Tag Archives: Firefox

Software

Is Firefox Slow? Yes And No…

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Back in October I wrote a post titled Firefox vs. Chrome where I mainly talked about how I liked Firefox versus Chrome for its customization and how it seemed that more sites I followed or checked on got more traffic from people using either Firefox or Internet Explorer, which I don’t like but it is what it is, instead of Chrome. At that time part of the discussion in comments was how Chrome ran much faster than Firefox, and I really couldn’t disagree with it, but stated that the customization was what kept me with Firefox.


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I do have to admit that sometimes the slowness of doing some things in Firefox got on my nerve. Copying and pasting things shouldn’t take any time at all, but sometimes things would hang up. I noticed whenever I wanted to download anything that the download window took exactly 8 seconds before the OK button would highlight, and then another 5 seconds before the explorer window would come up so I could select where I wanted to save something. Frankly it was starting to get on my nerves.

Notice I’m saying everything in a past tense? No, I haven’t left Firefox. Instead, I thought it was time to see if what the Mozilla people were saying all along, that Firefox was indeed as fast as Chrome, but what slowed things down here the add-ons that make the browser fun, things that Chrome doesn’t come close to having. Yes, experiment time!

I went into Tools then Add-ons and then Extensions. I had “only” 14 extensions running live on the browser, and in my mind I didn’t think that was too many. But I had to disable some of them for this test. I disabled everything except 3 things. I kept the Adblock Plus pop-up blocker because I absolutely hate those things. I kept my Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar so I could keep the 3 rows that I love so much on the browser. And I kept the Search Status plugin because that’s the biggie for me in checking webpage stats. Everything else had to go for the moment. I then hit restart and wondered what would happen.

What happened? It popped back up almost immediately, and suddenly everything was fast and immediate. See, the thing the Mozilla people have said all along is that except for Adblock Plus they they don’t make any of the other extensions; well, they don’t make many of them. These are added by other people who access the open source software and create either a need or a luxury. Some of them are created by companies such as Skype or Zone Alarm or even AVG to integrate with your browser to better communications or safety. In that instance it’s not the fault of the Mozilla folks that the browser slows down, or that it starts consuming a lot of resources, which used to shut down my computer until I upgraded to Windows 7.

I tested it for about 4 hours and the speed was amazing. It seemed to run as fast as Chrome and Opera, which still touts itself as the fastest browser online. If Firefox is slower than those other two, it’s negligible at this juncture because I’m not waiting for anything.

I was a happy guy… sort of. I’d gotten rid of a lot of things, but now I wanted to see what would happen if I added a couple more back. I did it piecemeal, to see if any one of these might slow things down. I started with the Download Status Bar, which I figured was the least intrusive, and my speed maintained itself. Then I realized that I needed to add Greasemonkey back because that added the option of being able to download YouTube videos, which I’d lost by turning it off. I restarted the browser and things were still fine. One last thing, and this was truly my luxury item. I wanted to see if I could add Stylish, which changes the look of many websites for my browser, without losing speed. I did that and my speed stayed the same; whew!

Which ones didn’t I add back? I left off AVG Safe Search, Colorful Tabs, Microsoft Framework .Net Assistant (I have no idea what that even does and I don’t remember adding it), Read It Later, Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox, Weather Watcher and Adblock Plus Pop-on Addition, which brings extra strength to the original Adblock Plus and works great.

I will be removing most of these since I’ve decided I’m not going to use them anymore, but some I’m going to keep and load only when I need to run them. Rank Checker is a great tool because you can use it to check your keyword rankings on 3 search engines at the same time, and if you have multiple phrases you want to check it’s perfect for that. I’m keeping the extra Adblock Plus because there are some websites I go to that always open up new windows that that’s irritating. And I’m keeping SEO for Firefox because it’s another great tool for checking SEO stats on websites. The others… they just have to go, and removing things instead of leaving them disabled supposedly helps speed as well.

Is Firefox slow? Not anymore! If it is for you maybe you should try my experiment, and then if it works see what you can live without. I did the same thing on my laptop and it was amazing, but since I didn’t have all the same add-ons there as on the main computer I didn’t add much back. Go ahead, try it. 😉
 

Software

Why I Left Firefox For Chrome And Why I Came Back

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Last weekend I finally had it with Firefox. After one more crash because it was blowing up my resources I decided it was time to give up the ghost and I switched to Chrome.

I had two other alternatives, of course. I could have gone to Opera, which has always been pretty fast, but it just seems so sparse. True, one should probably only think about using a browser to browse the internet, but many of us are looking for certain things from our browsers to enhance the user experience, if you will. I also could have gone to IE8 but decided I just don’t want to go backwards, even though I’ve heard good things about IE9, which I haven’t loaded yet.

