Mozilla’s Firefox Browser is this site’s Preferred Web Browser
For a while Google’s Chrome browser had seemed to be the web browser of choice, based primarily on its various ease of use features, although some of those features are provided however by extension components. More recently however, Google Chrome’s negatives have become more apparent, and more annoying, removing it from its once favorable status with me. The result is that Mozilla’s Firefox browser has returned as my web browser of choice for now.
There are multiple important, and some quite practical, reasons for returning Firefox to its primary browser status. The first is the fact that Google’s Chrome just uses way, way, way, too much memory. The second are various annoying CSS related display problems in Google Chrome’s algorithms that have become apparent while building this web site, www.marilynperry.com. The third is Google's intrusions upon some aspects of the Chrome browser's privacy features and privacy functionality. The settings configuration system is also annoying, as has been Google's removal of various features like the total memory usage viewer to track its ungainly multi-process implementation.
There just isn’t any justification for any web browser gobbling up gigabyte after gigabyte of memory just to open the application and to display an empty browser window.
There just isn’t any justification for any web browser gobbling up gigabyte after gigabyte of memory just to open the application and to display an empty browser window. However, Google’s Chrome does precisely that, more so than does Mozilla's Firefox. As a seasoned software scientist with decades of experience, I have to believe that such enormous memory usage is the product of lazy, if not inept, programming practices that are simply wasting memory, when better designed data structures could be using less memory more efficiently. Unfortunately, memory gobbling software applications like Google’s Chrome are clear evidence of a major shift in software development paradigms, wherein traditional values of memory usage management and processor usage efficiency have been discarded in favor of features at any cost, regardless of resource usage sacrifices. We have thankfully reached a 64 bit computing threshold whereupon large memory, as much as 16 to 32 gigabytes of system ram are commonplace on desktop and laptop computers, and where multiples of that amount are commonplace in internet server system computing.
The second primary browser preference change factor has been very strange problems with the way Google Chrome displays certain HTML elements when combined with various CSS annotations of them. Google Chrome is giving zero (0) height elements height, in the case of these specific problems, lots of height, when it should not be doing so. In the www.marilynperry.com web site, this problem causes the article headings to have huge vertical spaces between the heading and the article contents, which should not be there (see example image at left). Firefox however, displays the same HTML/CSS code correctly, and as expected. Kudos to the developers around the world contributing to the Firefox browser’s code, for getting such HTML/CSS display and formatting details right.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer hasn’t even been on the web browser landscape for years, and its replacement called Edge remains an inept afterthought that Microsoft would like to foist upon users, at the same time Microsoft refuses to provide the sorts of features that make Firefox and Chrome far more popular. After noticing the display problems with Google’s Chrome, a quick trial of Internet Explorer revealed that Microsoft's horrible web browser has even more severe display problems than those apparent when using Google’s Chrome. Consequently Microsoft's browsers haven't been a consideration for years, and probably won’t be for years either, and for far more reasons than just its failure to display many websites correctly.
Given all the foregoing, Mozilla’s Firefox is once again the premium and primary web browser of choice. Mozilla Firefox is the preferred web browser to use when viewing this web site. The other available web browsers just don’t do the job well enough, or even correctly. In other words, to have the best web browser experience on www.marilynperry.com, use the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
Marilyn Perry
