Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

[Evil Lurker]

I been thinking about ways to speed up my laptop's browser. I was using IE9, and all the damn flash advertising was slowing things down to a crawl, thrashing my hard drive with constant read/writes fragmenting files all over the place. Nothing like having flash ads start spewing loud ass voices/music ads when your right in the middle of something.

So I downloaded the latest revision of Firefox, and loaded in the add-on Adblock Plus and installed Easylist or whatever. I'm not for sure exactly how it does it, but it nukes just about all the ads on pages I frequent. Browsing has been significantly speeded up, an my hard drive no longer sounds as though its being thrashed.

I think my next goal will be to set up a ram drive and set Firefox to where it uses it instead of my hard drive.

[shovenose]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

Yes indeed Adblock Plus is amazing!
Interestingly enough, I find IE9 to start up and load web pages faster than FF. But FF has a better interface, more addons, etc... so Firefox is the way to go.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

Now try Opera and prepare to be amazed.

[NxB]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

or chromium

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I been thinking about ways to speed up my laptop's browser. I was using IE9, and all the damn flash advertising was slowing things down to a crawl, thrashing my hard drive with constant read/writes fragmenting files all over the place.

More likely Internet Explorer's caching. Internet Explorer generates a lot of files for web page and image file caching.

And Microsoft made it difficult to properly clear the file-based cache.

To really clear it, you must boot a portable Windows from a DVD or a CD, if using a mini XP. Hiren's boot CD with mini XP works like a charm, at least for XP.

[mariushm]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I'm not using Adblock because it has the potential to mess up forms and good scripts on websites I use and I'm too lazy to individually whitelist websites.

So i've taken the middle ground and installed just Flashblock which replaces Flash objects before they're even downloaded with just an icon - when you click it the Flash loads as it should have loaded by default.

And whitelisting is very simple, just right click and select "All flash from this domain / website" which doesn't enable all flash on a website

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I had good luck with AdBlock Plus!

And NoScript is the king daddy! No Javascript-based programs that create treacherous computing!

I'm starting to not like the Javascript-based image downloaders!

Before NoScript, some images load like I got a gazillion-years-old DSL service!

I usually estimated only around 200 kbps image file downloads!

And if that's the case, then I think image file sizes bigger than about 256 KB should be banned.

[lti]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I have been using Firefox 3.6 with AdBlock Plus and NoScript. I haven't had AdBlock Plus mess anything up. NoScript is a pain to use and doesn't block everything (as I found out when a radio station's Web site decided to install adware on my computer). I also have a custom Hosts file, which slows page loading, does not prevent sites in the file from adding tracking cookies to the computer, and caused Microsoft Security Essentials to throw a fit and remove sites that are known to infect a computer instantly after accessing the page.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I have been using Firefox 3.6 with AdBlock Plus and NoScript. I haven't had AdBlock Plus mess anything up. NoScript is a pain to use and doesn't block everything (as I found out when a radio station's Web site decided to install adware on my computer). I also have a custom Hosts file, which slows page loading, does not prevent sites in the file from adding tracking cookies to the computer, and caused Microsoft Security Essentials to throw a fit and remove sites that are known to infect a computer instantly after accessing the page.

There appears to be some options in NoScript not enabled by default to block more stuff and it's never a good idea to browse with an administrator account.

Too many stuff that can pull a stunt to gain privileges to take over Windows settings.

3.6 is EOL, IIRC.

[shovenose]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

My new MacBook Air can't use IE9 anyway so it doesn't matter :P

But can't you just use CCleaner to clear the crap from Internet Explorer 9?

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

My new MacBook Air can't use IE9 anyway so it doesn't matter :P

But can't you just use CCleaner to clear the crap from Internet Explorer 9?

You can, but again it thrashes your hard drive. IE9 happily uses the first free space it can find, CCleaner will wipe all the files, but it leaves "gaps" on your drive after its done. Other windows programs will want to come in and use those 'gaps" in between and during browsing sessions and next thing you know your hard drive is fragmented all to hell.

Its not so bad by itself but when you have a website with two, three, or more animated flash ads that change every ten seconds and each one gets cached a heavy browsing session can just bomb your drive with a couple hundred megs or more of crap.

[shovenose]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

True. That's pretty stupid of IE.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

well, it was a design choice. if anything, i blame flash for poopy garbage collecting and itself being the largest proc/mem hog.

but yeah, opera/chromium are boss, especially on linux.

i wouldn't say firefox BLOWS ie9 out of the water though, ie9 still manages to start faster on my computer and act more responsive, but i have a very, very bare install of win7 (actually it's win2008r2 converted to workstation mode). but i mostly use opera so, meh.

[shovenose]

Re: Holy crap Firefox blows IE9 out of the water!

I totally agree that IE9 is more responsive. Firefox feels faster though because while IE shows you a blank white screen while a web page is loading Firefox doesn't shows the current page until the new one is more loaded...