If you could fix Firefox or IE what would you do?

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If you could fix Firefox or IE what would you do?

Saturday, March 01, 2008 7:32 AM | Technology

As many of you know, developers are working on Firefox 3 (Mozilla.org) and Internet Explorer 8 (MSDN blog). My question to you is what would you *fix* in the current versions of either web browser?

Being a recent convert to Firefox, I have noticed a few things that could be tweaked, nothing serious though. I feel that Internet Explorer 7 should be completely revamped before Microsoft even considers releasing IE 8.

In Internet Explorer 7 I have found quite a few annoyances, of course mine may be unique to my installation. Your issues may be very different from mine. If so, please post a comment.

Internet Explorer Annoyances

Correct CSS rendering. Microsoft has had every opportunity to bring IE7 up to standards. It still isn’t there. I am tired of coding for both Firefox and Internet Explorer (CSS coding). Fix the CSS rendering.

Tab implementation sucks in IE7. If you are quick on the click like me, when you open a new tab and select a favorite the site opens in the previous tab and not the new one. Why not have an option to “focus” on the previous tab or the new tab, rather than the browser window jumping to the new tab every time.

Memory usage. Internet Explorer 7 is a memory hog and many times after an hour or so IE 7 becomes very slow and memory usage is over 500mb. It sucks to close my browser just to free up memory for other application to work properly. Many times after closing all IE windows, it is still active in tasks and must be manually shut down.

I still think Internet Explorer is written by a room full of (code) monkeys with typewriters, my daughter could write better code than the IE development team (seriously).

Do you have any Internet Explorer 7 annoyances? If so, post a comment (you might just win a $30 Amazon gift card for the best comment).

Firefox 2 Annoyances

There are only a couple of things that bother me in Firefox 2.

Occasional freezing of displays. I am not sure if this is Firefox or one of the 3 or so add-on extensions that I have (I suspect it may be the StumbleUpon toolbar). So don’t get riled about this annoyance if might not be Firefox.

CSS Rendering – While I do believe Firefox’s rendering of CSS is superior to IE7, it still needs some work (especially with CSS centering) and alignment.

Better AJAX support – Firefox still has problems with some implantations of AJAX. Nothing serious but it needs work.

Those are my only personal issues with Firefox.

Do you have any Firefox 2 annoyances? If so, post a comment (you might just win a $30 Amazon gift card for the best comment).

Related

Firefox 3 Performance Numbers (ajaxian)

Microsoft to push IE8 public beta (ITWeek UK)

As always, I enjoy reading and responding to your comments!

13 Comments

Comments

Posted by eric451 on 3/1/2008 8:13 AM: Firefox 2 crashes after logging out of gmail and attempting to jump to another link before the ajax 'done logging out' message is received.

This didn't happen in FF1.

The workaround is to just wait until gmail returns to the logon page.

I don't know if this is fixed in FF3 - with adblock missing there is currently no compelling reason to switch.
Posted by Aaron on 3/1/2008 8:37 AM: Firefox: memory leaks.

I'm really tired of running the browser for awhile, and then having to kill it because it's frozen up.

I read that Firefox caches various data from your browsing activity, so that you don't have to load things repeatedly; this is supposed to improve performance.

Clue: if you cache so much that the browser chokes on itself, that's an expensive "improvement."
Posted by allen on 3/1/2008 8:51 AM: Hi Eric, thanks for the feedback!

Hi Aaron, also thanks for the feedback!
Posted by Rob on 3/1/2008 12:16 PM: Firefox "memory leaks" are a myth. This is documented on the Mozilla web site by one of the developers. Actually, leaks do exist, as they do in most large applications, but Firefox leaks are ones you are very unlikely to encounter.

Therefore, any leaks you may have are brought on by extensions. In my case. I have several extensions and, currently 21 open tabs, yet memory usage is the same as when I started, and I know it will be around the same when everything is closed (due to caching).

Some people continue to spread this myth even though any such leak issues were cleared up long ago; and many of the leaks you will never see are fixed in FF3.
Posted by allen on 3/1/2008 12:30 PM: Hi Rob,
Thanks for commenting. I think nearly all applications have memory leaks, smaller applications of course are less likely to have major leakage problems (unless the code is very bad). I haven't personally encountered any memory links in Firefox, or at least nothing that I can attribute to memory leakage.
Posted by eggbert on 3/1/2008 3:32 PM: I would sort out picture auto-resizing so it doesn't use nearest-neighbour anymore. Processors being as fast as they are, there are a lot of prettier-looking alternatives.
Posted by allen on 3/1/2008 5:00 PM: Hi hear ya eggbert. I disable image resizing myself.
Posted by Dan on 3/1/2008 6:29 PM: My woes with Firefox 2 memory handling always seem more closely related to the number of tabs I have open than how long the brower has been running. I don't think that 1-12 tabs *should* use half a gig of ram, but in ff2-mac it seems to be a given. Camino does much better in this arena, but is lacking in plugins. If this were solved in ff3, I'd love it forever.

P.S. I'm sure it performs fine on newer hardware, but on my G4 PowerBook (running firefox) the live comment preview is all but insufferable. Maybe switch the update trigger to onblur?
Posted by Allen on 3/1/2008 6:41 PM: Hi dan,
I've noticed that Firefox does use less RAM than IE with the same number of tabs open. I generally have 4-8 open at any one time and Firefox does a better job with memory usage. I guess each tab instance adds to the overall memory overhead and FF3 will probably do the same. For performance reasons I assume that each tab instance has to use some RAM to stay active, if it didn’t there would most likely be a lag when clicking that tab and re-render the contents of the page.
Posted by Clay on 3/1/2008 7:45 PM: I love keywords, they are a great feature.

Unfortunately at present you can't get a site that you open with a keyword to load in the sidebar. This is highly annoying for any number of reasons.
Posted by Allen on 3/1/2008 7:47 PM: Hi Clay,
Thanks for sharing your imput!
Posted by Jansie on 3/2/2008 10:02 AM: definitely the memory leak in FF2, but apparently FF3 will have that sorted. also, opening a new tab should be like in IE7, so you don't have to CTRL T to open one. but that's pretty much it. love FF.
Posted by Allen on 3/2/2008 10:05 AM: Hi Jansie!
There seems to be a big debate on memory leaks and FireFox, I have really seen anything so far that points to it, although I do see a gradual increase in memory usage when opening multiple tabs. Thanks for stopping by and commenting!