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Apr 28, 2006
IE7 Stacks Up Well Against Firefox - Techweb
A recent article by TechWeb does an interesting feature-to-feature comparison of the recently released IE7 Beta 2 and the current version of Firefox. The author believes that IE7 holds the advantage on interface, tab management and RSS support. He believes Firefox still holds a slim lead in security ("for now" he says in part because the security on IE7 has yet to be put to the test). He also believes Firefox holds the lead in extensions for customizability and password management. Lastly, he declares a virtual tie in web standards support (which is good to hear...though we are stuck supporting IE6 for some time anyway).
Based on his analysis, it is easy to assume that IE7 holds a slight advantage over Firefox (in its current form). However, it also doesn't seem as if their are any "must-have" features that will cause most of us who have already made the switch a compelling reason to go back, especially given what the author calls IE's "tattered reputation".
Comments
I'll tell you where I see a difference: memory footprint. Firefox annoys the heck out me with its SUV-like penchant for consuming RAM. A typical session for me causes Firefox to consume ~200MB RAM, which is entirely unacceptable. IE, by comparison sits around ~45-50MB RAM when running the same exact sites. Gmail seems to be the biggest culprit. Most consumers have only 256MB-512MB RAM on their machines. At Firefox's rate, there's no way it's a viable alternative to a browser that's already built-in with a smaller footprint. We'll see what the future holds...
I can never understand how people can get Firefox to use more than 100MB of RAM. I'll hit 90MB on occasion, but usually it sits at around 40MB. Right now, it's at 66MB, but that's with 4 seperate windows with multiple tabs on each one. I'm a Flash developer too, so that means I go to Flash-based sites constantly (Flash is often blamed for the RAM usage).
I get the same behavior on at least three different computers. Based on my experience, Firefox runs just as well as IE, if not better at times. There's got to be some weird bug that affects only a subset of PCs. Maybe it really is the extensions. I've heard many people have been known to have 20 or more installed. Personally, I've never used more than 5 or 6. I'd guess the Joe-average user might install one or two at most.
I get the same behavior on at least three different computers. Based on my experience, Firefox runs just as well as IE, if not better at times. There's got to be some weird bug that affects only a subset of PCs. Maybe it really is the extensions. I've heard many people have been known to have 20 or more installed. Personally, I've never used more than 5 or 6. I'd guess the Joe-average user might install one or two at most.