Firefox is slower than Opera.

[dangel]

probably a dangerous topic but - i've spent the past few weeks using FF over Opera (which i've used for many years) just to see if the grass is/was greener. I'm that sort of chap - I like to play with the competition because I don't really have religious fervour when it comes to products.

And, it's slower. Possibly because you rapidly end up shunting addins into it but really, Opera has more out the box and is faster (especially on low-powered systems) than FF. Do you disagree?
I'm not sure atm whether i'll go back to Opera but having just clicked on opera by mistake and popped on here I really did think "wow, the web's quicker" because Opera seems to spend a lot less time dithering about, and is a lot lighter on resources.

So now i'm thinking "mmmm addins are good" but "opera is quicker". Life isn't fair.

[TAKTAK]

I don't really have a problem with speed in any browser, as long as they aren't the portable versions and are set up properly, but i prefer FF over alternatives due to the usefulness of lots of the plugins,
DTA, ABP, Firebug etc etc

[Oobie-]

I switch between the 2. Mainly because of the CSS's that certain websites have which don't seem to open up correctly in opera (never really seen ff not display a page correctly).
Just having this page open in both FF and Opera - Opera has 34mb in memory and FF has 43mb.

Loading pages for pretty much everything I browse is a lot quicker in opera (but only noticeable on certain websites a lot of the time, other times you don't notice anything), and navigating back and forth is a year quicker over FF too, obviously to do with the engine that each browser is built in.

[Singh400]

You should throw Chome into that mix aswell. And I agree you lost the edge with FF when you start junking it up with add-ins.

[aidanjt]

Meh, FF is a very strange, it both sucks hard and is pretty awesome all at the same time. For now I'm tolerating it's failings in the vague hope that Mozilla will fix most of its major failings in 3.5.

[Mnia786]

You should throw Chome into that mix aswell. And I agree you lost the edge with FF when you start junking it up with add-ins.

If you use firefox preloader, that factor is pretty much removed. You get darn near instantaneous loading of it with FFPL.

[TAKTAK]

One this i do detest is those sites which try to force you to use a particular browser...

Not really related to speed... but meh

[Agent]

Agree Dangel, I find Opera quicker than FF by default.

However after a few tweeks I find less between them, although I'd still give Opera the slight edge. Not enough to make me use it fulltime though. I just find the plugin system too useful

Tweeks:

Fasterfox: http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/ Although I wouldn't bother with the precaching stuff

Pipelining settings, although it looks like these are included in Fasterfox now : http://www.forevergeek.com/2004/12/make_firefox_faster/

nglayout.initialpaint.delay - changes page rendering. More info on http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9020880

I found pipelining to make a big difference

[CX23882-19]

I find Opera faster than Firefox, particularly on my old Celeron 1.2GHz laptop. The downside is that Opera has compatibility issues with a number of websites, including the "new" Yahoo! Mail.

[Agent]

I find Opera faster than Firefox, particularly on my old Celeron 1.2GHz laptop. The downside is that Opera has compatibility issues with a number of websites, including the "new" Yahoo! Mail.

It's normally the other way around - websites that have been coded badly / wrongly.

In terms of page rendering, Opera is one of the best when it comes to standards.

[CX23882-19]

I'm not going to argue with you on that, but this is my biggest complaint with Opera: it prides itself on following the standards to the letter even if it makes it unable to render certain websites. Meanwhile, Firefox renders them correctly (although that can on occasion do an odd strange thing with text overlapping, but it's rarer these days).

Opera is kind of like a car that gives an extremely comfortable ride, and gives excellent fuel economy, but it can only do that when driven on a perfectly flat, perfectly smooth road.

It's a shame it's not possible to "relax" the compliance in Opera (or even selectively for certain websites), because I would have no hesitation using it as my main browser, but as it stands, I prefer Firefox 3.

[2Cold Scorpio]

I've found Opera to be faster han FF as well, and with more in-the-box from the get-go. I never saw the appeal for "add-ons"; either I don't have a use for them, or they are features found in other browsers natively (in IE7/8's case, a lot of them can be found with just one add-on: IE7Pro, which I do use).

I've just never been a Firefox fan. I guess my old nose still smells the slight scent of Netscape on it, and I hated using "that*.

[Kev32]

Very interesting topic, I moved from Opera to Firefox in 2006 due to the lack of support some sites had for Opera. May go back in light of reading this thread.

[joshwa]

Firefox eats all my memory if I leave it running. So I have to shut it down every now and again to get my memory (and firefox performance) back. But I tend to have too many issues with Opera (corrupt css, site problems, crashes etc) to use it all the time.

[Singh400]

Firefox eats all my memory if I leave it running. So I have to shut it down every now and again to get my memory (and firefox performance) back. But I tend to have too many issues with Opera (corrupt css, site problems, crashes etc) to use it all the time.

Wow, they still haven't fixed that bug? I remember that one from way back in '04 I think.

[Agent]

That one was fixed a long time ago. I suspect Josh has some other issue there, as I've not seen that on any FF install i've done for years.