Get PDF Download. I use it and it works great. Basically it is an extension that gives you options... something like Open, Download, and something else. You view the PDF through Acrobat, and not the browser... the way it should be in my opinion... because any PDF plugin for viewing in the browser really sucks.
I haven't had a bug with Firefox for many months. I will never go back to IE. I was an old Netscape user before they sold out to the evil AOL and polluted their browser with unwanted rubbish. Firefox has been really great for me. I don't have too many extensions installed anymore because some of them are what causes problems (especially crashes, it seems). The weather forecast is very useful and some other web tools are great too. Firefox for me.
i would guess your CPU must be around a 1.0ghz or slower? FF takes 3seconds at longest for me to load up, PDF's load in the same time it takes to launch acrobat reader.
and the reason FF appears to use more memory is because the resources IE uses is already loaded up by windows. you only have to look at windows xp at idle, 250mb of ram being used.
Firefox out of the box is absolutly awful IMO. Examples: you can't override the popup blocker by holding a key, if a website fails to load you lose the URL in the address bar, failed images can't be reloaded...
But after a lot of tweaking and fixing and extension adding it can be great. The most important extension for me would be "Tabbrowser Extensions" for its single window mode, reloading closed tabs and saving tab sessions.
There are also some great built-in features like "begin search when you begin typing", better filetype handling settings, automatic "google, I'm feeling lucky"-fication in the the address bar and of course middle-clicking on links.
The most annoying problem I can't get rid of though is the poor mouse wheel scrolling. It is not as fast and not as smooth as IE. Holding the middle button to quickly scroll down to the bottom of a page is especially useless.
IMO:
For speed, stability, compatibility: IE
For features and extensions: FF
For security: any browser that nobody uses i.e. not IE or FF.
Personally I use FF plus the "view in IE" extension for pages that FF doesn't like and I guess it will stay like this for a while due to the extensions I would miss in other browsers.
So there is some kind of extension for that too? I've been looking for one.
Firefox isn't "straight out of the box" thing. It needs tweaking and bunch of extensions. This is also the power of FF: you can get only those features that you want to use.
So, since this topic started I downloaded Opera and have been using it since until today.
It looked like Opera was a more complete package than FireFox so i decided to test run that first. So.....
Opera is a nice package. It looks and feels professional and has everything you need without the addition of extentions.
Mouse Gesturing is easy to use, tabbed browsing works well. You can even pause your downloads and start them again the next day which can be handy.
I tried the voice command extention thinking that this could be a useful addition to web browsing but it didn't really come in use at all. Sometimes I asked it to read out my e-mails whilst i searched the web for something but other than that it never came into play. It didn't work to badly, sometimes it didn't do what I wanted it to execute no matter how clearly I spoke. Defietly a thing to look out for the future though.
I found that Opera crashed more than IE. Sometimes I have no idea why, sometimes I would start downloading something, click on another tab and it would just freeze, which got a little irritating after 7 times. Luckily though Opera can bring back up all your webpages that you where browsing in an instant.
Opera has many other features like opening certain pages when you start Opera but for me this is useless.
So overall Opera isn't a bad package at all, in fact its pretty good. But a few hic-cups here and there can get a little irritating.
If you are thinking of changing to Opera then I would look at the features and see if you actually need half of them.
I would give Opera 7/10
Just installed FireFox now and i'm going to give this a try now. Tabbed browsing and mouse gesturing isn't working instantly so looks like i'll have to look around. Shame it isn't like Opera where everything is ready to go.
Install Firefox 1.5beta2, it's damn by far the best browser out there
It's soooo many times faster than Opera, which is called "the fastest browser on earth", even though it's the slowest...
