Opera owns!

[hdskull]

I have a question, so sometimes when I use firefox, it shuts off the window by itself, what do I do to change that ?

 

[badmephisto]

Opera has no extensions which is a huge downside in my opinion, and most importantly, it is not open source.

How often do you look at Firefox's source code?

never myself. but then we both know that that's not the point.

It just sounded to me as if being open source were an advantage by itself. For most users, I think it isn't. Actually, now that I think of it, I'm not even sure what the point of open source is. Not even extensions are a good argument for it, as those could probably (?) be supported by a good extension API. Not sure you need to look/edit the code of the core program for that.

i don't even know where to start when listing open source advantages...
- there is no single company that controls the code. If Opera would theoretically all of sudden decide to discontinue development, noone would have the rights to continue in the development, and all people using the software would be in big trouble. This is not a concern with Open Source.
- the code can be read by masses, so there is pretty much a very good guarantee that the code doesn't come with some privacy concerning subroutines that could for example track your web-browsing habits without your consent or so on. (remember the Sony rootkit scandal?)
- open source is more secure especially in huge projects such as Firefox, because many developers can review the code and find bugs in it. Also, the code is usually very good, neat and well commented because you know that there will be people reviewing it after you code it.

those are only some of the major points, but I'm sure there has to be plenty of stuff out on the internet about this, if you just search a little deeper than the wikipedia.

 

[tim]

tends to hang while loading websites.

That's because pipelining isn't enabled, and there is a pause between entering information, and reading information.

I don't talk about how fast the page loads, i mean the application itself hangs (doesn't response) a lot.

 

[Jai]

In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')

 

[AvGalen]

In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')

I know you said "playing a part", but please don't start blaming the users computer. Firefox is well known for having memory leaks. Many of those have already been fixed, but many are still there in version 2 and even in version 3.

This is a great source: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox)

These 2 quotes should be a good indication that there is really something wrong in the way firefox manages memory:

Version 3 will have "more memory leak fixes", so version 2 still has some:

Memory leaks can cause Firefox not to release memory that it is no longer using, especially with older versions. There has been a lot of effort to reduce the leaks in recent versions, and Mozilla developers have have created tools to detect them. [5] [6] To minimize leaks, you should upgrade to the most recent version. The most common memory leaks appear to be fixed in Firefox 2. [7] Firefox 3 will likely use even less memory than Firefox 2 due to more memory leak fixes and further efforts to reduce memory usage. [8]

Good advice, but shouldn't be necessary:

If you find that Firefox's memory usage continues to grow after long periods of being open, you may want to consider periodically restarting Firefox to bring the memory usage back to reasonable levels. The Session Manager extension allows you to close Firefox while maintaining the pages you have open.

 

[tim]

In that case, your system may be playing a part in that, Tim. What are your computer's specs? (If you don't know, right-click My Computer, and click 'properties')

I tested it on Mac OS X (Tiger) and on two different Windows machines. It doesn't seem to be a system issue. (Unfortunately i can't find a page at the moment, which makes the firefox hang, but just load a web page with a java applet and you'll see, what i mean.)
Anyway, i use Safari for daily browsing and Firefox just for web development.

 

[Kristoffer]

I use Opera, its niiiiiiiice

 

[Jai]

If you have an extra USB flash drive you don't need, and you're running Vista, you could enable Readyboost , which uses the USB drive as extra RAM.