Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?)
Chris Messina, who used to work on Flock (an open source browser based on the same code that runs Firefox), says the beast has woken up. Beast being Microsoft.
But IE7 does have some challenges ahead of it. Some sites in it render very slow. Most notably for me, Google Reader (that’s now my most used Web site because I’m reading all my feeds there and building my link blog with it). I’m also using the new Firefox 2 and Firefox is a LOT faster. IE7 is frustratingly slow on Google Reader. It seems to hang whenever new stuff is being downloaded in the background via AJAX. To be fair, Google is probably pushing the browser in all sorts of ways, even the MSN team decided to back off on its use of AJAX due to speed problems, though (Live.com used to have an infinite scroll capability, which I really loved but they got rid of it after speed complaints came in).
I haven’t yet visited enough sites with both browsers to know whether this is a single site problem, or an experience that I’ll have overall, but Firefox 2 does seem faster.
UPDATE: I just went to Google Maps with both browsers too. Same results. Firefox 2 is a LOT faster on AJAX (dragging the map around feels a lot better on Firefox 2).
On Local.live.com, though, both browsers behaved almost exactly the same (both were fast).
I wonder what the difference in AJAX calls are between the two mapping sites. That might demonstrate that Web 2 sites might need to do some homework to get their sites to be performant in both IE7 and Firefox.
By the way, I just did a little “start up test” of both browsers. I set both browsers home page to TechMeme. Then I started both up. Then I closed both. Then I started them both up again. Both times Firefox noticeably beat IE7 on completing the page load.
So, my #1 wish for IE8 is already “more speed please.”
What have your experiences been?
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October 19th, 2006 at 6:59 am
[...] Robert Scoble says IE7 is slower than FireFox on some web sites. He’s running FireFox 2 so it would be interesting to see a comparison of FireFox 1.x instead. Posted by mmcconnell1618 Filed in Uncategorized [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Firefox generally caches EVERYTHING even when I tell it to use 0 meg for cache.
I launched both browsers here pointing to techmeme.com and the load times were about the same.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:17 am
I like how both browsers now offer a user-friendly view of RSS feeds to make subscribing to blogs and podcasts much easier.
I just wish both browsers made it easier to download enclosures so podcast subscribers would have a no-brainer experience in subscribing to feeds.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:18 am
Well, I just downloaded and installed IE7. On the first run (where default search provider has to be chosen), it crashed. Since I am in the web industry and have to work with it, I gave it another shot.
- The “new tab” option is not very intuitive and took me a while to figure out.
- Can’t close a tab directly (no “x” on it).
- The Print functionality seems much better.
- Quicktabs could be useful. Firefox had a plugin for this, but I never bothered installing it.
Hmm…not sure whether I’ll continue using it..
October 19th, 2006 at 7:24 am
Varun: weird. Every tab on my IE7 has a little “X” on it. You can also close tabs by using Ctrl-W on your keyboard.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:26 am
Varun,
Maybe this will help.
- The “new tab” option is not very intuitive and took me a while to figure out.
It’s a blank tab, vs. Firefox’s use of File, New Tab
- Can’t close a tab directly (no “x” on it).
If you have more than one tab going, there’s an X on each one when it is active, or just right-click on the tab you wish to close, and choose Close.
- The Print functionality seems much better.
I agree, the shrink to fit is great!
- Quicktabs could be useful. Firefox had a plugin for this, but I never bothered installing it.
I don’t install any Firefox plug-ins.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Michael: I am using both browsers in default mode. Both seem to reload the page on startup every time. Why do I say that? Cause I open Techmeme several times a day (often dozens of times) and every time I check the page is different.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:44 am
[...] Qualcuno ha già confrontato i due browser, e sostiene che su alcuni siti basati su AJAX (ad es Google Reader e Google Maps), Firefox 2 sia molto piu veloce, mentre su altri si equivalgono. E che FF2 sia molto più veloce anche riaprendo un sito appena chiuso. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 7:56 am
You can also middle-click a tab to close it. (gets around the issue that only the active tab has an X)
Middle-click or Ctrl-click a link on a page, it opens in a new tab.
Ctrl-T is a shortcut for New Tab.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:03 am
craig : there’s an option in the feed properties to “automatically download attached files”. it should probably be on by default, but then Robert would complain that it’s slow ;)
October 19th, 2006 at 8:08 am
We might want to enquire is it the browser or the website? I see a lot of websites that intentionally render like crap in ie. Is it beyond Google to do this as well.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:10 am
[...] In his blog Matt Cutts reviewed the new Firefox update, but was too scared to try out IE7 in light of Danny’s experience. By all accounts he was pretty pleased with the new version, and Robert Scoble has noticed that some sites seem to run a little slower on IE7, with Firefox being muchg faster than the Microosft browser. Only time and in house testing will tell. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 8:12 am
If you want to see if IE/firefox are reloading the page, fire up Fiddler (fiddlertool.com i think) and see if you get a full/vs. cached header response.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:12 am
I was using the Beta version of IE7 and I also observed the same thing,IE7 is damn slow, even when I create a new tab, it acts as thought I made a big mistake !
IE7 is supposed to be faster..however I felt that IE6 was much better (on the speed front) !
October 19th, 2006 at 8:18 am
I am so not installing that until after service pack 2!
Besides, firefox already gives me all I could want in a browser.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:23 am
“That might demonstrate that Web 2 sites might need to do some homework to get their sites to be performant in both IE7 and Firefox.”
Great… yet even more browser incompatibilities that have to be solved not by the people producing the browsers, but the web site programmers and designers.
