Notices

I did a quick V8 Javascript benchmark for both - and while this really isn't anything too scientific - Firefox got better overall score.

Firefox http://dromaeo.com/?id=99174
MicroB http://dromaeo.com/?id=99175

I didn't disable any widgets or anything, so results might vary a bit on each run.

MicroB FTW! Overall you get a better experience with it. And looking at the bugfixes coming with PR1.2, it'll get better. Hopefully firefox will get better, but for now it's just a step back.. at least for me.

Did you update the firmware? PR 1.1.1 added support for potrait browsing.

Definitely MicroB, the idea of firefox is great but even with flash enabled I just find it pales compared to the proprietary browser. I think the n900 for a lot of non-tech/semi-tech people (like myself) is all about full fat web on a little machine and while firefox is ok in theory and the mutt's nuts in terms of concept, for me MicroB seems totally intuitive and a winner after a month and a half of use.

To be fair though either option is still miles ahead of anything else out there as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the creator's announcement thread about adflashblock-css:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=43753

It's called adflashblock-css, because it uses css to hide flash elements on the page. What you'll see instead is a white box of equal size to what the flash would have been and if you click the box, it will load / show the flash.

It doesn't use lists to look for ads - it just disables all flash content (or at least hides it).

You will probably only find it in extras testing (not sure), but it's a very small patch and, as far as I recall, only uses css to hide flash content and no "actual code", so it's lightweight and probably easy to get rid of if you don't like it.

I haven't measured how much faster sites got, but my gut feeling is that everything runs snappier on the sites I visit.

I love Firefox on the N900, Weave sync has been working perfectly for me, and the N900 has enough RAM for all my tabs/bookmarks compared to the N800 where Firefox soft crashes frequently with an out of memory error.

My BIGGEST beef, and this is the one that is going to have me Browser Switchboarding right back to MicroB, is the inability to highlight text. I can't STAND the fact that I look up code for a quick fix on the N900 and then I have to keep tabbing back and forth between the webpage and the terminal to manually enter in all the code.

To the user that mentioned desktop bookmarks, these also work with Firefox if you use Browser Switchboard to change the default browser to Firefox.

MicroB for me. The big problem with MicroB is that most addons don't work well. I couldn't use Greasemonkey and I'd like to try Feedly, for example.

I find Firefox and Fennec clumsy and slow.

I'd like to try Google Chrome on the N900.

Turns out you can highlight text and copy/paste in Firefox. From a post by Cue:

"to copy text what I do is I click the point to start highlighting then shift+left or right arrow highlights, then ctrl+c to copy."

What he means by 'click the point to start' is just touch the point you want a cursor. You will not see a cursor, but once you hold shift and < or >, the text will begin to highlight forwards or backwards. Then just ctrl+c copy ctrl+v paste.

It's still microB for me. I love the interface in firefox/fennec but it loads slowly and feels quite clunky. The biggest bother for me, however, is the lack of 'swirl' zoom gesture or volume button zoom. I hate double-click zooming with a passion, so for me that makes firefox unusable.

I must say, I was utterly blown away by how good microB is out of the box.

I've found double-tap zooming works a little better in Firefox than MicroB and use it most of the time to zoom. You can also zoom Firefox with Ctrl+up-down buttons. And zooming with the volume control is either in the nightly test builds already or will be soon. Expect volume zoom, more features plus more speed in the next official release.

I just don't get where everyone keeps saying Firefox is slower than MIcroB. It does start up slower because it doesn't pre-load into memory at boot like MicroB, but loads webpages just as fast when I compare the two. Firefox has a newer rendering engine, runs javascript as fast or faster than MicroB and handles some complicated websites I have to access for work better than MicroB. Am I missing something here?

The only real problem I have with Firefox is it doesn't yet let me organize bookmarks in folders.