Firefox vs. IE Options

[Spectatrix]

All of us are Firefox users! Except for Dogmeat. Because he's an IE LOSER!

[impala454]

lemme explain a little something about how windows works.

every windows application with a user interface has window handles. it's a pointer to memory that contains information about that window. when you start an application it starts up in its own process, meaning it has its own memory space. the entire application and overhead fires up and you have your inital window handles. window handles take up memory, obviously.

now when you fire up ie or firefox or any other application this is what happens. if I go to firefox -> file -> new window, the firefox application creates a new window handle using windows api calls (there's no special "firefox" window api). that new window handle's memory is contained within the same memory space allocated to firefox.exe, as will any window created by firefox. now the tab will be different, because it doesn't create a new window handle, hence there will be less overhead. it looks as though when you run firefox.exe manually again while it's open, firefox simply sees that it's already running and assumes you wanted to create a new window, and your existing firefox.exe process creates the new window handle. ie on the other hand just starts up a new process with its own memory. this is the only difference in the windows api calls of these two browsers.

is one better? that all depends on how you want to see it. the windows swap space on a typical computer is anywhere from 500MB-2GB nowadays, with new processes of either browser not taking up that much space, so the problem lies when something crashes. if you have a process crash, anything in that process's memory is gone, including all window handles. so in either browser, if you're opening new windows in the same process and one particular page barf your browser, all your browser windows are gone, whereas if they were in seperate processes they would not affect each other. in other words, it's more stable, but takes up more memory.

i'm not tryin to be an asshole here, just tryin to explain how the shit works for those that take all the propaganda at face value. I honestly don't really prefer one browser over the other. I've tried them all out and to me it just displays a damn webpage, whether it's IE, Firefox, Opera, whatever. I simply use IE mostly because it's already on the comp.