A replacement for Firefox

[emfrat]

On Friday I finally ditched Firefox as a browser, after nearly 12 months of frustration and disgust at the progressive worsening of problems introduced by every upgrade since that time ago.
I tested K-meleon, which showed a lot of promise, but was brought down by lousy coding on a site I use a lot. Not their fault.
Also tested Chrome, which was nice and quick, but was going to make me do a lot of work to preserve my bookmarks - no thanks. However, in fairness, a search in Chrome threw up a browser called PaleMoon, which I had not heard of.
http://www.palemoon.org/
It is essentially FF3.6 with all the 'too-clever-for-its-own-good' stuff stripped out. In a bit over half-an-hour, and without being reduced to reading the 'destructions', I had a very stable browser with all the good things I had in FF and none of the problems. It even handles the non-standard coding from Facebook and the like. There are a couple of quirks related to that, but I found refreshing the FB page fixes them. I also asked in the PaleMoon Help for an ad blocker, and was pointed to one which installed quickly and easily and works just like a bought one. I will look through their Forum and see what else is around, but this Granpa is now a very happy cybernaut

ATB
MikeW

[DaveB]

Tks for the HU Mike

Alternative browsers (ones that work!) will always be of interest to many here

ATB

DaveB

[SkippyBing]

I've started using Opera which is nice and stable and handily synchronises bookmarks between my desktop and laptop automagically.
It also has a nice feature where you can open a new tab and it gives you a grid of thumbnail links to your favourite sites, you can even have the thumbnails update at regular intervals which lets you see if there's anything new on without actually visiting.

[ianhind]

To get bookmarks from Firefox to Chrome, I thought it was just a matter of exporting the FF bookmarks to an HTML file (in Organise Bookmarks, Import and Backup) and then in Chrome using Bookmark Manager import that HTML file (Organise, Import Bookmarks). That's what I've done in the past.

Ian

[DarrenL]

Installed and using here, exported Firefox bookmarks (HTML) and imported. Added standard Firefox AdBlock Pro, a theme, additional Firefox search engines all hunky dory.

Looks exactly the same as Firefox but I have yet to have the foggy white "Not responding" curse that I got every now and again with Firefox.


Really good find

[emfrat]

To get bookmarks from Firefox to Chrome, I thought it was just a matter of exporting the FF bookmarks to an HTML file (in Organise Bookmarks, Import and Backup) and then in Chrome using Bookmark Manager import that HTML file (Organise, Import Bookmarks). That's what I've done in the past.Ian

Cheers Ian -
Chrome wouldn't recognise K-meleon, even though it is Gecko-based, as is FF. I also saw a note about needing a different (manual) method of importing but that was apparently only suited to FF pre v3.0 I think. Either way, it was too much trouble at the time so I left it until later, but by then PaleMoon was doing everything I wanted so it's still there

ATB
MikeW

[austerdriver]

Is there any particular reason why you stopped using FireFox?

[emfrat]

Is there any particular reason why you stopped using FireFox?

Hello AD -
To enlarge on what I said up top - I went to FF from IE7, because of the security holes in IE, and also because Microsoft tried to sneak IE8 onto my machine 'under the radar' in the guise of a routine Windows Update. FF had some great features, and Thunderbird, the Mozilla email handler allowed me to set different filters on each of my email accounts. I still use Tbird.
Around the start of 2009, I installed an FF update and immediately had big problems with memory leaks and runaway CPU usage. Typically, the browser kept grabbing RAM each time it needed some and did not return it when that task was finished, so eventually there was hardly any RAM to work with and the machine ground to a halt. Similarly, the CPU usage would suddenly shoot up to over 50%, preventing me from closing the application and forcing me to kill it using Task Manager. Then I could start again, until the same thing happened, usually within an hour or so but often in a matter of minutes.
At that time I had a lot of faith in the FF team, although I felt they had lost the plot a bit. However subsequent updates only served to make the problems worse, and I saw no point in continuing with FF.

I know it is freeware, and I know I can't write that stuff, but I don't intend to debate that issue. There are a couple of forum pages, as well as the Mozilla support site, where you can read what has been happening.

Hope this helps
MikeW

[DarrenL]

Is there any particular reason why you stopped using FireFox?

I have stopped using Firefox because every now and again it would freeze say "not responding" along the top of the screen and turn the whole screen foggy white. Pale Moon has never done that.

I have Pale Moon running with all the addons, themes, extensions I had with Firefox, it looks the same because it is Firefox under the skin (click about and it says it's Firefox 3.6.13) but without all the trouble I was having.

It's how Firefox should be.


Ps. Another problem I had with Firefox was the URL bar and search engine window not appearing when starting Firefox up, having to go into Customise and dragging them back onto the toolbar. That's not the 3 menu options of navigation and bookmarks ticked toolbars that didn't appear but the actual part you see the http:// address of websites in, possibly the most important part of a web browser. Firefox was good but it's been overtaken.

[Garry Russell]

Firefox often causes my cpu to run a 100 percent

I only use it as some of the site I frequent won't work well in IE as it is not powerful enough

I think Firefox is awful and it updates without me wanting it to.