What Are the Pros and Cons of Firefox®?
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If you are an Internet Explorer® user, you may be reluctant to trying another browser, even when people around you claim the wonders of Firefox® or Opera®. While IE serves many people well, it is worth considering Firefox® if you have dealt with certain problems, like security breaches and download problems, in the past. Here is a quick breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of Firefox®.
ADVANTAGES
- Speed. Firefox® is reported to be the fastest browser when it comes to download speed. Not only do programs and files download faster, but you get a record of all your downloads in the form of a table, so you can erase or move them at your convenience.
- Security. Firefox® has some advanced security measures that protect your computer from spyware and even certain viruses. Firefox® also comes with a state-of-the-art popup blocker that stops almost 100 percent of popups.
- Tabbed browsing and other advanced features. Tabbed browsing allows you to open an unlimited number of pages in a single window, thus helping you organize your browsing. Firefox® also has an embedded memory, which means that if your computer is turned off by mistake, Firefox® will remember which Internet pages you had open and offer to get them back for you.
DISADVANTAGES
- Compatibility issues. The main disadvantage of Firefox® is compatibility. Some websites do not show properly in Firefox®, and require you to view them with IE. This includes pages with ActiveX and VBScript, both of which are not supported by Firefox®.
- Memory. Firefox® takes a lot of memory to run. Even with an up-to-date computer, you may find that it becomes hard to run Firefox along with a couple of programs. Firefox® also tends to freeze and close when too many tabs are open simultaneously, which is why Firefox® invested heavily in creating the recovery memory feature.
- Interrupted service. Another disadvantage of Firefox® is that downloads cannot be resumed if interrupted. This may not be a big deal if you have DSL service, but those on a dial-up connection may have a lot of trouble with this. Firefox® was actually designed for people using high-speed Internet, which means dial-up users can run into many problems along the way.
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i'm a word/pic nerd but a computer amateur. i do downloading and word processing and navigate happily around the net grabbing things, but i don’t do real photoshopping and learned my way into the computer and net from a word processing base, no programming. i have a low grade blog. i have a vista system and ie 8 but have always heard good things about firefox, especially the open source aspect and the fact it is not microsoft. one time i tried to download it and start using it and things went wrong and i chickened out and removed it. now chrome beckons and i wonder if i should try one or the other. Any advice on which if either way to go? - bwendo
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1. Compatibility: Firefox has a built-in "IE engine" icon you can click on to switch to viewing the page in IE through the Firefox interface when/if you need to view a page in IE. It would be helpful to note that the reason Firefox does not support ActiveX or VBScripts is because these scripts are so often used for spyware. (That's part of what makes FF more secure than IE.)
2. The memory issue is untrue. See Wikipedia's article on Firefox and look at "Critical Reception" to see: "When PC Magazine compared memory usage of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, they found that Firefox used approximately as much memory as the other browsers.[64] Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra indicate that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7." Also, I have used FF since its release in 2004 and have no problems with freezing personally, but FF is updated constantly to fix problems or bugs that might cause freezing on certain boxes. If you Google "Firefox +freezes" you get 646,000 hits. If you Google "Firefox +freezing" you get 1,040,000 --- that's roughly 1.7 million hits together for a browser that's been downloaded 300 million times. 1.7 million is just over .5% as a comparison to downloads. That's an extremely low hit-rate even if you double it to 1%. That kind of hit rate isn't indicative of an overall problem for a browser that's been downloaded so many times. Try the same Google search with "IE +freezes" and "IE +freezing" and you'll see what I mean.
3. Interrupted service: Resume downloads will be built into FF 3.0 and should perhaps be mentioned here. - anon3678
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Written by
Diana Bocco
Last Modified: 26 July 2009
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