I vote everyone move to FF2.0, all other browsers be outlawed, and the wold can move on with a lot less needless stress and wasted time.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Oh, one more thing… I wouldn’t bother making my sites perform well in IE7. I’ll worry about FF, Safari, and others first. Anyone who chooses to use IE7 which should have been done right, especially considering how much time Microsoft had to do so, can bear with whatever performance issues it has. I really don’t care.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:27 am
IE7 rendering performance is pretty bad, IMO. I read primarily news pages (MSNBC, CNN mainly), and it feels about as bad as IE6, which is as bad as IE5, and IE4. The only time I get a speed boost is when I buy a new computer (which is about as often as IE releases a new version, but I’m not synching my computer purchases to the IE team’s release schedule because they’re not rendering multi-textured concave objects with physics calculations)
I haven’t downloaded the release version yet, but another problem I had with the betas was the inability to open a new tab that has the URL of the prior tab, much like “File|New|Window” works.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:29 am
“That might demonstrate that Web 2 sites might need to do some homework to get their sites to be performant in … IE7″
That might demonstrate that IE developers might need to do some homework to get their browser to be performant with … Web 2.0 websites.
Why are you still whoring for Microsoft when they’ve stopped giving you paychecks?
October 19th, 2006 at 8:29 am
radaronpaws: >>Great… yet even more browser incompatibilities
This is not an incompatibility. It’s just slow. They both do the same thing as far as I can tell (at least on the sites I mentioned).
If there’s a way to do AJAX that works well in both browsers, why not do that? The virtualearth.com team found some way to do that.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:31 am
[...] Of course, this same week the latest release candidate for Firefox 2.0 came out. Word on the street is that Firefox 2 is noticably faster than IE 7. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 8:35 am
RObert, how can you love that infinite scroll thingy?
You couldn’t drag the little thing..
so after scrolling to say, result # 200… if I wanted to go to result # 20 again, I’d have to scroll through them all, or re-search for the term and scroll down again.
Pagination is useful!
October 19th, 2006 at 8:36 am
So what’s the advantage of IE7 over Opera, Mozilla or other browsers? Speed is bad on my machine, rendering is slow, tabs is a feature 5 years old and we have the first security alert this morning!
October 19th, 2006 at 8:45 am
[...] Reports from Scoble indicate that IE 7 is significantly slower than Firefox when accessing Google Reader. That’s one reason why I’m in no hurry to try it out. Looking through his comments, sounds like that’s not the only thing that’s slow… tagged as: googlereader, ie, ie7 [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Durr: >>Why are you still whoring for Microsoft when they’ve stopped giving you paychecks?
If you think this is whoring I don’t even want you as a reader. Please go away. I want smart readers. If you’ve been reading me over the past month you’ve been seeing that I’ve been pretty darn tough on Microsoft.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Ryan: if I wanted to go back I would have just reloaded the page. Did you know that 99% of all searchers never click on the “next” button? I liked the infinite scroll, but obviously it didn’t pass through the user testing phase.
October 19th, 2006 at 8:55 am
[...] IE 7 came out yesterday. Scoble’s early review doesn’t sound that great. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 9:09 am
So far so good…one hang last night but no issues with Ajax. Likewise, Google reader, homepage, etc all load fine. I’ll check out the Ajax feedback asap. I’m more concerned around legacy Active X controls embedded in older apps.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:21 am
Thanks for the comment. I replied “Robert, I really couldn’t say why IE7 was significantly slower for you on AJAX sites such as Google Reader and Google Maps. If it gets to be too much, you can always switch to FF. :)” in my comments. :)
October 19th, 2006 at 9:22 am
IE7 has moved the browser game on beyond Firefox.
It’s a really nice program - no tab bar, no tool bar, no menu bar. Instead, a clean-sheet look at how the GUI of a browser should work, maximising screen real-estate. And you know what? It works!
I must say I’ve also used it to browse Google Reader and Gmail. Maybe if I timed it it might turn out to be slower than Firefox (which itself is *a lot* slower than Opera), but I haven’t noticed.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:29 am
Dan G, have you tried IE7 on other stuff like Zimbra or other Web2.0/AJAX sites (new Yahoo Mail)? How does it work for sites like that?
October 19th, 2006 at 9:44 am
[...] And the early reports are that it is dog slow and has trouble with AJAX style pages. Just like IE6 I guess. Meanwhile, Firefox2 is out and is kicking the pants off of IE7 in speed and web standards adherence. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Why is it so difficult to install multiple versions of IE on a single machine? OK, I sort of know the answer, but it really makes testing sites for IE rendering problems more frustrating than it already is.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:56 am
[...] Was just reading some of the coverage on the release of Internet Explorer 7 and noticed a post by Robert Scoble in which he said the Google Reader website loads very slow for him, Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?). I to have noticed that almost everything by Google loads very slowly for me, Gmail.com takes a lot longer to display the page, my personal Google homepage takes awhile longer to load as well. Google sitemaps loads okay, no problems there. But IE7 does have some challenges ahead of it. Some sites in it render very slow. Most notably for me, Google Reader. I’m also using the new Firefox 2 and Firefox is a LOT faster. IE7 is frustratingly slow on Google Reader. It seems to hang whenever new stuff is being downloaded in the background via AJAX. To be fair, Google is probably pushing the browser in all sorts of ways, even the MSN team decided to back off on its use of AJAX due to speed problems, though (Live.com used to have an infinite scroll capability, which I really loved but they got rid of it after speed complaints came in). [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 10:01 am
First IE7 security exploit reported here:
http://secunia.com/advisories/22477/
October 19th, 2006 at 10:09 am
[...] enough time to read Scoble’s post [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 11:04 am
This is such lame pseudoscience on your part, Bob. Which is your usual lame m.o. If you’re going to make claims re: IE7 is slower than FF 2.0, a.) do it in something resembling an objective fashion, that way others can validate your results and b.) do it with something more than a hand-wavy “I tried to go to my mom’s blog and it felt slow and somewhat ambivalent to my needs”.
