Firefox is a very fine browser.\u00a0 It’s full-featured, and it allows for the use of some excellent add-ons.\u00a0 It used to be the fastest browser out there for Windows.<\/p>\n
As far as Linux is concerned, Firefox is a sludgy molasses pit.\u00a0 Things have improved a bit since Firefox 2.0, but it’s nowhere near what it should be.\u00a0 This is a shame.\u00a0 It’s more than a shame actually, because I depend on the security of Firefox and some add-ons to make my browsing safe and worry-free.<\/p>\n
It’s pretty sad that the Windows version of Firefox runs faster in WINE on a Linux system than the native code does.\u00a0 If it weren’t for the horrible security risks involved with anything Windows, I might do that trick myself on this computer.\u00a0 But no, I need to get something else going here.<\/p>\n
I’ve heard that Opera 10.5 is fast.\u00a0 Faster even than Google’s Chrome browser.\u00a0 Google can suck my ass, by the way.\u00a0 I still use their search engine, but I’m staying away from their other products because they’re basically the “Internet Monopoly” company, like Microsoft tried to be.<\/p>\n
Opera has a bad reputation to overcome however.\u00a0 It used to be a product you paid for, and it also had an ad-supported free version.\u00a0 Dumb idea.\u00a0 I refused to even read about Opera for a long time because of this.\u00a0 Now, apparently, it’s totally free.\u00a0 Not open source like Firefox, but free to download and use.<\/p>\n
This is important here because I would like to give it a try.\u00a0 Seeing as how I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 (Xubuntu 9.04 to be exact, with LXDE), Opera 10.5 is not in my available software pool.\u00a0 I would have to add a certain repository to my sources list and then mess around with what is still basically beta software.\u00a0 I think I might have to just wait a little while.\u00a0 Things might get easier or better.<\/p>\n
Firefox could even make a breakthrough in speed with their Linux version, who knows.\u00a0 I would still prefer Firefox over any other browser because of the add-ons.\u00a0 It’s possible to use AdBlock with Opera 10.5, so I’ve heard, but I also use NoScript, Request Policy, and some others that make the way I browse easier or more feature-enhanced.<\/p>\n
On my very first PC, a machine with hardly any system resources to play with, Firefox is almost unbearably slow.\u00a0 Since the Linux partition of that machine is only used for browsing\/text-to-speech, that’s a bad situation.\u00a0 Firefox has all the same great features on that PC, and I still use AdBlock and NoScript, but everything is SO slow.\u00a0 To make matters worse, Firefox and those add-ons exhaust the RAM memory on that computer so it has to resort to using the hard drive swap space, AKA virtual memory.<\/p>\n