by tyson » Tue Mar 15, 2011 9:37 am
internet explorer gets a bad rap mostly due to ie6. ie7 and ie8 are decent browsers that load up pages just as quick as firefox and consume WAY less memory than firefox. it is not uncommon for me to see firefox use 1GB ram.
ie9 is worlds better than ie8. i've been following the beta and it seems to steal the good things about firefox and chrome. the only place that i'd like to see improvement in ie is in plugins/3rd party extensions. supposedly ie9 has a built in ad-block though that i have yet to try.
that being said, chrome is my go-to browser still. there are some pages (work-related) that just do not work in non-ie browsers and some pages that just do not work in ie so i have to run both. but chrome is the only browser i use on my mac, and the browser i use at home/work mostly. not because of any security thing but because it's fast and mostly lightweight. on my mac it's a bit of a memory pig, but safari blows and firefox is heck slow.
really though, for just basic basic web browsing IE is fine.
i can't see where anybody says firefox 3 is fast. the thing is dog slow and has had memory leak issues for years now. you can tweak firefox to load up pages faster, sure, but it just chews up more ram that you only get back by closing firefox completely.