Submitted by Mozilla Firefox has been outperforming Internet Explorer for a number of years, and its latest version is even faster than ever. However, there is a new, lean, free web browser on the block which runs web pages at lightning speed. It goes by the name of Google Chrome.
Tweak the right settings and with some experimentation, Firefox can keep pace with Google Chrome. Unknown to many of its users, Firefox has a raft of options that can unleash the browser’s true potential. With just a few minutes of your time, you can make your daily web browsing more enjoyable.
The suggestions in the article are great for making Firefox run faster, but I think Chrome’s UI is greatly superior.
I usually use Chrome, but when I do use Firefox, I run these extensions:
– Chromifox Companion
– Chromin Frame
– Hide Menubar
– Pimpoflage
– Speed Dial
This makes Firefox look and act very much like Chrome.
See a screenshot at http://lh6.ggpht.com/_VwLs3rFfUVM/SotB8N42QvI/AAAAAAAAABw/1go5hJqNA…
This screenshot is Firefox, not Chrome!
Edited 2009-10-04 20:55 UTC
Thanks for some of the extensions you piinted out, but I do advise against giving Firefox the full Chrome-like makeover on Windows 7 because the title bar stays there and looks ugly and the updated window frame does not integrate with Aero’s features well.
To save vertical space without losing Firefox’s UI functionality (well, you could install the Chrome like theme if you like those icons more, I’d suggest installing only these two extensions:
Chromifox Companion
Hide Menubar
Thanks to the new “tool” like icon added on the right of the address bar, the default behaviour of Hide Menubar causes no real loss of functionality and Hide Menubar’s use of the ALT button to quickly toggle the menubar’s visibility is quick to use if you just want the menubar back for a second
.
That’s strange that Windows 7 keeps the normal title bar… does it work on Vista? I’ve only tested it on Linux with Compiz. It does act sort of weird under Compiz, too. It doesn’t “wobble”, and you can’t drag the window off the screen; however, both these problems can be fixed by dragging while holding ALT (which then makes the menu bar appear when you don’t want it to).
Yeah, I can tell, because it has the Stop button in a sane location. Sigh…
Mozilla will add the 1 process per tab thing to firefox too (they may even take code from chrome). Once this will be done, firefox will become much faster, but will take more memory.
But firefox true potential come with the XUL-UI toolkit. Nothing compare to it. Modifying the browser layout and making extensions is so easy. Just by modifying UserChrome.css (or using the Stylish extension), it is possible to adapt the browser and recover a lot of space. It is why I prefer Firefox to Chrome.
I use Chrome on my netbook because it is faster. But if I take a look at it with WireShark, it send every url I visit to Google (don’t say it don’t, install WireShark and see by yourself, links are transmissted to Google if you click outside of the page frame (like address bar)).
*sigh*
Setting initial paint delay to 0 *slows down* Firefox instead of speeds it up. It causes the page to be rendered immediately, before content has had the chance to load. It makes the browser _feel_ faster because something appears quicker, but due to the extra repaints the total load time is greater.
Why has this been posted? It’s out of date, mostly inaccurate and already handled by extensions like FasterFox.
The jit trick made the article worthwhile to me.
I have to take from chromium (last daily broke it on my karmic), so it’s great to get some sensible performance out of good ol’ FF as well.
As it looks like you don’t have proplems running new code, you could also try Firefox development versions:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/
I suggest not taking latest-trunk it could be broken, but something like: 3.6a2-candidates usually works and you get automatic updates too.
I run the dev version of chromium just because it’s the only way you can run the app in the first place. Firefox is just a fall-back browser for me, so stable version will have to do :-).
I wouldn’t mind Firefox being a bit _slower_ if it didn’t eat so much CPU time when idle and prevent sleep after inactivity.
Slightly off-topic, but anyway: the Arora browser has reached version 0.10, and with that release it has become useable as a lightweight and fast, standards-compliant browser.
http://www.h-online.com/open/Lightweight-Arora-web-browser-turns-0-…
IMO it is certainly worth installing if you run KDE4, since it is Qt-based (similar to VLC, qmmp and SMplayer). The developers say there will be a package available for karmic soon.
http://arorabrowser.blogspot.com/2009/10/arora-0100.html
I tried it with the acid3 tests:
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
It scored 98/100.
On the same Arch Linux system, Firefox 3.5 scored 92, and Konqueror scored 89.
PS: I posted this post using Arora.
Edited 2009-10-05 10:23 UTC
It was useable before 0.10 as well.
It’s still much slower than Chromium. Chromium being Gtk is no big deal, because it doesn’t look native on any platform ;-).
By “useable” I meant that with version 0.10 Arora can now run plugins such as Adobe flash and it has Adblock.
I’m not sure if Chromium supports that level of being useable, even if it is faster.
It does have flash, not sure about adblock though (I don’t use it).
You can use add “–enable-plugins” to chromium launcher to enable support for flash and other plugins.
That’s not needed anymore with new daily builds.
I run some browser benchmarks comparing firefox, arora, midori, epiphany and chromium and I got some interesting figures [1]. Arora is nice, but if you are looking something gtk based midori [2] is really good, and it’s usable although some things are broken right now.
[1] http://www.sealabs.net/seadog/2009/09/browser-benchmarks/
[2] http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html