xzi said:
Those people claiming it's "faster" are the ones who've been using it for a while. It has NEVER been faster then IE. It's a resource hog and it's a second browser when you already have one.
You can claim a lot of things about Firefox, but speed has never been one of them. 3.0 might be better I guess.
Personally, I'm not one for installing alternative things when I already have one that works--and that's IE vs. Firefox for me. Why put on iTunes or Winamp when it comes with WMP?
Then again, I'm a Microsoft admin by trade
Depends what version of IE you are talking about. If you are talking about IE6, well the Javascript engine in IE6 performance is horrible compared to FF and Safari. IE7 is better but still not there. Not even close.
In terms of standards compliance, even though IE7 has improved in this area FF and Safari once again are leaders here.
As for Speed, you have the right to your opinion but you might want to take a look around the net and you will find that the statement of FF NEVER being faster than IE is just not true. All the test I have seen and my personal experiences as a web developer that has just spent the last 2 weeks doing performance analysis on our web site with both FF and IE7 found that both perform pretty close in our application. Actually FF was about a second faster in most test. There are a lot of things that go into the perception of browser speed so one must be careful when making blanket statements like NEVER faster than IE because the data on the net just does not back this statement up.
I personally would not choose my primary browser based on speed alone. For me, FF is my primary because I like the flexibility, has great add-ons, and it renders 99% of the sites I go to (Ones is does not is because of proprietary IE only technology choices). Also, you can actually run FF2 and FF3 on the same machine at the same time unlike IE which makes it good for the transition time when upgrading.
You also can skin the browser.
Well My advice is.. Give it download and try using it as your primary browser. Look at the add-ons and play with it a bit. Can't hurt and if you don't like it uninstall it. I am in the camp that one should always have two browsers on a machine.
For the record during the day at work I use both since I develop web apps, but my preference is FireFox by a mile.