Anyway, Firefox had suddenly decided to go nuts on me. It was using some major league resources on my computer, once to the tune of 1.8GB; that’s a lot. It was regularly going over a gigabyte, and that was way too much. Then it started crashing all the time, asking me to send crash reports to Mozilla. Last Sunday it crashed the 7th time in one day and that was that.

So I made Chrome my default browser. I had been thinking about it anyway, but not without some reservation. It’s a Google product, as you know, and almost anything related to Google wants to track you. I wrote a post in 2010 telling people that if you use Google Toolbar it tracks your searches and then you start getting targeted advertising. I know they try to tell us it’s for our benefit but I just don’t feel the benefit if you know what I mean. At least you can turn it off for Google Desktop.

I used Chrome for about 4 days and started to feel that, though it had been running better than Firefox, it had issues as well. For instance, every once in awhile it just hangs for a little bit. I went to check the resources and found that it was using a gigabyte of memory as well; what the hey? It seemed to handle that much memory a little better than Firefox but not entirely; that was shocking.

Then I started missing some of my customization. For instance, I was able to modify the look of Firefox to what I was used to in the past; you can’t do that with Chrome. Also, certain plugins that make using a browser that I’ve come to like aren’t available on Chrome. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto Chrome whatsoever. Well, I did finally get one thing to work, but that was it.

Yup, I started missing Firefox, but I had to do something to help it stop crashing. I decided to take a look at all the plugins I was running, along with other things, to see what I really didn’t need anymore. I ended up disabling, then removing, a lot of things that I noticed didn’t even work anymore. Firefox 5 automatically disabled some thing it said it wasn’t compatible with, but I use both Stylish and Greasemonkey and it turns out some scripts with each of those weren’t working anymore either, and could have been causing a conflict.

The verdict is pretty good so far. The highest recorded memory since I made the changes is 525MB, which is easily more manageable. The browser hasn’t crashed since I started using it again and I’m happy about that as well. Maybe it’s finally going to behave; one can only hope, right?

But customization is really what puts Firefox ahead of every other browser, and in the end that’s really why it’s my favorite. That’s my story; what’s yours?

Software

Google Chrome Revisited

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In September 2008, I wrote a review on this blog concerning Google Chrome. It wasn’t the most positive review, but it was brand new and I said I’d check it out again at some point. That point is now.

First, let me tell you why I’m doing it. I’m a Firefox guy, but as you may remember, I wrote in August about some of the problems I’d been having with it. The sucker was constantly freezing up on my computer and I couldn’t shut it down via the Task Manager, so I’d have to reboot to use it. Also, this problem started with CommentLuv in the past month where I’m visiting blogs and having to refresh a few times to leave a comment so the program will pull up any of my posts. My hope and test was that Chrome would alleviate those issues.

Installation is still goofier than anything else I’ve seen. You still get this super long EULA before you can download it, and I decided to read the entire thing to see if there were any traps in it. If there were I missed it, but I made sure not to allow it to add anything else to it when I downloaded the loaded it up.

It says it installs fast; trust me, Firefox loads at least 10 times faster. And when the browser finally showed up I have to admit that it looked a lot more like Opera than what I was expecting. There were two tabs at the top, with a plus sign where I could add more tabs, and a menu bar; that’s pretty much it. I pulled up the Help link so I could figure out how to use a few more things, such as wondering where toolbars were. Seems they don’t use toolbars because they say it slows things down; I’d never heard that before, but I did some reading and they’re not the only ones saying it, so I’ll leave that for now.

To set things up, everything starts by clicking on this little wrench at the top right. I did change a few settings, nothing overly brash, but one thing I set that didn’t seem to change anything was making the default fonts bigger. When I closed and reopened the browser, that setting didn’t take hold, so I found myself having to enlarge every page I went to later on.

I’ll say this; pages do load pretty fast. I turned off pre-fetching, which can slow things down, and I’m sure that helped. I also changed the theme, which is under one of the default tabs when the browser opens for the first time, so that was pretty cool. I learned how to import bookmarks from Firefox, and one of those was my bookmarks toolbar, so that’s one toolbar I got back, and all the other bookmarks are aligned under this button to the far right that says “other bookmarks”; that makes sense.

As for plugins or extensions, there seems to be a lot of them but not the one I’m looking to use, unfortunately. I like being able to see PR or Alexa rank when I visit new sites, and the closest I could find that works with Chrome was SEO Quake, and I don’t like running that all the time. But that’s a personal preference thing; I’m sure you could find something to use.

