Which Broswer to use?

[Old Sparky]

O.K., I know that's a difficult one to answer, and which is 'the best' is a matter of opinion. I've been using Firefox for a number of years now, and, the odd 'glitch' apart, I'm generally happy with it, except for the fact that it's very memory hungry, averaging about 200-220MB. Can anyone recommend a Browser, using less RAM, please? I'm reluctant to go back to I.E., even though
it uses far less RAM than that!

[Nick]

For some reason there seems to be a feeling here that Chrome is somehow "a BAD THING".

Its not

I run it on the several hundred Windows boxes that my teams use with absolutely no problems whatsoever.

Generally I find that where people have "problems with Chrome" it turns out to be some system or environmental issue rather that Chrome per se.

Personally, I use Chrome for pretty much everything, except for some totally rubbish sites that are non-XHTML-compliant - sometimes IE is necessary.

We also have some clients (Tier 1 banks mainly) that insist on IE, and older versions at that (IE 8 mainly), because it works with their legacy (aka rubbish older) applications and their rationale is "if it aint broke, don't fix it"...

[Joe]

I'm a Chrome fan and also like Safari. Chrome seems to take about the same memory as you've quoted but Safari is only taking 130MB

- Joe

[Retired]

Hi,

I too very much like Chrome. I'm not a computer geek by any means but I find Chrome very easy to use and simply clicking on the three bar icon at the top right of the screen gives me access to my bookmarks and downloads; clicking on the star to the left of this adds bookmarks which couldn't be easier.

I tried using Firefox for a week or so but couldn't settle with it ; Firefox is good but in the end I missed Chrome so I'll stick with Chrome. Chrome is fast.

A quickie whilst I'm here. Ever since I bought my new computer with Win7 64 bit I've come across programs that don't work like they used to when I was running XP? I've had lots of problems copying and pasting URL's. For some reason this works fine when on forums but when using Outlook email I could copy OK but then when pasted the link didn't change colour and didn't work. I used to simply wipe the URL and click copy; I've also tried Ctrl + C then Ctrl+V but these no longer work for email?

This morning I thought I've had enough of this silly problem so browsed the web for a solution. I now wipe and copy the URL and after pasting into the email I select "Hyperlink" from the toolbar and click on it. I can now add the URL links into my emails but feel this is going backwards rather than forwards?

Kind regards, Col.

[Nick]

I regularly use Outlook as my email client with Chrome. The trick with URLs (or more generally and accurately, URIs) is that some applications don;t identify them automatically until the string is terminated by a non-URI character, e.g. white space.

So, when copying a URI, always paste the string then hit the space bar - this often make the auto-URI-recognition work fine without having to explicitly mark the pasted string as a URI.

The bottom line on URIs, URLs, URNs etc. is Mr. Tim Berners-Lee (him again!), who first standardised this stuff back in 1996: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html

HTH

[Mark Hennessy]

Chrome is fast, but very memory-hungry - that's partly how it achieves the speed. On Linux at least. I have to use it on my 3GHz P4 with 2GB RAM because Firefox is a bit sluggish. In practice, I end up having both browsers open because Chrome consumes so much memory with all the tabs open that I want (I have about 3 times as many tabs open in Firefox, and it takes about a 3rd of the memory that Chrome does). After running for about 3 days, Chrome slows down and needs to be restarted - it's fun to watch the resource meter, as the memory usage suddenly drops by about a GB when it unloads. It takes about 5 minutes all-told to restart, and locks the CPU usage at 100% for nearly all of that time.

So, that's the main reason I feel that Chrome is "a bad thing". Of course, one could additionally get paranoid about Google (the new Microsoft!).

A modern web browser taking a couple of hundred MB is not atypical. Modern web technologies are very memory-hungry. Even just rendering a simple HTML page that's been put together using CSS is surprisingly difficult. Given that the browser is the primary application for most people today, I have no problem accepting that it's going to use a large percentage of the available memory. The OS can always "page" out to virtual memory if needed - that just results in a bit of a delay when switching to another application, but that's only a second or two - less than the response time of some websites.

