I think I’m one of the earliest adopters of Firefox around. It happened quite by coincidence, just on the day I switched to using Linux, Mozilla released Phoenix 0.1. I was looking for what browsers were available on Linux, and stumbled upon Phoenix. Back then I fell in love with it because of its small footprint, and simplicity (certainly compared to Mozilla). I’ve been using it ever since, going from Phoenix to Firebird, and finally from Firebird to Firefox. I’m singlehandedly responsible for dozens of people switching from IE to Firefox, so it is rather ironic that now I’m switching back to IE (on my Dell box at work, at home I am a Safari loving guy).
The reason is Firefox’s memory usage. Last week I spent half a day debugging an application that failed to insert some records through its JDO layer because it didn’t have enough memory. Okay, granted, JDO (Kodo) shouldn’t fail silently in this case, but still, it was very frustrating. And maybe it didn’t have any relation to my memory at all, but it did make me discover how much memory Firefox actually consumes. >200Mb memory usage for a browser isn’t something I’d call a feature. (the Firefox developers respond to the reactions on the memory usage of Firefox 1.5) I did change the max_total_viewers setting, and I realize that the excessive memory usage may be caused by one of the extensions I use (GMail reportedly also causes a memory leak in it’s use of XmlHttpRequest, although they deny it), but still it annoys me.
So the last few days I’ve been happily browsing along using Avant Browser It has popup blocking, tabs support, and it includes SessionSaver -like capabilities. All that I need (for my non web developing needs)! Goodbye Firefox, maybe I’ll see you again on a browser reunion party or something.
(the default install does like look shit though, you’ll have to tweak it a bit to look a bit decent if you decide to give it a go)
Firefox is a hog; I’m much happier with Epiphany.
It’s been a while since I’ve used a Linux box, but Epiphany certainly seems to have improved into a usable browser since I first tried it, back when it was first introduced in Gnome. In the meanwhile I’m not so happy anymore with Avant, the little things that drove me away from IE the first time are beginning to surface again, I’d forgotten all about them. What I really need is something like Epiphany for Windows, the Gecko engine inside a very light browser.
You’re right. Last week my Firefox is really s#cking memory. I don’t know why? A plugin? I don’t like IE, I miss the tabs. I tried Opera but a lot of sites are not functioning (correctly). I wouldn’t blame Opera, many sites are probably not following the “standards”. Is there another alternative?
Avant Browser has tabs, but like I said in my previous comment, it’s still IE. I don’t know if there are any alternatives, I don’t like Operate that much either. Still using Firefox now but not happy with it. I have to restart it twice a day because memory usage goes over 400Mb :(
Since Opera 9 I am a happy Opera user on Windows as well as on OS X!