The important stuff now. I can’t tell you if the browser will lock up and shut down like Firefox had been doing, but I have to admit that Firefox hasn’t messed up in this way for me in the last month or so. There’s no way to test for that, I’m afraid, except to leave it open for a month or so; that’s probably not going to happen. I did check resources and it’s using about 2/3rds less than what Firefox consumes, so that’s a benefit.

But when it came to CommentLuv, it seems I have the same problems with what’s going on with them on Chrome as I have on Firefox. So, at least this tells me it’s not a browser issue; heck!

So, once again, I don’t think it’s bad, but it doesn’t fix the main issues I have with Firefox and thus don’t warrant my changing just yet. But it will be another browser I’ll use to look at new webpages as I create them.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Home

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Home

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Internet

Toolbar Overwhelm

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I guess it was time for this post. I know I can’t be the only person who is suddenly hating all these toolbars popping up all over the place. It’s almost to the point where you can’t go to any site or blog without having either the upper or lower part of your screen filled with a toolbar that won’t go away. Heck, even my buddy Sire had one (he might still have one, but it’s not coming up anymore & I haven’t seen him talking about it any).

At this point probably everyone has seen either this picture to the right or something like it. These types of toolbars are bad enough because it seems like every piece of software wants to load someone’s toolbar onto your computer. I already have a search engine I used that I specifically loaded myself; why the heck would I want to keep adding other company’s toolbars onto my computer like this?

You go to a news site these days and there’s a toolbar at the top. You go to close it and sometimes it doesn’t close, just reduces itself to this little tab that seems to be saying to you “go on, you know you want to use me; I’ll just be sitting here until you’re ready”. If I closed your toolbar I’m not going to use it; take it away! And, for whatever reason, Firefox’s Adblock Plus can’t block them; what the hey? Guess I have to find some software or plugin that blocks pop-unders, which is kind of what these things are.

Why are most of these sites loading toolbars? It all comes down to money; it always does. Everyone is getting paid to add a toolbar in some fashion. Software companies, if it’s not their toolbar, are getting paid. Blogs that add toolbars get paid if someone actually uses it. I doubt there’s one truly altruistic company out there putting out toolbars. Heck, even Google’s toolbar, which I stopped using, was getting something out of the deal, mainly tracking people who used it, even on their own computers, so they could target advertising towards them based on their surfing habits. I wonder what kind of ads Google sends to those folks who only search for porn all day, since they don’t accept advertising from adult related sites.

Either way, I have to say that I didn’t purchase this 22″ widescreen monitor so someone could invade and fill up my space with a toolbar. Please, if you’re going to use one, at least allow us to be allowed to totally close it and get it out of the way.

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Internet

Customize Your Google Page; There’s A Caveat Though…

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Last week I heard the news that Google was going to allow people the opportunity to customize their main page. What they were going to do was to have certain images already set, but if you wanted to you could use your own image for the page.

I have to admit that I was excited. Though I have my Google page already altered thusly, there to the left (right click to see it bigger), via Stylish and Firefox, and I have that stupid sidebar shut down through a script on Greasemonkey, the idea of adding my own image was kind of appealing. And all we had to do was wait until, one day, the link to the bottom left of the Google screen popped up.

Mine popped up Sunday evening, and I thought that was pretty cool. I went to look to see what I had to do, and saw some choices already there. I saw that you also had to log in to your Google account, and for the first time I was sort of hesitant, and I wasn’t sure why. Then I realized why. The thing is if you want to use your own image, you must set up a Picasa account, which is their photo sharing site. Then you can upload your image and attach it to your page, and go on with your business. If you didn’t want to do that, you could upload one of their pictures, but you still have to have a Google account to use it, so that when you sign in it knows it’s you. Otherwise, you can stick with your white background, or do something like what I’ve done.

Here’s the thing about a Picasa account. If you have one, it pretty much means other people can go through your images. That’s what the user agreement says. I don’t have an account, so if there’s a way to make it private I don’t know about it. Still, the idea of someone being able to go through my personal pictures and use them for whatever reason they wish to bothers me somewhat. Yeah, I have some pictures on Facebook, but I knew that I’d be sharing those pictures with people I allow into my Facebook life, since that’s the kind of privacy I put on my account there. Anything beyond that, I’m not sure I want to deal with.

For me, I can do without it. Truthfully, if I wanted to tinker with it, I think, because I use Firefox, I could figure out a way to alter one of the scripts to use my own picture if I wanted to badly enough. However, overall, unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s not a great thing to go messing around with these scripts. That’s why my background is black instead of my favorite color, which is red.

Anyway, if you’re not quite as skittish as I am about sharing some of your images with the world, and you want to customize your Google page, go for it. It’s not a bad deal overall, and gets rid of the boring white. Lucky for me, I’ve already taken care of that on my favorite browser.

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