Active X - Controls Help FFS

[MangaFish]

pah - these days firefox is as insecure as internet explorer, slower than internet explorer, less stable and more resource hungry than internet explorer.

Opera is a far superior browser imo. Especially on *nix systems.

Also, if you haven't already, download Opera mini for your mobile phones / PDAs / XDAs / etc. It really will revolutionise the way you surf the net on your handheld devices!

(i should get paid for this kind of PR hehe)

[TechMouse]

pah - these days firefox is as insecure as internet explorer, slower than internet explorer, less stable and more resource hungry than internet explorer.

Based on what?

I agree about Opera.

[MangaFish]

Based on what?

I agree about Opera.

Independent research.

Opera has the least security holes. Firefox and IE are about even (i believe IE has more serious holes, but Firefox has more overal flaws from the article i read a couple of months back)

Look up webbrowser benchmarks and FireFox usually ranks pretty low on page fetches and rendering.

As for system resources. On a PC system Firefox takes longer to start than IE, uses more memory than IE and i've had it crash on a stable Windows system more times than i care to remember.

Don't get me wrong, Firefox is still better than IE imo, but then Opera is better than Firefox.

At the end of the day though, now browser is safe (especially when given to the average novice home user) so firewalls, virus scanners and so forth, is highly recommended.

I'd say the best advice is use the browser that best suits your needs and skills, and stick as much security software on your internet system as you can (and exercise some common sense. Don't download files called "i love you.exe" hehe)

[dan the acid man]

yeah opera is pretty good, only just started using it again

[TechMouse]

Independent research.

Opera has the least security holes. Firefox and IE are about even (i believe IE has more serious holes, but Firefox has more overal flaws from the article i read a couple of months back)

That people know about.

Don't forget the source code for Firefox is open, so security experts can look through it - hence it's much easier to find holes, and issue patches.

There are probably many more holes in IE, they just haven't been found (or fixed) yet.

Look up webbrowser benchmarks and FireFox usually ranks pretty low on page fetches and rendering.

Out of the box or when optomised?

As for system resources. On a PC system Firefox takes longer to start than IE, uses more memory than IE and i've had it crash on a stable Windows system more times than i care to remember.

This is possibly true. Though it does depend how many extensions you have installed.

The session restore functions are really helpful though.

[MangaFish]

Is FF open source? I know Mozilla is but i didn't think FF was (though i've never really checked).
As for they're probably more holes in IE that are undiscovered: maybe, maybe not. IE gets a lot more attention to scrutiny by hackers and script kiddies if just because it's the most globally used webbrowsers. However, both our arguments are entirely speculation.

Out of the box or when optomised?
Out of the box. However bare in mind that the vast majority of web-surfers wouldn’t know how to optimise FF and the other half (myself included) are not being motivated enough to play around with the options. But in all fairness you do raise a good point that some browsers potential isn’t always realised in the default configuration.

This is possibly true. Though it does depend how many extensions you have installed.
It’s true without any additional extensions installed though bulking out the system with extra plugin’s to escalate the situation.

The session restore functions are really helpful though.
Is this new to FF v2? Opera has session restore functions as well and I find it invaluable so I can see how FF users would find them helpful as well.



At the end of the day – the web browser is only every going to be as good as the person using it. FF and Opera would be over kill for my mum who barely handles IE 5.5, where as I personally find Opera 9.x much more intuitive to the way I work than FF or IE. There’s some FF users who hate default Opera’s layout. It’s all horses of courses.