Before I switched to ADSL Max I had used FireFox for so long that I forgot how fast/slow IE was, but after a bit of testing that I've come to the conclusion that Internet Explorer is faster for downloads... I did some testing on my rig as well as my parents computer and came to the same conclusion, test results: Files downloaded from Microsoft HD samples. (Before anyone says anything, I don't think MS is giving extra bandwidth to IE users). 104MB IE: 2m 13s (average 781KB/s) FF: 2m 36s (average 666KB/s) 84.4MB IE: 1m 45s (average 804KB/s) FF: 2m 1s (average 698KB/s) 161MB IE: 3m 20s (average 805KB/s) FF: 3m 50s (average 700KB/s) As you can see there are significant differences between IE and FF. Does FF have difficulty in downloading at high speed or is it just me (bearing in mind I did these testing on two computers)? FF version is 1.5.0.3 and IE version is 6.0.2900. Obviously I want FF to be faster since I use that primarily for downloading.
Sounds like network settings are different. You have optimised Firefox right? You could always try Opera, since it is a much better browser than Firefox anyway.
All the tests that I've seen show that IE is faster than FF, but you should have run the test on the same machine anyway. FF is actually quite a memory hog - but when you have a gig or two of RAM, does it actually matter? ch424
You could also try using the new Firefox 2 alpha if your desperate, that's pretty fast. As for the download speeds, is that what Firefox is telling you, or do you have some network monitoring tool telling you?
Firefox is pretty much optimised in the way I want it, and ch424 all the test results above were done on my machine. I also did two downloads on my parents rig and came up with the same conclusion, IE is faster than FF. Looks like FF is no longer speedier than IE but FF 1.0 was... perhaps I should switch back but then I suppose I become a bit of a security hole...I gave Opera 9 a try yesterday but installed it too! Might reinstall and give it a bit of try for a week. [Jonny] I get the start and finish times of the download and work out the speed in FF and use the standard times IE is giving me since the download starts when I press "save" in IE, but in FF the download starts before I even press "save to computer"... And FF2 - thanks, now where can I get that... /me searches the web.
I've never noticed the difference in speed since all the connections I use are broadband and I don't do any huge downloads such as movies. The user experience with Firefox over IE 6 was so much better that I didn't even try IE 7 Beta. I'm happy with Firefox and it will take a lot more than Microsoft turning IE into a Firefox knock-off for me to switch back. They'd need to create some awesome features specific to IE for me to consider it. Right now it's removed from both my home and work machines.