I say this because, FF 2.0 chugs like a hippo on my everyday Vista box and IE7 feels snappy as all get out. So much so, that I’m retraining myself not to miss FF’s wonderful extensibility.
Which browser’s better is totally subjective, but your speed claims smell like the usual Scoble “I’m just going to write it because no one ever fact checks me” b.s.
People repeat what you say as an authority, how about writing something authoritative now and again?
October 19th, 2006 at 11:12 am
“Live.com used to have an infinite scroll capability, which I really loved but they got rid of it after speed complaints came in.”
————————————-
Yep, Microsoft caved in to the troglodite. I hate when they do that; they seem to lack the guts to move forward for fear of offending anyone. Thank God the Office team didn’t back off of its new UI. But at least Live.com still uses infinite scroll for its image search.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:13 am
I’ve been developing a Web 2.0 service (www.sampa.com) for almost 2 years now. It works on both FF and IE. There are many haunting problems with both browsers like memory leaks and memory bloating. However, what makes Firefox so much faster on rich web-based apps (AJAX, DHTML) is that its JavaScript interepreter and the DOM manipulation are about 6-10 times faster than IE’s. I measure it.
For example, re-sorting a table with 100 rows in IE might take 20 seconds, while on Firefox it takes just about 3 seconds. Now, if that table has 200 rows, IE can take up to 2 minutes!!! Firefox, just about 15 seconds.
That explains why MSN couldn’t keep growing the table larger and larger. It works ok with static content, but not if you plan on adding, removing or re-arranging the rows of the table.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Initial thoughts:
1) Glad to have tabs (long time coming…)
2) Mixed feelings on the add new tab noobin on the end of tab row. Good for average user as it makes adding new tab easily. Apperance is annoying to me…wish I could turn it off, but whatever.
2) Wish that the ‘X’ was on every tab regardless of whether it is selected or not
3) Wish I could customize how it looks. For instance, would love to have the bottom row be only tabs…no Favorties, home, etc. Would love to move icons around.
Thanks to the team for working to create something new. A refresh was needed. Still like Safari and Firefox way better. IE 7 just doesnt feel right when I open it. Just feels…unnatural. I dont open it and feel “ahhhhhhhh”. I feel akward, similar to going to a disfunctional website and not wanting to stay and read.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Regarding FF’s speed on Google sites, note that Google contributes developers and money to FF, so it’s not surprising that FF would be tuned to Google. Did anyone try Opera, Safari, etc with Google’s sites to see if those browsers are slow or fast?
(Despite having a gmail account, The only Google site I really use is Groups, just to browse some usenet groups, and I’ve had no speed problems regarding IE on that site.)
October 19th, 2006 at 11:21 am
Robert, I would give Maxthon a try - fast load - no problem with Google reader.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:36 am
I’ve been using IE7 since beta 2 as my primary browser. It’s been working great and no issues with speed. In fact I prefer it over Firefox which regularly crashes when a flash window player is open for a while.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Keith,
>>another problem I had with the [IE7] betas was the inability to open a new tab that has the URL of the prior tab, much like “File|New|Window” works.
One way is pressing ALT + ENTER in the address bar. That opens the url in a different tab.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Ah, my favorite dialogue from “Pirates of Silicon Valley”:
Steve Jobs (played by Noah Wyle): “We are better than you are….we have better stuff.”
Bill Gates (played by Anthony Michael Hall):”You don’t get it Steve…that doesn’t matter !”
YouTube link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2GEDy042iNM
—-
Firefox has been a better browser than IE6, and that didn’t matter to a lot of users who were comfortable with IE6 and thus didn’t bother getting Firefox.
IE7 is now an arguably better browser than Firefox1.5, and that is not going to matter to folks already comfortable with Firefox.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Security flaw:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061019/tc_pcworld/127564
October 19th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Turn off the Phishing Filter my browser sped up enormously.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Robert - I work next door to the team owns the scripting engine in IE (they run all the Javascript code).
Sites doing AJAX/Javascript code should go look at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/28/728654.aspx
- that and the other article in the series talks about how to make Javascript/Ajax sites really,really fast on Internet Explorer.
I know that several members of the JScript team do read your blog - so consider your comments heard :-)
October 19th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
[Previous comment didn't show up - reposting. Aargh!]
Robert - I work next door to the team owns the scripting engine in IE (they run all the Javascript code).
Sites doing AJAX/Javascript code should go look at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/08/28/728654.aspx
- that and the other article in the series talks about how to make Javascript/Ajax sites really,really fast on Internet Explorer.
I know that several members of the JScript team do read your blog - so consider your comments heard :-)
October 19th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Anti: when I worked at Microsoft there were many INTERNAL reports that Firefox was faster than IE7 on AJAX-centric sites (even the old version was faster on AJAX sites). Oh, and since when did normal people have Vista?
October 19th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
It doesn’t know to save current tabs with links (by default). And I didn’t find the option to save tabs manually anywhere.
