Last week, I finally bowed down to the power that is Firefox. So where have I been, you may ask? I have been hanging my Internet based washing on Opera (Linux) and Maxthon (Windows) for the last couple of years.
Let me explain why:
First at work, I (still) use Windows 2000 as my workstation. There’s a host of reasons for this, which I won’t go into – but the main one that keeps me using Maxthon is that our intranet uses integrated authentication, which means one less login for me each day. Maxthon is a front-end wrapper around the IE (or Gecko) engine giving me a tabbed interface, mouse gestures etc. The other and main advantage is it’s (mostly) low memory footprint compared to both Firefox and Opera.
On my Linux machines or Windows machines with memory, I chose Opera. It used to be fast, it used to have a low memory footprint and once you got used to it’s mail client, it was good.
What’s changed? Maxthon slows down exponentially after a day’s worth of use. Opera is chewing more memory than any other application I run and most of all, Firefox has XUL and add-ons, which are finally useful, with compatibility better than Opera and security better than IE.
I still have IE running under Wine on my Linux machines, Opera installed wherever I go but it looks like Firefox has finally taken the cake for me at the moment.
I am currently writing this blog from the Firefox “Performancing” plugin, to a WordPress blog that I uploaded from the Fireftp plugin, my wife is playing her music (not necessarily a good thing) from Firefox on Windows which is controlling Amarok Music Player on my PCLinuxOS machine.