft makes you use I.E.

There have been some issues logging in and staying logged in. I know some of these steps are obvious but,

1. You must click on Remember me after you log in.
2. While Internet Explorer has a feature to remember the password, it is terrible at best.
3. Firefox's feature to recall your username and login is vastly superior.
4. There are many 3rd party programs that will take care of this for you. Roboform is just one, and is very good.

ONE HUGE ADVANTAGE OF FIREFOX over I.E. is that it will spell check your posts as you type, something that is not available on the board (that I am aware of.

I like Firefox. Was using it on the server until we went to V6. Everytime I tried to use the boards and some other functions, it kept trying to reload Firefox. It would say something like cannot open firefox because another version is already running.

I never could work around this one, so I just got rid of firefox.
Maybe I'll try it again.

If you open Firefox and go to Help on the toolbar, choose Firefox Help, on the right you will see Ask A Question. This will take you to their support page. At the bottom left, you will see ask a question where you can type in a question or use the chat feature. Or if this is too many steps, just use this link. By the way, when you first click on Help --> Firefox Help, you will see a cat with a sthethoscope. She is looking for an MA job and will travel.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/ask

Also, when you get that message, always right click on your task bar at the bottom of the screen and choose Task Manager. Use the second tab: Processes and see if anything with Firefox or Mozilla is running and click end process. Then open Firefox.

By the way, support consists completely of volunteers. On the top right of the first Help page, there is a place to register and make a contribution. I would consider that if they are able to help you.

OK, I feel like chat support.

I use firefox as well. Mainly because of the adblock plus add-on. Chrome's doesn't even close to working as well as FF's. There are about 10 other addons that I like to use as well. You can use IE Tab in Firefox if the site you need to access only works with IE (e.g. hospitals, portals, etc.)

That's a great tip. Where do you find that tab for I.E.?

IE Tab V2 (FF 3.5, 4, 5, 6, 7+)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-36/

That's awesome. Gotta check the add-ons more often. I could probably find this, but is there a way to have an icon on the toolbar to open a tab in Explorer?

Right-Click on Toolbar>Click Customize>Drag and Drop the IETab Icon wherever you want>Click Done.

Here's a Step by Step with pictures:
http://sluthra.x10.bz/mozillatoolbar.html

I'm a Chrome addict now. It has the same IETab that Firefox has. I love firefox as well. Chrome still has some quirks occasionally but so does Firefox and IE. I've almost completely eliminated IE from my life.

I have not used Chrome much, but I love the way Firefault updates itself similar to Adobe, etc. Just quick updates that never screw up the browser. Wish AC could work that way, but that is different.

I also love the message from where it says, "Oops, that was embarrassing."

I am with Travis. And Chrome is the fastest of all.

Now if we can just get them into the speech recognition business...

Bert, that cat has a clipboard, not a stethoscope. Have someone else interview the next MA you hire.

Damn. No wonder I am missing so many murmurs. Another sure sign of rabies.

IE9 is really good been using it lately over Chrome have not used Firefox in a long time.

They are both good. I just like the spell check in Firefox for the board.

Interestly, I use all 3.

I prefer Chrome for speed, but sometimes pages don't load quite right.

IE and firefox are about the same for speed.

For compatability, IE is the best, followed by Firefox.

Firefox and Chrome had a slew of add ons, I have more add ons for Firefox than Chrome.

If you use an SSD, the speed for firefox is a non-issue. Even if you don't, usually, it's just the first run that's slow.

I'm a devoted IE user (this should come as no surprise). My main reasoning for promoting IE is the management features included that are particularly very nice when in a domain environment. I have done such things as:

* Set up home pages and populated favorites with imporant URLs.
* Approved and deployed activeX controls so each user would have them ready to go.
* Set proxy server settings to all machines.
* Hidden parts of the UI from users.
* Pre-populated trusted sites.

I do admit to getting quite upset with Microsoft back in the IE days and fully agree that allowing the IE team to be disbanded years ago was one of MS's greatest mistakes ever. My faith was restored with IE7 and continues to be with IE9.

JamesNT

sluthra,


There is actually a very good reason for that. Hint: It has nothing to do with Firefox.

JamesNT

I'm not sure which part you are referring to. The first part is a given, SSDs improve load times for virtually every application compared to a traditional hard drive.

The first run being slow could be the number of add-ons you have installed. Another reason is the Tab Recovery feature and also because firefox lacks OS integration (huge security plus)but results in slower loading.

This one should be fun. My money's on Sandeep. If for no other reason than the Hint comment.

I run Firefox 6.0.x as my main browser, and on any given day may have 60-100 tabs open in different windows sets doing different things. I've cut down on the add-ons that I run, but I always start with ad-block, flashblock, and scriptblock. This gives me a pretty solid and secure way to browse all the links I'll get. If you are in a curious mode, run scriptblock and watch how many different third-party sites are called as part of a single page load on a major site. Scary.

For password and form management, I've gone to the pay version of LastPass, along with the pay version of XMarks (combined now), so that I have my encrypted credentials and bookmarks anywhere I want them or need them. Handy little things like being able to generate 16-20 character complex passwords on the fly, then have the app remember them. Just checked I have ~ 500 sets of credentials memorized.