October 19th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
I am NEVER going back to Windows at home and will avoid it as much as I can outside the flat
October 19th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
I figured it out. It saves tabs when you set that option in Option dialog box. When opening IE again it opens a home page tab PLUS saved tabs.
October 19th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Sriram - when developers tell you “it hurts with I do this with your browser” we don’t expect you to come back and say “then don’t do that”.
Firefox can do it. Be like Firefox.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Heh… I find it funny that IE is having trouble keeping up with AJAX sites. It was just a few years ago that they deliberately designed the Halo site with scrolling layers that wouldn’t render quickly in Firefox, making it look like utter crap.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
err… they == Bungie Web Team. Notice how they added an image that slightly overlaps the text. They could easily fix the performance problems in Firefox, but have they after 2 years?
October 19th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
Firefox is totally better than IE7. Who cares about IE we should be telling people to use Firefox, Opera or Flock instead.
October 19th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
It took a grand total of 4 hours for IE7 to crash on me. Niiiiice. On the plus side, that’s about the same as IE6.
October 19th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
[...] Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?) [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
The dopes who claim that IE7 is slow haven’t apparently noticed the little animation in the status bar indicating that it defaults to having the anti-phishing filter on.
As comment #47 said, turn it off if you want full speed. But, on second thought, keep it on and take the few seconds in extra load time. You’ll be safer.
October 19th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Brian: I just turned off the phishing filter in IE7 and on Google Maps and other AJAX sites, it still is much slower to refresh. Dragging the map around feels much better in Firefox than it does on IE7.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
After installing IE7 and restarting, Google Notifier no longer remembered my username and password. Feature?
October 19th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Finally the IE team is woken from their sleep. Will they do the same thing they did to Netscape? Don’t think so. They’ve got a game on their hands. This time they haven’t leapt over another browser but are simply playing catch-up. Firefox is too agile compared to the large tanker that is Microsoft.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
I took the red pill (or is the blue one) and jumped from IE6 to IE7. I have FF installed and use it from time to time, but really most sites render properly with IE6 and have problems with FF. Now however the tides have turned. IE7 doesn’t render a lot of sites (mostly CSS table-less sites) worth a damn. The tabbed browsing is cute but boring. I’m going back to an IE6/FF combo and calling it a day.
October 19th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Am I the only one who has had this HUGE problem? As long as IE7 (any version, including the release) is installed, all my programs that rely on IE for embedded display of Web sites (e.g., FeedDemon and all other RSS readers, WebSite-Watcher, even WeatherBug) will crash when displaying just about any page). I can’t believe others have not had this experience. The only solution is to uninstall IE7.
October 19th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
John: I haven’t experienced that yet. Sounds like something is messed up on your system. I used to have problems like that with bad video drivers. Not sure that upgrading your video driver will fix that, though.
October 19th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
IE 7 is slow than IE6.Firefox it is a LOT better,1.5 and,certally,Firefox 2.0
October 19th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
[...] No sooner have I posted this that I found Scoble’s entries here and here. He also mentions Factory City’s take. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
I use IE6 regularly, but now I started to use FF2 beta more often because Google Reader is faster there. After reading your post, I decided to wait before upgrading to IE7. Without increase in performance, there is one reason less to upgrade.
October 19th, 2006 at 9:01 pm
[...] IE7 has been finally released. But IE7, that it is, is still posing some problems. And IE7, that it is, has a security vulnerability discovered already. [...]
October 19th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
I just loaded it tonight and haven’t had many issues so far. I believe they brought a solid effort on the user experience (not tooting my own horn…yet).
1) The start up page with settings is a nice touch, great way to introduce new features/settings without some silly flash tutorial.
2) Quick tabs, simple and elegant way to get a visual of your open tabs without over gadgetizing it.
3) Tabbed browsing implementation (now tooting own horn): scrolling and the dropdown with the list of tabs is something that we thought would be better when you’ve got 20 or 30 tabs open. It might be easier to pick from a dropdown where you can read the name rather than a 20px wide tab when the bar is full. And new tabs spawned from a page open directly to the right of the original tab. One of the things that I disliked about firefox and safari is that i’m browsing and open a link in a new tab and it opens way to the end of the stack — out of context from where I was. But, I know it’s not something people will be used to. I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:30 pm
IE7 crashed when I was on my friends MySpace (usually very speedy in ff). IE7 = one thumb down.
October 20th, 2006 at 12:37 am
I did also have this IE7 crash first time i ran after installing the browser.And whats more i think it is the only Browser to ask for system reboot after the installation.Seems Microsoft has learnt lessons from the FF success but it seems too bad a remake of FF.
October 20th, 2006 at 1:32 am
Marcelo Calbucci wrote:
“There are many haunting problems with both browsers like memory leaks and memory bloating. However, what makes Firefox so much faster on rich web-based apps (AJAX, DHTML) is that its JavaScript interepreter and the DOM manipulation are about 6-10 times faster than IE’s. I measure it.
For example, re-sorting a table with 100 rows in IE might take 20 seconds, while on Firefox it takes just about 3 seconds. Now, if that table has 200 rows, IE can take up to 2 minutes!!! Firefox, just about 15 seconds.”
This is what I have been worried: Memory leaks and memory bloating on Web 2.0 sites using AJAX to create seamless user experience without page refresh. If Marcelo Calbucci’s measurement is accurate with consistency, Web 2.0 is in trouble :(
3 sec vs 20 sec in web world is equivalent to Live or Die. Do you guys remember Friendster’s story?Friendster lose to Myspace in speed.
