Firefox Review

Review for Firefox 2-20-11:

Firefox has become the browser of choice for many people seeking alternatives to MS's IE. It has grown into a very nice browser and has many many features.

I shall outline the positives and negatives of this browser:

+

*has very good performance on most systems

*has very powerful addons and you can pretty much add any functionality to your browser you can think of

*more standards compliant and renders pages much better then MSIE

*is more secure then IE

*had multiple tabbed browsing before MSIE

*easier to develop for

*has the option to save all tabs on exit

*has search bar integrated

*robust bookmark management

*very active development

*flash plugin is now separate process

*excellent interface

*customization of theme is powerful and you can even make it look like IE

-

*can be a memory hog with plugins like flash

*sometimes slows down over time with certain websites

*does not have multiprocess tabs like IE does so if one tab crashes the whole browser is brought down (but this does not happen to me often)

I have to recommend this browser over MSIE because the mem usage on my system is actually much lower then MSIE8 and MSIE8 takes up more paging file/commit charge and thrashes my disk more. Also it is harder to kill the flash plugin process if it starts to bloat. FF has better bloat control as a result. Most of the tab crashing in FF relates to Flash anyways.

Ratings---> performance 4/5 interface 5/5 features 5/5 stability 4/5 rendering 5/5 customization 5/5