Hacking Is My Life

Okay, so there’s this blogger (bloggette?) named Little Miss Queenie who has decided to give away make up sort things on her blog. In an attempt to please the demands of my girlfriend, I have entered the contest at her behest. Wish me luck. If you so desire, you can also enter her contest at the following link (although there are lots of steps and you would need some motivation to finish the entering process).
To visit her site click here or just click on the giant cartoon of her. To go directly to the sweepstakes entry, click here.
Good luck and good riddance. <span class="fullpost">

Internet Explorer 8 vs. Firefox 3.0.9

I’m not comparing apples to oranges, so there’s no Firefox 3.5 in this comparison, as its still in beta. I’ll update this post as soon as Firefox 3.5 goes final and I’ve had a chance to use it for a while
So, without further ado, here we go!
I’ve always been an avid Firefox user, all the way back to when it was still called “Phoenix”, I was a Firefox user. Before that, I used Netscape almost exclusively (back when I was young and did not know the wonders of Linux), in essence, I’ve avoided Internet Explorer for a long time now. However, IE isn’t available in Linux, so I wanted to perform my tests (both quantitative and qualitative) in the same environment. All the tests and browsing were done on a brand new Sony Vaio FW laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 w/ SP1.
Before I get to the personal impressions, here are your standard test results that concern numbers and the like, both browsers were fresh installs, and all private data was cleared before each test. For the cold start test, I restarted the computer, and bookmarked 5 websites (google.com, yahoo.com, live.com, espn.com and ign.com) that I had saved locally and set this as the homepages for each browser. Then, I measured the amount of time it took from the instant I clicked the shortcut to the time when every webpage reported itself as “Done.” For the warm start, I did the same thing, but I measured the time it took for the fifth time I started the browser after a restart. All commonly used plugins (Flash, Silverlight, and Java VM) were installed ahead of time. All tests were done 5 times (except for the cold start, as I did not want to restart 5 times) and averaged.

Test	Internet Explorer	Firefox	Winner
Cold Start	3.8 seconds	5.5 seconds	Internet Explorer 8
Warm Start	0.9 seconds	1.2 seconds	Internet Explorer 8
Sunspider	5171.0 ms	2771.2 ms	Firefox
V8 Benchmark Suite	91.4 points	213 points	Firefox
Acid2	Pass	Pass	Tie
Acid3	CRASH (furthest it went was 12 points)	71/100 points	Firefox
Total Wins	2 (with a CRASH)	3	Firefox

As we can see, Internet Explorer opens quickly, but once you actually getting around to browsing actual websites, at least according to these tests, it fails tremendously compared to Firefox (even Internet Explorer 7 got further than Internet Explorer 8 on Acid 3). Mozilla’s Gecko engine takes a commanding triumph over Microsoft’s Trident engine in this war, although Firefox’s XUL interface could use some further performance tweaks, but I guess that’s the tradeoff for cross platform compatibility.
However, in real world web surfing, Internet Explorer felt faster than Firefox. I attribute this to the difference in how IE and Firefox render pages, but just to make sure, I installed Fasterfox Lite (please note that this addon is still experimental, which means that it may not be safe for every day use) in Firefox, and sure enough, IE still felt faster, even though timing the actual load times proved that Firefox was faster at actually loading the pages. I’m not sure what causes this, maybe its the satisfying “Click” you hear in IE when you click on a link.
Things I like about Internet Explorer 8 (bolded are the things I REALLY like):

• Quick startup
• Pleasantly attractive interface (available with Firefox themes, even one that is designed to look like IE)
• Impressive search suggestions in search box (Firefox doesn’t support this)
• Draggable bookmark folders on the bookmark toolbar (Firefox can’t do this)
• InPrivate Mode (which actually blocks banner ads as well) (Firefox users can install Adblock Plus and Stealther). I STILL CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO TURN THIS OFF WITHOUT CLOSING ALL OF MY BROWSING WINDOWS!!
• Every website on the planet is written for it (at least in Compatibility Mode anyway) (Firefox can render just about every site, except those that implement ActiveX, which only IE supports)
• Colored Tab Grouping (Firefox can’t do this, although there is an addon for it, it doesn’t work very well or at all)
• Snappy webpage loading
• Efficient use of screen real estate (Firefox users can install Personal Menu to hide the menubar)
• Crash restore for individual tabs
• Nice “New Tab” page (Firefox users can install Fast Dial or Google Toolbar to get Opera’s and Chrome’s new tab page respectively, but it doesn’t support one like Internet Explorer’s)

Things I like about Firefox 3.0.9 (bolded are things I REALLY like):

• Add-ons like Adblock Plus (which I personally don’t recommend, but it is quite nice), Personas, Shareaholic, GreaseMonkey and many many others. (IE users can install IEPro, which offers many additional features for IE)
• Fast, smooth web surfing
• Open source development philosophy
• Better RSS feed management
• Built in download manager
• Custom searches
• Cross platform compatibility
• Low RAM usage

If you’re just glancing at these two lists, it may look like I have much more to like about Internet Explorer than I do about Firefox, but that just isn’t true. Firefox Add-ons offer an infinite amount of customizability. There were many things both browsers had that I liked, such as suggestions in the address bar, find as you type, and bookmark and setting importers that work.
After being a Firefox user for a long time (I did have about 2 weeks when I randomly decided that Microsoft was my hero, and I didn’t use anything but Microsoft products, that experience has scarred me forever), I was pleasantly surprised by how far Internet Explorer 8 has come, and I can’t wait for Microsoft to push out the automatic update for it. To those people who haven’t heard of Firefox, please try it! But if you’re stuck with Internet Explorer, or are scared to try new things, Internet Explorer 8 certainly isn’t a bad choice either.
The browser I’ll be using for the rest of today and like, ever?

Note: I have purposely ignored Chrome, Opera and Safari as Firefox and Internet Explorer are the top choices for most users out there. Whether you’re on Mac, Linux or PC, Firefox should be your number 1 choice for internet browsing. Think otherwise? Chrome lover (Matt! I’m looking at you!), Opera junkie? Other browsers? Any Lynx users out there? Konquerer? Tell me about it in the comments!
Edit: Just a quick fyi, this screenshot doesn’t represent a test or anything, but this is what IE’s RAM usage looked like after about 2 hours of normal web browsing with only Xmarks being the only addon installed. That’s almost 800 MB of RAM just to IE folks. That’s crazy…

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