Originally posted by: ss284
Agreed to the fact that IE is the fastest. Also agreed that firefox has absolutely terrible memory leak problems, and for some reason it refuses to close sometimes.
-Steve
Yep. I did some comprehensive searching of their bug database, and it appears that one of the major speed/responsiveness "bugs" with Moz started around version 1.2b, and which Firefox has inherited through the shared codebase.
It happens to be a very poor design issue, revolving around garbage-collection. In a foolish attempt to "Fix" some memory-leak problems, what they end up doing is calling the garbage-collection routines, not once, not twice, but *4* times, on a page open/load/close. Plus, due to the memory leaks, there are a lot of orphaned (? - not really sure here) objects, that don't get cleaned up during the GC routines. Instead, they just slow it down more and more, the more the browser is used. This interacts *horribly* with low-memory situtations, since the GC routines have to touch nearly all of the dynamically-allocated memory objects that Moz uses, which means that it has to page all of Moz's mem through the HD (Moz allocated 300+ MB of VM, on a system with only 256MB of physical RAM0, and it has to do it *four* times!
I've measured times as slow as (literally!) 20-40 minutes to close a tab, after having the browser open and heavily used for like a week straight. Eventually, I usually manage to crash it, at which point it: a) corrupts my bookmarks (sometimes), or simply doesn't save the updated/saved bookmarks from that session (usually), b) corrupts my history, c) corrupts my mail/news databases, d) corrupts something else.
Opera, if it ever crashes, still saves the entire browser/tab/history state, and can re-open them all when re-starting. Moz still doesn't even have a way to save all windows + the tabs open in them, nevermind the session history for each tab.
There's also another brain-damaged feature in Moz/Firefox, which thankfully there is now a pref to disable in Moz 1.7rc1. If you minimize the last open window, Moz attempts to page nearly all of itself out, or something like that. Essentially, it violates the unwritten rule of VM OSes, try to touch as little memory as possible. Instead, it intentionally touches nearly all of it, which again, on a low-memory system, thrashes like mad. What it *should* do, is let the OS do it's job, instead of Moz trying to be the OS.
Even in such situations as when Moz is paging like mad, and my HD light is solid-on, I can still open Opera, and load pages, far, far faster than Moz, even in low-memory situations. Reason? Opera isn't brain-damaged like the nefarious lizard is.
However, I *still* use Moz and now more often Firefox, even with all of these shortcomings. Why?
Well, I was bitten by a security hole in Opera, an exploit, in which they made absolutely ZERO mention of, on their web site (no message urging people to update to the next version, due to a security issue), nothing in their FAQ, user forums, NO acknowlegement of security issues at all. If a commercial software company refuses to acknowlege serious security bugs in their software, and doesn't inform, nor help, their users to deal with those issues, then I refuse to use their software.
Yes, Opera may seen operationally better, and have nicer features than Moz/Firefox, but its security is no better than IE, and the companies attitude towards security is a lot worse, than even Microsoft's.
PS. I've had issues with Moz not wanting to close cleanly, usually it has to do with certain versions of Adobe's Acrobat (PDF) viewer software that auto-loads when viewing a .PDF online, but doesn't auto-unload properly. I find that if I use Task Manager to kill acroread.exe, then Moz has less problems closing. I haven't had that problem with the current version of Firefox and whatever version of AcroRead I have installed right now.