Web 2.0 community have to do more measurements. We probably have to go back to our kitchen tables and deal with this.
Headache: Still have to hack IE6 and deal with IE7’s memory leaks
October 20th, 2006 at 2:10 am
This is clear IE problem, in fact very same problem we talked about few months ago. It just more noticable today since there are many more 2.0 sites to visit.
btw what went relatively under the radar: FF RC2 had improved on already terrific JS/DOM performance and now on most intensive web 2.0 pages it may be up to x50 (!!) times faster then IE. http://tinyurl.com/u4b5e Firefox seems to quickly becoming “official” web 2.0 browser…
October 20th, 2006 at 5:34 am
I installed the latest updates to IE7 and had a whole load of problems. My buttons on the taskbar disappeared, IE7 refused to open and kept crashing my PC, it wouldn’t let me access anything at all such as my Hotmail or Spaces and I kept on receiving the message ‘Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close’.
So I did a rollback and am NOT updating IE7 again thanks all the same.
October 20th, 2006 at 7:16 am
Robert your funny, what did you expect ie 7 to be a Firefox killer ? A lot of us only just tolerate ie and consider it a tool for the mentally deranged who like adverts for patent drugs and send spam for spammers.
When (or if) ‘ie’ fully supports css, and … and … etc then you say it works - until then ignore this pile of sewage.
Remember Robert - there are standards and microsoft ideas. Microsoft is not important, the standards are, the inability of ms to follow these standards is well proven. Incidentally this might cause many web 2 startups to fail, and some cybercafes if the only html viewer is ie - (hint dont use an easyinternet cafe for web apps), but then windows live is much better and its owned by microsoft as well.
I hope some web 2 startups sue microsoft. I see a ‘restraint of trade’ thing.
October 20th, 2006 at 7:44 am
bananasfk: I really want smart readers here, not religious jerks. You do realize that Microsoft invented most of AJAX, don’t you? So, the fact that IE7 doesn’t work best with the stuff that was invented inside its own doors is pretty ironic.
Also, Microsoft has, in the past, been at the forfront of Web standards support. Who did CSS support first? IE. Who had an object model most developers could figure out first? IE.
So, take your hatred of Microsoft somewhere else like Slashdot please.
October 20th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Robert thats fine to list some of the achievements that ie once provided, but please dont write a future post saying ie needs this and that to make your podcast webpage things usable in month or so time.
Writing a page of validated standard html that acts and looks similiar on many browsers (including windows) should not be that tricky to pull off
If by following the xhtml standard - im a religous freak then the w3c is doomed.
October 20th, 2006 at 10:09 am
[...] edit 1 Interesting post from Robert Scoble on his opinions of IE7 - check the comments for more… [...]
October 20th, 2006 at 11:38 am
[...] Scoble knocks IE7’s performance compared to Firefox 2 and I had to see it to believe it. Given I’ve been living in IE7 for months - and more recently with IE7 on Windows Vista - I’ve never given performance a thought, which tells me either that performance has been fine or I’m simply ignorant. Likely a little of both. But I wonder, does it really matter? [...]
October 20th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I have noticed the same thing. Firefox is faster than IE6 and I haven’t noticed much of a performance improvement with IE7.
IE7’s tab context menu annoys me even more than the performance. “New Tab” and “Close Tab” are switched around. While beta testing, I closed a ton of tabs unintentionally.
The only big features Firefox didn’t have was the phishing filter and Quick Tabs, but now their both available in Firefox. They were actually available before 2.0 through extensions. There’s really no reason for me to switch back to IE for this release.
I think the big feature IE is missing is a nice and easy extension model backed by a large community. This is what keeps Firefox ahead of everyone else.
October 20th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Well, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to, it’s easy to win.
FireFox simply cheats:
http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinha/archive/2006/10/20/firefox-2-outperforms-ie7-because-firefox-doesn-t-do-the-right-thing.aspx
(Yes, that’s the same as the pingback above.)
October 20th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
[...] I also downloaded IE7, which has finally been released. Remarkable that it is the first full revision of the browser since 2001. Anyway, as Scoble notes, it’s too slow to replace FireFox in anyone’s estimations, especially v2 of FF, which is considerably quicker than previous versions. [...]
October 21st, 2006 at 4:17 am
Firefox will unofficially become Official Web 2.0 Browser.
Assume Microsoft does nothing and is blind with PR success on IE7 release.
My prediction:
1st wave of Web 2.0 sites get hit the most in severe degree are the social networking sites. Teens and young adults are spending few hours on these web 2.0 sites daily. They will be the first to notice the unbearable longer responses on IE7. These smart consumers will quickly find out the easiest way is to dump IE7 and switch over to Firefox, rather than rollback to IE6. These social networking users will spread the word out like fire. Auto updates will accelerate the Firefox switch over.
Next are the Productivity web 2.0 sites like webtop applications. Simply asking clients to switch to Firefox will solve the issue. If clients want to run office 2.0 app without buying Microsoft product, they surely wouldn’t mind to switch to FireFox that is Free and faster.
In the next 3-6 months, Firefox market share will be mysteriously climbing up faster than usual thanks to the IE auto update.
October 21st, 2006 at 9:05 am
#30:
>I must say I’ve also used it [IE7] to
>browse Google Reader and Gmail. Maybe
>if I timed it it might turn out to be
>slower than Firefox (which itself is
>*a lot* slower than Opera), but I haven’t
>noticed.
