To anyone who works on Mozilla-Firefox:

We use complex web forms for internal processes at our company. We (as developers) greatly favor Mozilla-Firefox over Microsoft's Internet Explorer, as it's safer, more versatile and more rigorous with respect to standards. However, we tell our users to view our internal web applications with IE. The following illustrates why.

(Click on some of these to get your own numbers. Try it with your own computer using IE and Firefox.)

Example Seconds to Load

Type of page Mozilla Internet Explorer

Just text 0 0

Just text in a table 1.437 .125

Text with some input boxes 1.516 .047

Text with some input boxes in a table 7.844 .187

Text with some input boxes and a style 3.11 .049

Text with some input boxes and a style in a table 8.719 .2

Text with some input boxes and a style in a table (10 times bigger) 473¹ 2.187

Example	Seconds to Load
Type of page	Mozilla	Internet Explorer
Just text	0	0
Just text in a table	1.437	.125
Text with some input boxes	1.516	.047
Text with some input boxes in a table	7.844	.187
Text with some input boxes and a style	3.11	.049
Text with some input boxes and a style in a table	8.719	.2
Text with some input boxes and a style in a table (10 times bigger)	473¹	2.187

Here are a set of smaller examples to use as a test case for Firefox developers. Notice the freaky jump from 5 to 10 instances. Things settle down to linear, again, after the jump. To get the below results, I load these pages, then quit Firefox each time. The numbers below are on a machine with a Gig of RAM, and almost 512 Meg free even after the initial Firefox load.

1 Instance	Approximately 0.018 seconds
2 Instances	Approximately 0.035 seconds
5 Instances	Approximately 0.088 seconds
10 Instances	Approximately 5.4 seconds
20 Instances	Approximately 12.5 seconds
30 Instances	Approximately 18.5 seconds
40 Instances	Approximately 25 seconds
50 Instances	Approximately 30 seconds
100 Instances	Approximately 62 seconds

These numbers are NOT rigorous. It's not certain that Firefox and IE execute the javascript timing code at exactly the same point. But the numbers are SO different that such details don't matter. It seems pretty clear that IE scales with page size more or less linearly, whereas Firefox does not, and that IE handles text boxes and tables much, much faster.

We believe that other companies use complex web-forms too, and that the MIS departments of those companies are in the same quandary as us. This is probably impeding Firefox's acceptance on the corporate desktop.

Paul Pomerleau and Nikhil Trivedi
Globalcom, Inc.

¹ The above numbers come from a windows machine. Another version of Firefox (on Linux) showed this page in only 190 seconds.