Just installed IE9 on the wife’s laptop, cos Firefox is a total memory hog and Chrome’s relationship with Flash is icy at best.

I’m actually really liking it, but there are a few Microsoft niggles that I’m wondering if they can be worked around.

e.g.

1) When I load the google search page, the cursor defaults to the web address bar rather than the search input bar.

2) when I highlight text and right-click, I get all sorts of “search with…” options, but the “search with Google” is behind a few menus unlike the “search with Bing” option. I can “search with Google Video” no problem, but how often is that going to be a convenience?

I get that it’s Microsoft making Google an awkward search engine to use so people will use Bing instead, but is there a way of altering these things? Apart from these minor annoyances, it’s pretty much the best browser I’ve used.

Control Panel…Internet properties…Manage Add-ons…Search providers??

I find the latest IE to be really unpleasant to use:- it’s as if they’re trying so hard to be helpful that you can’t actually do anything, and bing is rancid but microsoft’s own so I bet it’s almost impossible to get rid.

On a side issue:

Firefox is a total memory hog

how do you tell? I’m running FF4 and can’t tell if it’s hogging memory or not.

Magical!

Ta very much!

The computer’s started freezing for a couple of minutes and then comes free again. I look at the task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and Firefox is generally using metric assloads of memory. Exponentially increased when there are more than about 3 tabs open.

IE9 is pretty sweet, especially after druidh‘s info. Give it a go.

Whoever MS employ to build their browsers should be flogged and told where to go. Horrible piece of software.

I’ve just removed IE9 and re-instated IE8. 9 has made my Sony laptop very slow at loading pages for some reason.

It’s super speedy on this laptop – Acer Aspire 5735Z.

Really quite impressed.

IE9 is probably ahead of FF4. FF is memory leak city and Mozilla don’t seem to care enough to even acknowledge it. I’ll stick with Chrome though

Chrome’s relationship with Flash is icy at best

Is it? Seems to work fine when I want to look at Flash content, though by default I block Flash, given it buggers up every browser.

My FF4 was leaking 2.8GB of memory – back to Chrome me thinks!

Chrome+Flash+Windows 7 seem to be a poor combination. It always seems to crash and then I have to restart Chrome.

Chrome works very well for me on W7…

…Firefox is generally using metric assloads of memory. Exponentially increased when there are more than about 3 tabs open.

erm.. can’t say I notice this and I use Firefox every day, often with >20 tabs open, on a development machine that usually has a lot of other very memory intensive things going on (i.e. a development environment, Word, PDFs open and two virtual machines running).

From what I can gather Firefox “memory leaks” are usually just normal page caching (i.e. using plenty of memory, but not actually “leaking” and freeing it up when requested).

My FF4 was leaking 2.8GB of memory – back to Chrome me thinks!

The genuine memory leaks tend to be a result of dodgy extensions rather than the main Firefox product.

Just installed IE9 on the wife’s laptop, cos Firefox is a total memory hog..

http://lifehacker.com/5784396/browser-speed-tests-firefox-4-internet-explorer-9-chrome-11-and-more

Chrome works very well for me on W7…

Yep – me too. Can’t remember the last time it crashed, and I tend to keep my browser open (computer on standby) for days at a time.

Just downloaded Opera, pretty good IMO. I like Chrome but its recently been crashing Flash and can be a little juddery. I hope its just a bad version and not systemic so an update will fix these problems but for the time being i’m going to the Opera!

Rock and roll, the browser wars (as Billy Joel might have sung).

I’ve got IE9 and FF4 installed wherever I can, and am much preferring FF4 at the moment. It’s got a few niggles, but it is rapid.

I spoke to soon about Opera. its not loading STW very well at all.

Liked a few things about opera, but there was too many ridiculously stupid things that bothered me. Chrome just isn’t as customizable as firefox. FF4 all the way.

On the IE9 front, is there any way to increase the number of items in the History list? It is now defaulting to 5, but I prefer having more items in here as it’s faster than using favourites.

pretty memory usage graph

I know that’s how everything should work, but her laptop keeps freezing up with Firefox. Doesn’t happen with IE9.

I know that’s how everything should work, but her laptop keeps freezing up with Firefox.

Odd. I’d try a fresh install of Firefox (i.e. with any previous install deleted). No extensions and suitably defragged.

Though by the looks of the pretty graph you might be better off with Opera if it is running on a very memory limited laptop.