David Russell

I’ve been a long time fan of Mozilla‘s award-winning browser Firefox. I’ve heralded the glory of safe browsing and championed the cause of FOSS.

I do still love Firefox. But lately, I’ve been troubled by a single problem: Firefox eats alive my available RAM, occasionally to the point that my machine slows to an unbearable crawl. I’ve researched the problem extensively only to come up with many dead ends on options to repair this. Apparently, many people (and seemingly Mozilla) touts this problem as a “feature” in that it is caused by caching history of the open tabs. If I have 10 tabs open at one, Firefox stands at the ready for any one of those tabs to be selected and will allow faster access if I navigate forward or backward to recently browsed pages.

Of course, the idea is fantastic. But the price to pay for such a feature is costly, especially on my home machine where available RAM is 1 GB.

After trying several modifications to Firefox, none which were successful, I decided to start casually browsing using Opera. The reason I looked to Opera was because of one particularly bad experience with Firefox. Quite by chance one day, I was using Firefox with about eight tabs open. Suddenly, my computer started acting up and I checked the system. Firefox was hogging a tremendous 610MB of my available 1,024. Yikes! I really needed to get to what I was working on faster than it would take to clear the issue by rebooting Firefox, so I pulled up my Program List, opened Opera and within seconds was browsing through the information I needed. Firefox whirred away in the background, trying to figure where to get more RAM to do its deed.

While browsing with Opera, I noticed how responsive the application seemed. In fact, web pages loaded faster. At first, I thought it just seemed that way as I was miffed at Firefox for going 20 mph in the fast lane of I-95. But indeed, even over time, Opera responded well. I opened the same tabs in Opera, navigated around for an hour or two and checked the system status. Opera was using a mere 59MB of RAM while Firefox still hogged over 300MB. I was impressed with Opera.

Today, I dual-wield the browsers. I still use Firefox daily. I cannot live without it for web development. In fact, I recently commented to a friend that if I was left with the option of a single browser and three plugins, I’d choose Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug and the HTML Tidy Validator. Together, they are a brilliant development platform. But for casual browsing, I’ve started turning very often to Opera. It’s fast, light and gets the job done. The UI takes some getting used to, but I’ve found everything I need.

If you battle the Firefox “memory leak”, I’d encourage a visit to opera.com. The browser is free and it’s a great alternative to Firefox. Opera also comes in tiny packages for your mobile device. And Opera Mini is a great product for accessing the web using more traditional mobile phones.

[tags]opera, mozilla, firefox, browser, slow, speed, switch[/tags]