God damnit!

That still counts as performing poorly when measured against other browsers. It could be Firefox's Javascript engine that is too slow: As a developer, I want to have applications that run fast and look good; I don't care how the browser achieves that much. At the moment, Firefox just doesn't do that for me.

I'm using an Intel Core 2 CPU at 2.40GHz, 2GB RAM and an NVidia GeForce 7300GT. I use the latest betas of Chrome, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox available precompiled for download (not directly from their repositories). My OS is the latest Windows 7 with all recent updates.

Actually, Internet Explorer 9 has a similarly poor performance, as you can see from my measurements. Opera seems to be winning so far, and by a wide margin.

I'm using Windows 7. As far as I know, Firefox uses different rendering techniques on different operating systems, so that may be a cause.

Interestingly, Firefox compares poorly to other browsers when it comes to heavy rendering in "canvas". Here's a demo I made that allows measuring the speed of rendering in FPS (frames per second).

http://dionyziz.kamibu.com/3d/heli/

Chrome 6: 31 FPS
Opera 10.60: 46 FPS
Safari 5.0: 25 FPS; visually poor results
Internet Explorer 9: 19 FPS
Firefox 4.0 Beta 1: 19 FPS

Although in practice most of the time advanced data structures and algorithms are not used, it is useful to study them and implement them yourself at least once. Dijkstra's algorithm, Prim's, Kruskal's, maximum flow, and other basic graph-operating algorithms are a good example.

I would say that FreeBSD makes a better desktop for me because of the frequent updates to the ports tree. I like having Gnome 2.10 installed and having 2.12 probably ready a few weeks after its release.

Yes, that's why I use it as my dekstop OS as well.

My personal wish is that FreeBSD would take the same approach that OpenBSD had NetBSD have with their ports trees and create a security branch. That would give me the size of the FreeBSD ports tree with the stability of the Open/Net Trees.

A security branch wouldn't be bad, but a stable branch is what we really need. I'm very disappointed whenever I have to update my ports tree whenever I see that some port is somewhat broken or so. For example, last time I updated, there seemed to be an issue with glib (not so severe, but still an issue). That was pretty much a while ago. Haven't updated since, as I haven't had enough time. I just wish the ports Just Worked (tm). I know though that it's not an easy task.

As for the OpenBSD installer (GP post), I actually wish FreeBSD and NetBSD adopted it. It's very simple, and lets you do your job very fast. Nothing wrong with the FreeBSD and the NetBSD installers, but the OpenBSD installer seems way nicer. (Yes, I know I said I haven't used NetBSD, and it's true. But I have installed it, because I needed to double-check some bad comments I had heard about its installer - pretty much lies)

This used to be in the "Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense" section of Wikipedia for a whole year, so it's not really a new joke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Best_of_BJA ODN%23Water_on_Mars As the image history suggests, the same picture was posted on the 1st of April, 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Water_on_mars.j pg