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Not only that, but Firefox became freakin´ slow as time passed by. Mozilla Seamonkey, having been kept up to date by only a handful of developers - not sponsored by Mozilla Corporation, it seems - in order to "backport" some of Firefox niceties such as AdBlock+ and often accused in the past as being sluggish, is WAY faster than most of the recent FF iterations.

The only reason that I still use Firefox instead of Opera is that I prefer the way how FF rendering engine tries to work around broken websites compared to Opera´s and the fact that the Opera Adblocker is not nearly as good as Adblock+ but anyone comparing FF and Opera speedwise and claiming that FF has an edge must have his or her head examinated. Not to mention that Opera´s cache management knows no rivals.

Opera lacks the mindshare, yes. It could also benefit of an extensible API so that its users can build the nice things that the community around Mozilla built on top of Firefox... True. But Opera definitely surpassed Firefox some time ago.

In my sister´s slower machine, the choice is a no brainer. Firefox definitely needs to go back to its roots if it wants to keep the lead over the competition since even MS seems to be waking up and getting their stuff up to the snuff!

Edited 2007-05-18 20:40

Actually, that is the case, IIRC.

Nightly builds are usually taken from an active-development tree (where devs can 'freely' make changes to the code (once meeting certain criteria), as patches).

Stable builds are taken from a fine-picked assortment of the code submitted in between releases, and resides in its own tree, making it possible to have vast differences between the two trees.

That and the difference in compiler options in stable builds, extra code (feature) patches applied, etc...

It can get fun finding the best nightly to run, though, so I'd stick to the stables if your unsure :-)

--The loon

I for one have gone back to using Safari as my browser of choice. There have been content rich pages (like the World of Warcraft Armory pages) which have caused Firefox to choke and consume 100% of my CPU speed for 5 - 10 seconds before successfully loading the pages.

Just taking this article as an example. Safari uses about 10% CPU power to display the page and the adverts. Once the animations complete, CPU usage drops to 0 - 3%. In contrast, Firefox 20 - 30% CPU usage to display that page and when the animations are done, CPU usage drops to about 5 - 10%.

This is really sad, as I much prefer Firefox since more pages render correctly.

It's probably Flash. Flash + FF is not yet a terribly friendly pairing. There's one of those stupid intel quad core ads (the one with the leopards) that causes my machine to hit 100% CPU usage everytime. I couldn't, easily, test this on IE as browser detection on the server side was returning a single GIF to IE but a .swf to FF. No idea why. I gave up at the point and just install FlashBlock!