Can you list some sites where Firefox is “a lot” slower than Opera? I’m practically a full-time Opera user, and frankly, I’ve never seen any. I rarely see any where Firefox isn’t faster, often a lot faster, and that’s even after tricking out Opera with every recommended speed trick in the book (something you don’t need to do with Firefox).
And note that I’m not talking about artificial benchmarks that show Opera is faster (there’s one from the Howtocreate site that’s oft-quoted.)
Real sites, especially popular, modern ones.
I think there might have been a day when Opera was fastest, and it still is when flipping “back” through pages you’ve just visited, but complex Web 2.0-ish sites of the day are its Achilles Heel, IMO, particularly if Javascript is employed.
Speaking of Web 2.0 sites, Opera doesn’t work with a lot of them (e.g. Yahoo Mail Beta), or does work but isn’t fully supported (e.g. Windows Live Mail).
In some cases, the folks at Opera have had to write and package elaborate workaround scripts just to get Opera working on a site at all (just recently Yahoo Mail Beta, where the performance is deathly because of this, and as soon as Yahoo changes anything on their end, it stops working again).
None of this is Opera’s fault, which probably supports more standards than anyone else, but sites aren’t particularly keen on standards. They write for browsers, not standards. And browsers with (at best) a 1% marketshare don’t reach a very high level of interest.
Case in point: eBay just announced that they’re concentrating on IE, Firefox, and Safari, and the rest of the browsers will be YMMV from this point forward. Opera will no longer have “advanced functionality” on eBay.
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200610.shtml#2006-10-19095331
October 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Interesting, I had no more problems with google features (that were noticeably hindering) in IE7 than I do with FF1.5
October 21st, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Could the number of plugins installed in Firefox make a difference? I would assume they do.
October 21st, 2006 at 4:35 pm
[...] So I’m late into the conversation about Internet Explorer 7 being released this week and I’ve read quite a bit around the traps when the chance has arisen from the different perspectives. John Oxton wrote a rather good piece and I was interested in Scoble’s informal speed comparison. [...]
October 22nd, 2006 at 2:23 am
Ist der Internet Explorer 7 der Killer fr Firefox?
Marktführer Microsoft legt nach langer Abstinenz heute mit dem IE 7 eine Schippe in Browser-Lagerfeuer nach. Bleibt die Frage: welcher Browser wird am längsten dem Dauer-Feuer standhalten? Killt der IE 7 den Steilaufstieg des Firefox-Browser…
October 23rd, 2006 at 9:46 am
Just installed IE7 and unlike some people above who had trouble working out how to use the tabs, I found them pretty easy. Come on guys, it’s really not that difficult to use a mouse, especially if you claim to work in the “web” industry.
Anyway, I like the interface. A lot of screen is reserved for the web page thanks to the smaller interface at the top. I like the way the tabs work and the quick-tabs especially won my affection.
Being able to create your own search engine entries with a link is great too, as opposed to Firefox’s requirement to create/edit text files.
It loads quicker than Firefox too, though with MS having access to hidden APIs that Mozilla don’t, this is to be expected.
IE7 is a huge improvement over IE6 and I’d love to use it, but at the back of my mind there’s always the security issue taking me back to Firefox - IE has simply had too many security problems for me to be comfortable using it for my online banking etc.
October 24th, 2006 at 3:59 am
[...] If you’re not on broadband you’ll find that pages load considerably faster on it. Actually even if you’re on broadband you might feel the benefit? [...]
October 24th, 2006 at 7:11 am
[...] Must-have Add-Ins for Internet Explorer 7 The Internet Explorer 7 Team posted an amazing list of must-have Add-Ins for IE7. I’m using almost all of them now! If you don’t have IE7 yet, you can get it here, or Automatic Updates will push it out to you in a few weeks, as described in this blog article. I have both IE7 and the Firefox 2 beta on my laptop, and I must say I am very impressed by both. Two of the must-have add-ins for IE7, Inline Search and IESpell, drop into IE7 the two missing bits of functionality I coveted in Firefox - the search filter bar at the bottom of the screen, and the spelling checker. Although some reports are that Firefox renders some sites more quickly, I find that IE7’s Quick Tabs do a lot for my web surfing productivity. For web developers, the two must-have Add-Ins mentioned, the IE Developer Toolbar and Fiddler, are tried and true additions to my arsenal. What are your favorite and must-have browser Add-Ins? Filed under: General, Developers, Web Development in .NET - Advanced, Microsoft, Internet Explorer [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 9:41 am
I thought you’d be interested in a test that I did yesterday: http://marcelo.sampasite.com/brave-tech-world/e/Firefox-vs-IE—Who-s-faster.htm
This time FF beats IE really bad.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Have you tried turning the “Enable Native XmlHttpRequest” to off? It looks like the IE team didn’t code this to spec or they have some slowness in their javascript object. Turn this off and IE is forced to use the orginial ‘Microsoft.XMLHTTP’ object which seems much much faster…
October 25th, 2006 at 1:26 pm
[...] http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/10/19/firefox-vs-ie-7-ie7-having-trouble-with-google-sites [...]
October 25th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
My blog entry on IE7’s xmlhttprequest object:
http://www.techtoolblog.com/archives/ie-7-native-xmlhttprequest-not-so-good
October 27th, 2006 at 8:06 am
On my 2nd use of IE7 , I showed it to a friend who would be using it in work. Opened Gmail & BBC in tabs. All seemed fine.
after 10 minutes of looking through email, I logged out and attempted to close IE7 down.
I was asked if I wanted to close tabs. Clicked yes.
