It's a Big One

I had been using Internet Explorer 6 for a very long time when Firefox first came out. Since I’d had a history with it, I had my IE6 setup exactly how I liked it, and it worked very well. I didn’t see any ads, I never got popups, I had it very secure, and was never worried about what sort of evil things might come lurking. That one was mostly because I was smart about where I went and what I clicked, though. The point, though, is that I was perfectly happy with IE, and had no reason to start using Firefox. Then, I did one of my cleaning waves in order to get rid off all the junk I didn’t use anymore, and formatted. After I did that, obviously, all of my setups were gone. Since I was going to have to start afresh anyway, I decided to give Firefox a try. I fell in love with it. The flexibility that came from using extensions was great. I found a few that I really liked, and had everything set how I wanted it. Tabbed browsing was great as well, and really made viewing multiple sites easy. My favorite thing of all, though, was Adblock . My tweaks I used to use in order to not have ads were all through external applications. Having it integrated within the browser was quite handy. Also, the ability to just right click, and block something on the fly was a huge benefit. All in all, I loved using it.
There was a major flaw, though. It suffered from a massive hunger for memory. After even just a few minutes of browsing, I was already using well over 100 megs of RAM. I could have multiple windows of IE open, and all of them combined would use less ram than Firefox with a respective tab for each of my IE windows. The fact that it used a bunch of memory wasn’t really my issue, though. If it wants to take a bunch, that’s fine, that’s what free memory is there for. The problem is that it never would give it back. Once it ate up my RAM, it was gone until I closed the program. I tend to have an internet window open 24/7, so having to close it down and reopen it every now and then became a real pain. With a couple hours’ worth of browsing, I was using 300+ megs of memory, and the browser was moving pretty sluggishly.
This problem of mine first reared its head in the beginning. That was back when the program was still in beta. As such, I forgave it. It never did get better, though. I still kept having the problem after every update. Still, though, I continued to just forgive it. My desire to keep Adblock (by this point I had determined I never really used much of the other extensions) kept me using Firefox. When IE7 first came out in beta, I grabbed it, and played with it for a while. I really liked the new interface, and they had fixed a lot of issues. The biggest problem, though, was all those stupid ads. Let me take a moment to mention just how much I hate ads. I don’t even watch television because of the ads. I always wait until after a show airs and watch an ad free version. I’m not ever going to watch tonight’s Heroes final until tomorrow. I don’t even see the ads that I’m serving up on my own site I hate them so much. That said, I was really excited when I learned that extension-like things could be added to IE7. I was very hopeful that one would come along that could be just as good as Adblock in Firefox. I kept checking back every now and then, looking to see if one existed. Each time I looked, I came up empty.
One day after I got the latest version of Firefox, I noticed that it was taking a very long time for the browser to launch. I mean, on the order of 45 seconds or so. That is just absurd. I tried various things, and it kept being incredibly slow. On top of that, any page that was longer than just a couple pages’ worth, would take forever to load, and would bog down my system while it was doing so. If I was on a Digg page with lots of comments, my system would halt until it loaded. It was getting quite ridiculous. At this point, I decided I’d had enough, and was going to switch back to IE. It had been a while since I had last gone looking for an Adblock equivalent, and this time I found one. Enter IE7 Pro. I’ve only been using it for a while, but it seems to work quite well. I don’t think that it as on the fly ad blocking as easy as Adblock did, but I can live without.
Now my browser launches fast, works well, loads pages quickly, and best of all, still does not have ads. Hopefully, the Mozilla folks will be able to take care of that memory issue, as well as get back to being as fast as they used to be. Back when I first started using Firefox it really was quite snappy. Not enough that I noticed something over IE, but I certainly didn’t think it was slow. Until they do, though, I suppose I’m stuck using something else.

Sorry for such a long post. I didn’t write anything over the weekend and figured I should make up for it. I’ll try to get something in later today about why I didn’t write this weekend, and something I found pretty funny that relates to it. Now, though, it’s a busy day at work, so I should get back to that.