User:84user/wishlist

This page is in my User space and should not be confused with a wikipedia article.

Media players

Key: G=GOM M=Media Player Classic S=SUPER V=VLC media player Z=ZOOM

GOM Player hangs on some files playable with S,V,Z
Media Player Classic cannot render some files playable with S,V,Z
QuickTime generally terrible and slow
Real Player generally awful
SUPER (software) handles almost everything, but with a poor GUI
VLC media player plays most codecs with gaps and bugs
Windows Media Player fails to play many codecs
Zoom player cannot render some files playable with S,V,Z

Awkward media formats

.rmvb only payable with Real Player, G, M and Z

What Opera has that would be useful in Firefox

Page zooming that works on everything!
- Firefox has "View / Text Size / Increase " and Decrease but this neglects images
- Image Zoom is close but does not zoom the whole page and does not work with macromedia images
does not hog memory

What Firefox has that would be useful in Opera

"Find in this page" using control-F and with persistence.
- Opera does not have an equivalent, Opera's "Find" comes close but misses the essential aspects

fast tabbing
- Opera has Alt-tab but it is not fast enough because it requires two user actions to Firefox's one

Resurrect this page add-on
- Opera seems to have no equivalent

Is Firefox a Memory Hog?

Yes. At least Firefox 2 on my Windows Vista would regularly use over 1 gigabyte of extra RAM. Yes one whole Gigabyte, on a 2 Gigabyte system where the first Gigabyte was already used by Vista. Because I read posts from users that claimed Firefox 3 was better and *only* used 200 or 300 megabytes of memory with around 12 tabs open, I decided to upgrade. Here are my results.

Megabytes RAM   What I did 
 982            installed Firefox 3 (FF3) but did not launch it yet
1040            launch, open two more tabs, one is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
                the other is my wikipedia user page which I am editing now
                So that means FF3 has used 58 megabytes already
1020            memory usage is decreasing as I type?
1020            opened news.bbc.co.uk in new FF window
1020            opened three BBC news pages each in a tab
1030            clicked Preview button on wikipedia page
 980            opened new wikipedia.org page and closed original mozilla start page
 990            click my wikipedia watchlist
                (so far FF3 is behaving itself quite well!)
1020            after 4 windows opened, a google search and a wikipedia edit
unknown         after 20 hours open, FF3 crashes, so I restore the session
1180            FF3 session restored, 4 windows open, total of 10 tabs open
1190            after writing the above two lines!

Browser suggestions

I welcome anyone to provide links to Add-ons or widgets, Greasemonkey or other tweaks that implement these missing features. I have already seen various Opera settings to partly-implement Firefox's "Find" but so far each one fails to address the essential Find behaviour (press control-F in any tab and browser must immediately use the last-entered find text - Opera requires the user to retype each time; control-g is a part solution but takes too many user actions and simply does not allow user to edit the last find text)

If either Opera or Firefox implemented these shortcomings then I would only need to use one browser!