Why is FireFox such a fast browser?
Ive been using firefox for a long time now, and before that I used Opera. The only time I use internet explorer is if Im a] Tripping on Acid b] On a family PC that doesnt have a real browser or c] looking to get hacked, a virus, or worse.
So now that you understand that internet explorer is the worse piece of shit that can possible exist which is why I do not capitilize the I and E in the name (its not really even a browsers, its a piece of poop with a back and forward button) let me explain why Firefox is the fastest browser on earth...
Unlike Opera which optimizes paging and is fairly light-weight (translation: doesnt work on all websites) Firefox seems just a tad bit faster. Why? Because I truly believe it attempts to cache the entire Internet on my PC in main memory.
How is this possible? Well, its not, and thats where the problem starts. My laptop (at work) goes into hibernatino when I go home thus it believe its "always on" - I rarely reboot it. Over the course of a few days my Firefox memory footprint goes from 56MB to roughly 900MB. Now, the big issue is that I dont have a lot of memory. "My Computer" tells me I have .99 Gigabytes of memory (1,000MB) so if you do the math that means I have 100MB left for the rest of my applications and my operating system (winblows) while running Firefox.
Now you may be saying "huh? No way windows can run with only 100MB free" and you would be correct. Nor does my copy of Microsoft Word, Mozilla Thunderbird, Trillian, and all the misc. windows services and all that crap on my task bar (old school TSRs). So what magic keeps my system running?
The magic of swap! Swap is when my system realizes there is no way I can fit a 900MB application in memory with other processes running so it then "swaps" some of the physical memory with virtual memory (aka hard disk). So I may only be using 90MB of Firefox memory (meaning Im only accessing a smaller block of that memory) so the rest goes to disk for a bit since I do not need it right now. For those non-computer geeks this is an important key point: Hard disk access requires physical movement of the disk reader head while memory is fast access and has no moving parts. Thus the more you have in real memory the faster things run. And if you access memory outside that 90MB in Firefox it has to fetch it off the disk, bring it into main memory and put something older and less used down on the disk (we dont have infinate memory space) - SLOW.
Now if things start to run slow because of swap one must ask "how can firefox be running that fast?" - the answer: It is a gray area. Firefox runs lightening fast while the operating system crawls to draw windows, maximize/minimize applications and otherwise suck the life out of my productivity. So being the fastest browser you can find only does you good if its also streamlined and efficient, and without major tweaks under the hood to the Firefox configuration this just isnt a reality.
Lesson here: Firefox caching the Internet in my memory degrades my overal productivity (even if my productivity is defined as browsing the web). Its still better the internet exploiter.
Thats all for today :)
CodeMonkey