Internet Explorer 9 (not RC, the proper public release)

[Sysman]

Who needs IE when you can have Firefox?

To get at bits of microsoft.com which won't work under Firefox.

At least the BBC have stopped trying to persuade us to use IE. A decade ago one could have been forgiven for thinking that they were a branch of Microsoft Marketing.

[Sysman]

Feature not bug, claim Microsoft

El Reg; Microsoft: IE9's web privacy hole? A feature, not a bug

[AtW]

To get at bits of microsoft.com which won't work under Firefox.

That indeed is one of a handful of valid reasons to use IE.

I switched to Firefox many years ago when IE6 suddenly stopped executing javascript and no amount of IE reinstalling could fix it. Installing FireFox was easier then reinstalling whole Windoze thingy

[VectraMan]

I am on FF4 RC2 right now on the reply page and it is using 2% of my CPU (quad core), Win XP 64 bit. All animations are fine - you got some problem with your install or just your FF4 used up too much memories (recent betas have been terrible in this respect - require regular restarts, RCs seem better).

It's definitely weird, and I can't believe this is normal. And this is with the latest FF release, and yes it does use more memory than IE, but not an excessive amount (98K vs 72K).

IE is clearly winning the graphics performance race though, and not just for me. Scroll down to look at the comments here:

Firefox 4: hardware acceleration ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

[thunderlizard]

Firefox 4 (resource hog that it appears to be).

nooooo! That's what happened to Netscape Navigator, hence switching to Firefox.

[d000hg]

I'm on one of the Mozilla mailing lists and "how do we catch up with IE9" is an ongoing discussion. It would seem MS' argument to properly integrate with DX10 (dropping XP) isn't without merit, though I'm sure with enough work it can be done.

[VectraMan]

I'm on one of the Mozilla mailing lists and "how do we catch up with IE9" is an ongoing discussion. It would seem MS' argument to properly integrate with DX10 (dropping XP) isn't without merit, though I'm sure with enough work it can be done.

I'm suprised Firefox are doing Direct-anything; you'd think with the cross-platform nature of Firefox they'd be trying to build it on OpenGL for all platforms. But I guess there's a reason.

MS are obviously trying to use IE9 to leverage Windows 7, but that's not really a bad thing in itself as XP is pretty ancient, and a lot of the XP stalwarts are probably also the people sticking with IE6 anyway.

[d000hg]

Well nothing in my post said FF were doing it through DirectX, but in fact they are. The reason is simply that on Windows, DirectX is more performant and more integrated. Especially things like DirectX providing accelerated 2D graphics... traditionally people have to use 3D graphics to draw triangles on a plane to emulate 2D.
OpenGL on Windows just isn't very good in comparison. At least part of this is down to drivers, but it seems DirectX is winning on Windows - a few years back it was much more 50:50.

So anyway, FF uses GL on non-Windows, and DX on Windows.

[VectraMan]

I guess FF need to be as good as MS so are doing what MS do. This means they need to do three versions: OpenGL, Direct 3D for XP, and Direct 2D for Vista/W7, which means all three won't necessarily work the same on any given hardware. Presuambly they feel that the comparison to IE on Windows is more important than giving the same experience across all their platforms.

I think we're entering interesting times in the browser wars.

[d000hg]

Yeah it sounds tricky to get right. I am not sure if Chrome has this hardware-accelerated rendering or not yet.