For sites where performance is important, I run Chrome, but I only go to sites that I have previously vetted with FF. Not surprisingly, it is the best platform for running Google Apps. Always have Google Voice and Google Music up (I have a few invites left for the closed Music Beta if anyone wants one), although I keep Google + running in FF so that clicked links open first in FF(also have + invites if you want one).

And yes I have IE on the machine for those rare occasions where the evil beast is required.

On a professional level I have no beef with M$, when people are (still) willing to pay for them, we make steady money fixing what users do (typically with IE). I have given up trying to convince users to change to a more secure overall configuration, we just charge full-rack when users jack things up after they have been warned and refuse to change.

Even with financial/corporate clients, we always install FF on their machines as a second browser, so that they can easily check their problem to see if it is a network problem, or the latest M$ update tinkered with a setting (typically IE). Now when we get a request for assistance, they will often say FF works fine, so it is something with IE or the Windows update - makes life easier on all of us.

Before I go any further, allow me to correct a comment I made in my previous post. The following comment:


Should have read:


The correction is in bold.

JamesNT

Now that I have that out of the way, first to Sandeep.


The part I am referring to is bolded.

The reason Firefox starts faster on subsequent loadings is because of Windows' prefetch. As a test, on any given Windows XP machine, reboot it to ensure nothing is saved. Upon initial logon, Firefox and pretty much any program will be slow to start. However, close that program and reopen it without rebooting and one will note that subsequent program starts are much, much faster. This is because XP keeps the binaries for Firefox in memory unless something else is started that forces them to be paged out to disk.

Windows Vista and 7 carry this a bit further with superfetch. Vista nd 7 actually remember which programs one uses the most often - and even what time of day they are used - and will begin prefetching binaries for those programs into memory upon boot and will fetch binaries for different programs when their most often used time of day approaches. This is why a Windows Vista/7 computer seems so much more responsive than an XP machine on comparable hardware after a reboot.

JamesNT

Second, Indy.

I would completely agree with Indy if we were back in the IE6 days. However, I have found IE8 and IE9 to be very robust and do an excellent job of stopping most malware.

That being said, I will not be persuing this discussion with Indy to terribly much further. I have found Indy to be an excellent individual and would not wish to see things sullied by stoopping into the old and quite tired "open source versus the Evil Empire" debates or something to the effect thereof.

JamesNT

That's true. Most programs do that, but it still wasn't as good as Firefox Preloader. Back in the day when Firefox was still in version 1 or 2, there was program called Firefox Preloader that would greatly improve start times by keeping the core components in memory. This is what most XP users used to speed up the firefox starts.

Another thing is now they have SSD caches too for those new Z68 motherboards which improve load times of a lot of programs. You can use a cheap SSD/HDD combo.

I just like the cute little fox holding up the globe.

With an SSD, I can't imagine Firefox opening any faster. It opens faster than a blink of an eye.

@Indy

One of the options you can check is for Firefox "To warn me when performance is affected by too many open tabs." Do you ever get that warning?

Bert, that sounds familiar, but if it actually came up I dismissed it a long time ago.

I just checked and my main browser window has 17 tabs pinned; that list changes over time as I add or subtract, but because life is heavily threaded right now, I leave a tab up when that is something there I am working, researching, watching, tracking, etc.

The tabs function kind of like Memory cache - stuff that is in play, in some variable state.

I'm not pinging on M$ per-say, just explaining my use case. There are a growing number of folks in the open source world calling Le Goog the new Evil Empire.

My experience with folks goobering up machines and then whining about it are the worst of clients, they take no responsibility for what they did, want it fixed immediately (if not sooner), and you wonder if they have the sense to come in out of the rain. Then tend to be management or executives of small companies, and their tool of choice is IE. They won't let us lock down their machines, insist on running as administrators, and as soon as the machine is good and jacked-up, will call every number they have for us, then me, then start texting; any time of the day or night. They try my soul. IE just happens to be their tool of choice.

In an enterprise environment, IE can be tamed and plays nicely with others in the sandbox.

Not that RAM is an issue at all anymore given many of us have 8 or more GBs of RAM on our client computers. But, how much RAM does 100 web pages require. Or do tabs not equal pages sometimes?

I've run into this problem hundreds of times. People just click anything. Most of the time their antivirus is out-dated/non-existent. Using an old version of IE and contract a lot of malware.

I remember when I was setting up our office with the new server. Employees were complaining about not having administrator access. However, shockingly, we no longer have any malware issues with the exception of my dad (an admin) who uses IE and got some spyware ha.

Sandeep,

Almost all of my clients complain about not having Admin rights. And to a one, I don't care. Usually when they call complaining about not having admin rights, they are trying to do something they shouldn't be doing, anyway.

As for line of business software, I use tools from Systinternals (www.sysinternals.com) to find out what objects programs need access to so they can run without the user being an admin.

JamesNT

I think it should be made clear (I am guessing) that you are talking about local admins and not domain admins.

I used to locked down the clients and log them in as users, but I found there were too many things they couldn't do.

I agree with spyware and malware. But, in five years, we have had three viruses. One on a client and two on mine.

From my perspective, I think everyone is being too hard on their clients. Computers can't be so locked down they can't be used.

Any a lot of IT people make their money because their clients don't do as they are asked.

God knows a lot of doctors are taking calls after hours due to poor compliance of their meds, etc.