ms ie6 hijacked?

[woodturner]

I spend hours a day online dealing with massive graphs and tables, huge .tif images, large documents, etc and I cannot stand to do it with IE. ... In reality FF is about a thousand times faster than IE in real world scenarios.

How big are your "massive" graphs and tables? If it appears to you that Firefox is faster than IE, they can't be that big. How many terrabytes of data are in these graphs?

If you have studies that are accessible online showing that contradict the observation that IE is faster than Firefox, please post them. I will be happy to provide references to the papers, but please advise which university libraries or peer-reviewed journals you would have access to, so I can provide references you will be able to get.

I did find one report online
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#winspeed

[Jim Frye]

That's unusual - Firefox is usually much slower than that to load. I'm guessing you probably aren't using the tabs and having it load multiple pages on startup? That's probably the difference - Firefox can take a minute or more to load even just a few pages on startup if you are using the tabs.

That's one example of the difference in design that demonstrate the speed advantage of IE. With multiple tabs on startup, Firefox loads all the pages before you can access any of them. IE loads the one that is showing first, then fills in the others in the background, so the first page is available and accessible quickly.

Oh! Tabs! Yes, I rarely open any browser with tabs, but just for grins, I opened FireFox with 92 tabs to see what the performance impact was. Just under 2 minutes for all 92 to be opened, including the ones with 404 errors. I could see the completed tabs before all were done. In fact, it brought the first one finished on top as soon as it was done. IE crashed with the same set.

[Rich P]

IF IE was taking 3-4 minutes , it may have been pre-loading it's cached content. If it has been a while (or never) since you have cleared it, you might consider doing so.

I know when you install FF it tries to import a bunch of stuff from IE and it may do so with the cache in which case the "baggage" has simply moved over.

I don't use Gmail so I can't help there but the following thread talks about the icon disappearing...

http://www.google.com/support/forum/...193ab8d0&hl=en

[woodturner]

Oh! Tabs! Yes, I rarely open any browser with tabs, but just for grins, I opened FireFox with 92 tabs to see what the performance impact was. Just under 2 minutes for all 92 to be opened, including the ones with 404 errors. I could see the completed tabs before all were done. In fact, it brought the first one finished on top as soon as it was done. IE crashed with the same set.

That's cute. Problem is, some less technically inclined people here may not realize you are being sarcastic and think that you really did open Firefox with 92 tabs.

FWIW, the practical limit for tabs in our testing for IE is 150 tabs and for Firefox it is 50. Of course, even with a high-speed T1 line (so the internet speed does not limit opening speed) Firefox requires nearly 7 minutes to open the tabs, and will not serve any of them until all are opened. IE requires 10 seconds to serve the first tab, but takes nearly 2 minutes to completely load all the tabs.

[woodturner]

IF IE was taking 3-4 minutes , it may have been pre-loading it's cached content. If it has been a while (or never) since you have cleared it, you might consider doing so.

That's a good point. It may also be beneficial to reduce the size of the cache, on both IE and FF. If the cache is too large, the overhead to manage it exceeds the time saved by having the cache.

[Jim Frye]

No Sarcasem Here....

That's cute. Problem is, some less technically inclined people here may not realize you are being sarcastic and think that you really did open Firefox with 92 tabs.

FWIW, the practical limit for tabs in our testing for IE is 150 tabs and for Firefox it is 50. Of course, even with a high-speed T1 line (so the internet speed does not limit opening speed) Firefox requires nearly 7 minutes to open the tabs, and will not serve any of them until all are opened. IE requires 10 seconds to serve the first tab, but takes nearly 2 minutes to completely load all the tabs.

No, I really did open both browsers with 92 tabs. When Firefox v3.5 finished there were 92 tabs open. You could scroll through them.

I realize that after 42 years in the IT profession, as a programmer and systems engineer, I may not be the most "technically inclined" person on the planet, but I can write what I see. I have a 10Mb internet connection that typically runs about 7.5 Mb download rate.

[dbhost]

I've had two primary kinds of issues with Firefox:

1. It doesn't work correctly with many or most online banking sites, which are written for IE. I can't do online billpay with Firefox with any of my banks.

2. Firefox is very slow. Might well not notice that as a casual user, but as a developer using the browser to display graphs and engineering graphics, it is extremely slow and cannot handle larger graphics and graphs as all.

What bank are you with? I have no trouble with Bank of America or Chase bank using Firefox.

And what sort of engineering drawings are you trying to display in a WEB BROWSER?

Eh, never mind, if you are sold on Micro$oft, you are sold on Micro$oft.

[gsmittle]

At work I have to run IE for access to some "worldwide" vendor sites. I've asked them about Firefox and they told me "their system was set up to run with the internationally used IE"??

Hmmmmm… sounds like a lazy web designer to me… or somebody bought and paid for by M$.

g.

[woodturner]

No, I really did open both browsers with 92 tabs. When Firefox v3.5 finished there were 92 tabs open.

Sorry, I thought you were joking. We have not been able to replicate your results in our lab, and given the threads on the internet where people claim to have opened large numbers of tabs with FF as a joke, I thought you were joking as well.

[woodturner]

What bank are you with? I have no trouble with Bank of America or Chase bank using Firefox.

And what sort of engineering drawings are you trying to display in a WEB BROWSER?

Some of the banks we have had problems with include Chase, PNC, National City, Mellon, and Bank of NY.

Most poeple think of FF, IE, etc. as "web browsers", but the applications are actually much broader. Many of the engineering systems now use a browser to display drawings, because it's a "common denominator" among machines and simplifies the document control systems. Most of the major document control systems, and virtually all the major CAD systems can display drawings in a browser.

That's part of what we do, but also we use the browser to display complex graphs, such as call graphs - graphs that map out the operation of a computer program and CPU at a very detailed level.