Current mood:

ditzy

the firefox 3 experiment:



so during the past 24 hours i realized that i'm probably the only person in the world who's not hating on internet explorer. with the release of firefox 3, it seems as if everyone is once again in the "zomg i hates dah microzoftz lorlz" mode.

i've been using maxthon as my browser for several years now and i'm very contented with it. maxthon is an IE shell, meaning, it's an application that encapsulates the IE browser object and adds vastly much more functionality to internet explorer, the application. you can read all about what maxthon can do in their website.

however, since it seems that i was the rose among the thorns (harhar) who was not using firefox as his browser of choice, add to the fact that i am insanely bored right now, i decided to try out firefox. i mean, it wouldn't hurt right? all my friends are gushing about it so i'm nominally intrigued enough to satiate my curiosity as to what the fuss is all about.



the first thing i did was to run a side by side loading time run. people are claiming that webpages load faster on firefox so what i did was to navigate to www.wowarmory.com, which is, incidentally, the only website which loads somewhat slowly on my old maxthon browser due to the fact that it (i assume) uses some sort of on-demand loading technology like ajax (once again im just guessing here) a lot.

the result? maxthon loads wowarmory just as quickly as firefox. i didn't feel nor see any significant reduction in loading time of the firefox browser over maxthon.

the only other website that doesn't load quickly on my browser are multiply sites (which is actually one of the primary contributing factors as to why i dont have a multiply account). i did a side-by-side comparison of loading times using my friend mikel's multiply account and this time around firefox did load the page faster.

i, however, noticed that when firefox loads a page, it composites page elements on the fly, unlike IE which takes more time to composite in the background and displays the page elements when they're complete. this means that although the firefox browser creates the illusion that it loads the page faster, the total loading time (i.e. all page elements completely loaded) for both maxthon and firefox are just roughly the same.


this was the only factor that could've made me switch from maxthon (IE) to firefox. i always get annoyed by how slow wowarmory and multiply loads on maxthon and since firefox doesnt really show a markedly amazing increase in page loading times then i see no reason to switch.



the next thing i tried to do was to import all my IE settings into firefox. the first time i tried doing this using firefox's import wizard, firefox crashed. so like... yuck. minus pogi points for firefox.



one of the things i find really really convenient about using maxthon as my browser is its super drag and drop feature. i could highlight ANY text in the webpage and drag it anywhere on the webpage and it will either 1) open a new tab if the selected text is recognized as a valid url or 2) perform a google search on the selected text. i'm not really sure if firefox has any addons which can do this and i'm too lazy to look for one if it has.

alvin [vaes9] did mention in a comment in jerome's [rikitikitik] lj that firefox comes with a mouse gestures addon, which by the way, is built into maxthon. maxthon does support A LOT of addons created by its add-on community but the only one i really use is the "enable right click" addon which overrides those websites which disables right clicking.

the major apprehension i have with firefox is that mouse gestures and super drag and drop are, for me, core features of my browsing experience and if i had to take the extra time to check and download new versions of these add-ons every time their authors update them then that would just not work for me. in short, ayaw ko na mamroblema pa kung may bagong update sa add-ons. effort mashado, and this is a major issue for me. imagine, problema na nga ang pag update ng bawat addon ko sa world of warcraft, pati browser ko ganun din? ewww, no thanks.



so at this point i am already more than convinced that this firefox 3 hype is just really what it is... a hype. but let me just go on and list just a few more of the things i enjoy with maxthon that i find sorely lacking in firefox 3.

1. lack of tab controls. maxthon has a mini toolbar that contains the following buttons:



the rightmost red button closes the active tab, the middle blue button maximizes/resumes the active tab and the leftmost red button closes all tabs but if you click the drop down menu, you can choose to close only all tabs to the left of the active tab, to the right of the active tab, everything else except the active tab, and so on.

compare it with the firefox 3 equivalent below:



asan na yung close all tabs to the left/right of the active tab? kahit yun na lang kasi gamit na gamit ko yung feature na yun eh. pero wala sa firefox. so again. meh.


2. i surfed to my blog - imman.livejournal.com. eto ang bumulaga sakin...



so syempre hindi nagsho show-up sa firefox yung mga imeem and youtube thingies sa blog ko. tapos when i click the "Install missing plugins..." button eto ang lumalabas:



manual install?! anak ng tinalupang tipaklong. kaka-highblood. sumakit ang bangs ko sa panga at kasukasuhan. ang maxthon/IE pag may kulang na plugin automatic na may lumalabas na parang "Do you want to install this plugin?" tapos click lang ako ng "Yes" tapos after a few seconds okay na sya. walang ka effort-effort. hindi kelangan ng brain power. susme.


3. no side bar.



maxthon has this thing called a sidebar where i can view/open/whatever any file on any drive/directory on my computer (shown in the screenshot). in short, parang may mini windows explorer built right into the browser. although this feature isn't as useful to me now na pasaway na ako sa buhay, it was super duper useful before when i was coding webpages for projects in school. i didnt have to open a separate IE window just to compare webpages from different directories, etc.

the sidebar also has a lot of other customizeable and neat functions like searchable history, organizing your RSS feeds, showing your favorites, and so on. yung folder view lang yung nasa screenshot but the maxthon sidebar can do a hell lot of other things.


4. you can set maxthon to automatically scroll a page forward at your desired speed (para sa mga tamad i scroll yung mouse wheel habang nagbabasa ng mga blog/news/kung anu pa man). you can also have maxthon force a page refresh for a given tab at regular intervals. i don't see any options in firefox that can do any of these.


5. there's this thing in maxthon where you can assign keys to load a particular webpage. like for example when im using my maxthon, pressing F4 will load my blog, F5 will load my friend's page, F6 will load fotki, and so on.

you can also assign search engines to certain search terms (shown in the pic below) so for example by default if i type "imman navarro" in my address bar it will do a google search for the phrase "imman navaro". however, if i type "wiki imman navarro", it will do a en.wikipedia.org search for the term "imman navarro" instead. this feature is, once again, fully customizable, and i doubt kung meron nyan sa default firefox.








anyway... i could go on and on about how uber maxthon is but the people who have used and enjoyed maxthon have said it better so just go to the maxthon's features page if you're interested in a preview of some of it's myriad awesome features.

there are currently two stable versions of maxthon which is maxthon classic (the one im using) and maxthon 2.0 which is a more feature rich version of maxthon. i read that maxthon 2.0 does even more geekery awesome stuff than maxthon classic but as i said, i'm perfectly happy with the classic so i've not yet found a need to upgrade to 2.0.

admittedly, internet explorer, the browser, is really lame, but maxthon has reinvented the application while preserving the browser control so you get all the features of a browser na may malaking community and the native-ness of the IE control. as i said before, i just hate the idea of having another browser taking up space in my hard drive if the one that's pre-installed with the OS is more than suffice for my needs.


in conclusion, i really didn't find anything worth my while in firefox. i honestly don't see how it's a better browser when the one im currently using is leaps and bounds ahead of it (and i'm using a version of maxthon that was most recently updated last year pa). im sure firefox has addons that can compensate for it's apparent lack of features but again - ang effort. gusto ko pag nagdownload ako at nag install ng browser di na ko kelangan magisip pa ng kung anu anong addons ekek na yan. so no thanks na lang firefox. my hard drive says it was nice knowing you but you have to go. harhar.

all that this experiment has achieved is instill in me a greater appreciation of maxthon. i've been using it for years and i really don't have anything bad to say about it... and that says a lot since napaka-angalero ko sa buhay. lolz.