I'm kind of a stubborn stick in the mud when it comes to my home PC. It's an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (single core, 1.8 Ghz) with 1 GB of memory and a Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 video card. I run XUbuntu linux on it and it works fine. But then along comes Firefox 4, that has new and improved graphics hardware acceleration, and it just so happens that it doesn't work with Linux very well. Search around on Google to read about the Firefox team's bitches and complaints about making their software work with Xorg drivers. Well, it works pretty well on Linux if you've got some new fancy hardware or something. But, hey, I run Linux BECAUSE IT IS LIGHTWEIGHT AND I DON'T HAVE TO BUY NEW FANCY HARDWARE DAMMIT. :-) So, there's this wonderful web browser test page created by the good folks at Mozilla, and it's located here: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ Go ahead, give it a try, see what you get. It's a good test to see if A) your browser supports crazy CSS stuff and B) how well your browser performs graphically. This is becoming an increasingly more important thing since sites like Facebook are using CSS to layer things like photo collections over a web page shown in the background. Yup, that feature requires some decent CPU and graphics card and it is slower than beans on an old PC running Firefox 4. And here's my results on my lovely little home PC:
- Firefox 4 - 1 FPS
- Chrome - 8 FPS
- Opera - 8 FPS
So, guess what browser I'm using right now to type this? Opera! Yup, going back to using good old snappy Opera. Opera is pretty close to Firefox in that it has lots of user preferences AND it has that search box in the upper right that I use like 3 trillion times a day. Now I just need to figure out how to add more search selections to it. I'm sure there's a web page decidated to that. The fiendish Opera fanboi club is smaller, but about 10 times as violently loyal to their chosen browser as the Firefox club. :-) Matthew Wheelock, if you're reading this, I know you are shedding a tear of pride that I am using Opera. :-p
EDIT: Wow, to add a search engine to Opera, you simply go to whatever search site you want (like imdb.com), right click in its search box, and select "Create search". Damn, that's nice.