I installed Firefox (FF) way back in early 2005 and since then haven’t touched Internet Explorer (IE) until now. I used to find that FF loaded pages much quicker and kept up with new CSS techniques unlike IE. Furthermore I love the add-ons you can get and, for me, web development would have been a real pain without them but alas things have changed with the release of IE7.

IE7 Better than Firefox?

IE7 now has good support for CSS (although a few annoying bugs), a growing number of add-ons and seems to load web pages a lot faster than FF. On top of all of this (and I don’t know whether this is just me but) text seems to render beautifully in IE7 and makes FF text rendering look of lack of a better word jagged. I have read into this a little and I have found people talking about anti-aliasing and using TFT screens (which I do) and so on. All I know is text looks better in IE than FF. I also find the FF often freezes or crashes when I have a few tabs open or a lot of pages with flash open.

So why am I writing this post well, I am willing to forgive FF unsmooth text (in the hope that FF v3 will fix this) as long as it runs faster and stops crashing/freezing all the time. So I have a load of add-ons installed (which I love and am going to list below) that I’m going to uninstall to try and speed up FF. Some of the below addons I don’t have active normally only when I need them but I think they are still slowing things down (na = not active)

The best addons for Firefox for a web developer

Personal Use addons

Uninstall All Add-ons

Right back to my original plan, I’m using Firefox right now so I’ll let you know my finding after I restarted… Oh yeah forgot to mention I have over 1500 bookmarks which might be causing the issue with FF however IE7 has the same bookmarks and seems to run fine, anyway back to the uninstalling…

Conclusion

Right so if your Firefox browser is loadin pages slowly uninstall your addons for a huge speed boost. It’s about the same speed as IE7 now. Problem is I love my addons just got to decide which ones I can live without.

Oh yeah the bookmarks make no difference.