I then got told, IE 7 has encountered a problem and must be shut down and I was then asked if I I’d like to submit info to MS.
In order words IE7 crashed! On my second use. Pretty Poor.
Otherwise its grand and a huge improvement.
I always hated how opening up a new (blank) window would cause IE6 to open with the same content you were viewing.
So you had to windows showingthe same thing. This made no sense to me.
Verdict:
I am sticking with Firefox.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:39 am
Can someone elaborate on what is meant by adjective “very slow”? Doesn’t make any sense to me at least. This should be supported with data. I mean on a blah-blah configuration machine loading blah-blah page takes m1 sec in IE and m2 sec in FF. This kind of data is going to help rather than saying “very slow”. “Very slow” for me is 100 times slower, for someone else it might be .3 times slower. Can we get some quick data here?
November 3rd, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Mees really don’t like Gate’s folly of late I’ve been
using Opera 9 as it more user friendly…..
November 9th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
[...] Walaupun sudah beberapa pekan kemunculan firefox 2.0 tapi saya baru malam ini berkesempatan mencicipi browser terbaru dari mozilla ini. Terlepas dari koneksi internet, browser ini saya rasakan memiliki kecepatan yang berlipat dari versi sebelumnya dan memang terasa lebih ringan. Hal ini diungkapkan oleh Chris Beard yang juga merupakan “orang” Firefox seperti yang dikutip dari wawancara dengan slashdot.org. Chris: Performance continues to be a high priority for us, and we test every nightly build to make sure that we’re getting faster, not slower than our previous releases. We’re really happy with Firefox 2, it’s a very solid release with three or four times the amount of fixes and work as went into 1.5. We’re hearing a lot of positive feedback about the performance of Firefox 2 as compared to Internet Explorer 7, especially on interactive web sites (even Robert Scoble recently blogged that “Firefox 2 was a LOT faster on AJAX”. Zimbra, who makes a really rich web-based productivity suite also recently posted that by their internal tests, “Firefox was more than twice as fast as IE 7 and four times faster than IE 6″. [...]
November 10th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
[...] Walaupun sudah beberapa pekan kemunculan firefox 2.0 tapi saya baru malam ini berkesempatan mencicipi browser terbaru dari mozilla ini. Terlepas dari koneksi internet, browser ini saya rasakan memiliki kecepatan yang berlipat dari versi sebelumnya dan memang terasa lebih ringan. Hal ini diungkapkan oleh Chris Beard yang juga merupakan “orang” Firefox seperti yang dikutip dari wawancara dengan slashdot.org. Chris: Performance continues to be a high priority for us, and we test every nightly build to make sure that we’re getting faster, not slower than our previous releases. We’re really happy with Firefox 2, it’s a very solid release with three or four times the amount of fixes and work as went into 1.5. We’re hearing a lot of positive feedback about the performance of Firefox 2 as compared to Internet Explorer 7, especially on interactive web sites (even Robert Scoble recently blogged that “Firefox 2 was a LOT faster on AJAX”. Zimbra, who makes a really rich web-based productivity suite also recently posted that by their internal tests, “Firefox was more than twice as fast as IE 7 and four times faster than IE 6″. [...]
December 1st, 2006 at 6:40 am
I prefer Firefox 2.0.
And I have to say the integrated spell check is awesome.
Only bad thing is: there are still websites not working properly with FF :(
If you are a Firefox fan you might want to integrate it into your Windows installation CD.
Integrate Firefox into your Windows installation CD:
http://addons.wordpress.com/2006/10/23/firefox-20-final/
The ultimate dream of every Firefox fan:
have Firefox installed since the first boot of Windows :)
December 3rd, 2006 at 6:33 am
What a load of BS that IE7 renders slowly, on any site i’ve tried it on firefox renders much slower.
Also, like pointed out the default is to check the site against phishing.
And, what are people saying ? Tabs not intuitive, they way more intuitive in IE7 than in Firefox.
Stop talking bs.
December 6th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Saying FireFox is better than IE7 is just a immature comment. Learn to understand and use all the better technology out there. FireFox is a good browser with its strengths and weaknesses and FireFox is not really better than IE7, but as good as IE7. If you like one better than the other, use it, but don’t tell everyone to use it, because you like. That is very immature.
December 6th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
SNT: huh? Firefox works a lot better on AJAX sites that I’ve tested IE7 on. Faster, by a mile. So, I can’t say it’s a better browser?
December 6th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Well, personal experience differs. I sure respect your views. But,in this case, you can’t say FireFox is a better browser, just because its better with AJAX sites. By the way, I myself use FireFox also and I like it. But I like technology more than any single technology tool and won’t appreciate it when someone shows personal hatred towards any technology. I care more about technology I use, not the companies that create them, because they don’t mean anything to me.
December 6th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
In XP, I like Firefox.
But IE7 is very nice in Vista. It’s my main browser in Vista.
January 3rd, 2007 at 3:17 pm
FireFox is better probably for the simple fact that Microsoft didn’t develop it. Microsoft code is just so sloppy to start with. It is like they intentionally try to see how many lines of code they can execute to do some of the most mundane tasks. They know they have the majority of the world by the balls, and they don’t care if they use every cycle your computer has to add 1+1 . They are Nazi’s.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Je trompe FireFox pour aller l’Opera
Opera quand a lui, m’a surpris par sa rapidite, aussi bien au lancement du navigateur que lors du chargement des pages. En revanche, j’ai eu bien du mal a personnaliser mon interface, a tel point que j’ai abandonne tellement j’avais charcute dans l…
February 7th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
IE 7 Sucks. ANYTIME i try to open attachments or work with contacts in GMAIL IE 7 crashes. If anyone has any ideas about this let me know soon.