Incidentally, the machine mentioned above runs Windows XP like a dream - even though it's >10 years old - and Firefox is the best browser to use in the Windows environment. But choosing between them is personal preference - if you don't tend to have many tabs open at once, Chrome is fine. Firefox is better with memory management these days (it wasn't always thus, so if you suffered from that, try it again). I haven't tried Opera or Safari in recent years, but no reason to suspect that they have a "killer" reason that makes them better than Firefox (last time I compared, they were slower and more memory-hungry, but that was a few years back).

[Radio Fixer]

Got bumped up automatically to IE10 the other day. So far so good and no problems.

Gary

[Retired]

Hi,

Thanks for the information Nick; I tried pasting the string and hitting the space bar but it doesn't work on my computer; good try though at least I know how to select "Hyperlink" which works.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221127252096;j...26_rdc%3D1

I bought one of the above computers in the New Year and note 929 of these have been sold to date. With quad core processor 4.0GHz; 1TB HDD and 16GB memory I doubt Chrome will slow it down much? It also has a decent graphics card installed and runs Win7 64bit. It was strange at first but now I'm used to it and find it brilliant value.

If you fancy a change Old Sparky why not simply try Chrome because you will quickly find out if you like it; if not you can always revert back to Firefox? Good luck.

Kind regards, Col.

[Nebogipfel]

"if it aint broke, don't fix it"... is a very good approach in my opinion

Firefox was fine up to version 3.62 (which I still use) but since that time they have gone into a crazy update cycle and seem to have lost their way. What version are they on now? must be 20 or something equally ridiculous. My dear brother faithfully updates all the time and every update seems to break as many things as it fixes. I suspect this is the main reason the developers of Firefox have alienated users and lost some of the huge user base they had.

FWIW I like, and am comfortable with a traditional browser.

I've been looking at other old fashioned browsers recently and both SeaMonkey and Slimbrowser look OK and are very similar to Firefox 3.

[Mark Hennessy]

Just built a "new" machine with XP, and put Firefox 19.0.2 on it, along with AddBlock Plus. It's working absolutely perfectly, and is very quick and responsive. I have 16 tabs open, and it's taking a quarter of a GB of memory, which is OK.

I say "new" - it's an ancient Compaq Evo with 1GB RAM and a 2.5GHz P4 CPU. I've just installed XP and all the service packs, and it's got most of the updates from Microsoft. So far, everything is running very nicely, though I'll probably put another GB of RAM in, as the motherboard will accept up to 2GB. The fastest CPU this chipset will take is 3.06GHz, and these are available for around a tenner, but as this is a small-form-factor machine, it might be asking a bit much of the PSU. I have a 2.8GHz somewhere that might be a better bet.

The Intel 845G integrated graphics are fine for what I need; it's comfortably putting out 1920 by 1080 to match the new 22" Iiyama monitor I've just bought (amazingly cheap for the performance). This machine is for the workshop, so I don't need gaming performance. Playing youtube videos pushes the CPU usage up to 100%, but the video is relatively smooth - a faster CPU will help, and perhaps a graphics card upgrade might be worthwhile as well (would have to be a low profile card) - I'd get one with DVI so I can connect digitally to the new monitor (although I must admit that it's hard to see any issues with the analogue connection).

Anyway, if Firefox is 100% fine on such an old, low-spec machine (it's more than 10 years old!), then I don't see a problem. I also don't see why one should stick with 3.6 - the updates aren't coming out that much faster than before - it's just that they are being given major numbers rather than minor ones. That was a marketing decision, because Chrome did that. Bug fixes and updates are quite important for a web browser from a security point of view, and should be adopted. I'm not aware of any major problems that have been introduced since 3.6, but it's easy enough to roll back if needed.

As I might use this machine for web development, I'll probably install all the others. If I notice any significant differences then I'll report back...

Cheers,

Mark

PS: If anyone fancies a change from the default blue, silver or olive-green themes that come with XP, you might like to try Zune: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078 - it looks quite nice and modern.