>Hi everybody,
>
>I have an impression that FireFox is much slower loading pages than IE, not to mention different look (usually uglier) in FireFox than in IE.

IME FireFox 2.x is generally a little slower than IE7. FF is generally more standards-compliant than IE7. Unhappily, a lot of sites code specifically for IE7 and its quirks, are not tested well (or at all) with other browsers and don't look as good in them (or more accurately, they look *different*).

FF 2.x may also slow down considerably if you've got a lot of complex pages or tabs open at once - it can use a lot of memory. If you run low and start paging to disk it'll slow down a lot. Check your total RAM usage vs. what's physically installed in your computer in Task Manager.

>Do you have similar observations? Do you know ways of speeding up pages loading in FireFox as well as making UI look similar in both browsers?

Google [firefox speedup]. My understanding is that there has been a *lot* of code optimization going into FF3, that will speed it up considerably and reduce its memory footprint.

As for UI similarity, if you're talking about other people's pages AFAIK you're out of luck. If they're your own pages you're talking about, you could design your pages to look good in FF, then in general they should look good in IE7 as well.

>For your web applications do you test in all browsers?

My understanding is most web devs test against at least FF, IE6 and IE7. Some say Opera is currently the most standards-compliant and is therefore also a good browser to use for testing.