Thank you.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:56 am
I have been using IE7 and FF2 simultaneously for a month now… I have to admit FF2 is faster but IE7 is better at all the other things. The interface is great. The RSS reader is excellent. It takes some time to learn but it is useful nontheless.
I also used FF 1.x and IE6 once upon a time. Back then FF 1.x was better.
My opinion, for the present try out IE7, bother with FF2 after you get tired of IE7. [Which I guess, is not happening anytime soon.]
February 18th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
What about cpu utilization…
I use firefox and sometimes open many tabs while browsing, which makes it slow, and that is understandable. After ie7 was update from beta thru microsoft update I thought of giving it a try and it to my surprise it seemed faster. To compare properly I opened firefox and ie side by side. Opened same sites and browsed to same pages on both and this time firefox was faster. Puzzeled, I opened up task manager to see what’s going on. Firefox seems to take lot more cpu cycles. I disabled all the add ons in both browsers and restarted to do an accurate test. Firefox does take about 70% more cpu cycles than ie7 when browsing the same sites/pages. And that is why firefox seemingly runs faster side-by-side with ie7 but when running separately ie7 is faster. E.g. if something takes 11 secs in firefox and 10 in ie, the same thing takes 12 secs in firefox when both browsers are running and 13 in ie, apparently because firefox tries to consume more resources and leaves rest for other apps including ie.
As I said before I am a firefox user and still am after this test (for pop-ups and security). Please do the test yourself and let everybody know.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:08 am
I am constantly having problems with FF 2 and Gmail, of all sites. I will always get the “taking longer than normal to load” message with the option of basic view. This works, but then there are a lot less usable options.
No problems at all with IE7.
This may be caused by Ad Muncher, rather than the browser though.
Interesting, considering the affiliation between Google and Firefox.
March 6th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Firefox not support Unicode like IE.
i don’t know the reason for this.
do u no?
March 13th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
FireFox has a problem in rendering. IE can easily beat it on this testcase:
http://www.teekoo.com/freebsd/chart.html
Firefox will hang with 300-500 bars, Opera, which claims to be the fastest, drag with 1500 bars,
IE, can do 5000 bars with no problem!
Try it!
March 27th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I used IE 6 for a long time and it worked fine. Then I heard everyone tell me that IE 7 is much better, so I decided to try it out. Once I had it installed, it works fine on most sites, except for the one site that I visit most which is Myspace. Every time I load the Myspace homepage, it works fine, but when I put in my password and click “Log In”, IE 7 crashes every time. No idea why. Any help or suggestions? Thanks
April 11th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Here’s a collection of tuning tips for IE7:
http://reliancepc.com/ReliancePC/Tips/IE7tuning/IE7tuning.html
August 30th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
[...] be a good step forward. Little did I know how slow it would render certain pages. According to the Scobleizer, it seems to have a particularly hard time with Blog Readers, like Google Reader. So, upgrading to [...]
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:33 am
Try this script in IE and Firefox and see the difference between them.
Firefox takes about 1 sec to finish it, while IE takes over a minute.
function testing(){
}
function buttonClick(){
var longString = “”;
for (var i = 0; i < 100000; i++){
if (i%100 == 0){
longString += “\n”;
}
longString += i;
}
alert(longString);
}
September 9th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
[...] however, we really are the minority. There are more IE users than Firefox. I am not here to debate which web browser is better, but I am here to say that if I run a billion dollar business… I think it would be [...]
September 29th, 2007 at 9:31 am
[...] Stephen Wildstrom did a little survey of demo machines at DEMOfall 07. 81% Windows, 19% Mac. He says that’s growth, and I’m not shocked to hear that. He also did a survey of browsers and found all Mac’s use Firefox over Safari, and makes a reference to it’s skin (an interesting observation considering the current discussion over retheming the browser for 3.0). Firefox did decent on the Windows front as well. I’ve noticed this myself. People seem to prefer demoing their web based product in Firefox. Is it out of habit? Or because some ajax based websites feel slower in IE7? [...]
January 21st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
[...] communication: Robert Scoble says IE7 is slower than FireFox on some web sites on certain websites. Source. Robert Scoble is a technical evangelist, and author; best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer. [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
I completely disagree. And I don’t want to! But the fact of the matter is that FireFox is NOT faster than Internet Explorer, and as I said, I really wish it were, becuase I’d love more than anything to stop using any Microsoft/Windows products, so I’m always on the lookout.
I’ve got IE6, and have now had Firefox 2.0.0.12 for about two weeks. IE6 continues to load pages faster for me than does Firefox, though I’ve noticed that Firefox has improved steadily over time, so I think the day will come. People can hem and haw and all of that, claiming I must be doing something wrong, but this is simply my experience.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I beg to differ - “shrink to fit” is a nightmare. Instead of one-click printing now, our clients have to use the menu and go into the dialog box to select 100% size. Our pages are properly styled (via CSS) to wrap print w/o cut off at 100%. IE7 does shrink to fit and you need a magnifying glass to read. You cannot right click and print an iframe without selecting everything in it. Then you still need to go into preview and choose your scale. You cannot set the scaling to 100% in javascript (only a registry hack) before calling window.print(). I have frustrated customers and wasted thousands of dollars researching a work around (none found yet). Microsoft calls this a feature? If this is how Microsoft thinks they are improving usablity they are seriously mistaken.