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• Be Faster, or at least as fast as Chrome. Having used the Beta sparingly, just on "feel" and appearance alone, it appears to have accomplished this. Javascript runs fast, and images don't have any of the problems that Chrome seems to have (especially animated gifs).
• Be idiot-proof enough to continue taking users away from IE, yet remain moddable enough for power users and their extensions. Needless additions like Panorama tend to ruin this perception.
• Support HTML5. The beta doesn't test as well as Chrome currently, but it remains to be seen whether that matters. Both are using WebM now, so video support is a wash. http://html5test.com/
• Have a nice, streamlined interface. Fails so far due to: Awkward tabs (unnecessary repetition of Page title in Menu bar and Tab bar) and terrible placement of url hover. I don't mind the removal of the status bar, but it's been established that URL previews should be at the bottom-left of the screen, where we've become accustomed to seeing them with status bars and Safari/Chrome. That being said, Tab management with lots of tabs in Firefox (having the scroll-function) is superior to Chrome's "make every tab tiny so they all fit in the same window" approach.

Honestly it doesn't have to be a perfect browser, as I'm getting ready to ditch Chrome just on the basis of poor image support and the fact that Firefox is FOSS, through-and-through. Scrolling in Firefox is also much nicer than in Chrome. It's all in the details, and since Firefox is nigh-endlessly customizable through extensions, most of those details can be taken care of. It's just a matter of how soon all those extensions get updated for Firefox 4, and how much drag they're going to put on the browser once everything is just the way you want it.

It still scores terrible on the HTML5 tests. Considering it's a bleeding edge new version you would think it would support the latest HTML features.

With that said Opera Mobile is awesome for low-end devices like my S60 phone. Other than that I don't see Opera offering much.

Dear W3C, there exists a good test for HTML5 already: http://html5test.com/ [html5test.com] - use that F*sake.

W3C has a test submission process for HTML5 conformance tests. If someone submitted those, they might get used. AFAICT, the tests to date have been submitted by Microsoft and have about the same coverage (presumably, because they are the same tests) as the tests Microsoft did in house and used to announce itself as the most HTML5 compliant browser a while back.

Dear W3C, there exists a good test for HTML5 already: http://html5test.com/ - use that F*sake.

The results from html5test have my Chromium nightly leading the pack with a score of 241 with 8 bonus points out of a total of 300. For comparison, in order of most "compliant" to least:

• Chromium 7.0.531.0 (60152): 241/8

• Chrome 7.0.517.8 dev: 231/12

• Firefox 4 (Minefield nightly): 207/9

• Opera 10.61 build 3484: 159/7

• Firefox 3.6.10: 139/4

• Internet Explorer 9 beta: 96/5

So the IE9 beta does lag pretty far behind the competition on this test for html5 support, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see Chromium/Chrome in the lead with FF4 gaining ground. The point is, though, that no browser is completely standards compliant yet, much less with html5 and/or CSS3.

I have tried the IE9 Previews, and I was not impressed as much as I wished.

Yes, there are rounded corners and canvas. But the real meat, the HTML5 specification has been lacking, such as HTML5 Form elements. I just tried again with html5test.com and it gives me 96 out of 300.

What I'm afraid is once the make it public they have to start to create backwards compatibility updates, I mean there were several rendering quirks compared to Chrome and FF which required to create yet another conditional IE CSS. Somehow one of my sites causes the text in iframes to drop in to non-cleartype rendering for one, which is a bit archaic. Once they make it to stable, are they willing to update it often to keep it as standards compliant rather than making yet another quirk mode?

So please, Microsoft, update the IE9 often would you?

Your reason for their being idiotic is idiotically narrow-minded.

Chrome is my third-most-used browser, and may soon be fourth. (Yes, I have all 4 installed on my home box.)

Firefox gets the most use. Things just all seem to be where they should be and operate as they should. Though the 4.0 beta tabs are a bit unsettling. I switched off the tabs-on-top, because that's just a fucking stupid place to put them, but they still extend all the way to the left border of the browser, instead of to the left border of the webpage pane. When a sidebar is open, it's got 3/4ths of a tab across it. They misassociated the tabs with the browser window instead of the webpage window, and misassociated the sidebars with the webpage window instead of the browser window. Jarring to the logic of the thing.

IE gets the next-most use. I have its security features cranked way up. It doesn't even play Flash now unless I go into the configs and enable the right button. I use it for sites where I suspect risky business.

I recently DL'ed safari, and I use it only to see how it operates in standards tests (http://acid3.acidtests.org/ and http://html5test.com/).

Chrome gets that, plus the occasional check to see if it handles some pages different from IE and FF. But really, it and Safari are curiosities, and IE is a rubber glove, while FF is the actual browser I go to when I go online.

And that makes IE 9 better than Chrome 5.

The beta version seems to test more of the spec: http://beta.html5test.com/

Mod parent up. That test looks pretty decent, although it has some issues. For instance, testing for device element when it's not fully specced; testing WebSQL when that's moribund; and testing WebSocket when it's not stable. My results are:

• Chrome: 212/300 + 6 bonus (dev channel)
• Firefox: 171/300 + 6 bonus (nightly)
• Opera: 129/300 + 5 bonus (10.60 preview)
• IE: 32/300 + 1 bonus (latest Platform Preview)

'Nuff said. The detailed results look legitimate to me, as these things go.

The beta version seems to test more of the spec: http://beta.html5test.com/

http://html5test.com/

things like this will have to do until we see something like ACID support HTML5.

Hi. Have you heard of this thing called "Google". It's pretty amazing really.

http://html5test.com/

Earlier this week, I attended Web 2.0, a conference in San Francisco. One of the big exhibitors is Microsoft. At their booth was a beautiful woman demonstrating a preview of IE9. At the time, she was demonstrating the graphics performance of IE9, highlighting the fact that they used the graphics controller directly to render the spinning graphics (which looked like a Windows-NT-3GL-screen-saver) much faster than Firefox and slightly faster than Chrome. She mentioned that it was “HTML5 rendering” and pointed to the site where you or I could prove it to ourselves -- http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. As she stood their beaming, I innocently asked if I could try, and she foolishly agreed to let me browse http://html5test.com/ which gave IE9 a score of 19/160 (BTW, that is what IE8 shows too). Then I tried it with Firefox and got 101/160, and Chrome 118/160. The beautiful woman was taken aback, obviously never having seen this site or acting as such. After learning what the site was about then generally questioning its motives, she dismissed the tests out of hand, saying they were basically irrelevant when compared to Microsoft’s. A gentleman standing next to me replied something like, “browser compatibility has been the biggest issue in developing applications, and now that most other browsers seem to have converged on a common standard, you dismiss it as irrelevant. You demonstrate a new version that will not be out for a year but does not feature any movement toward compatibility with anything but yourself.” The beautiful woman went into damage control, replying that what was being demonstrated was a preview, not even beta, and implied that many things may be added by the time it ships. I hope so, but I doubt it. BTW, others at the kiosk demonstrating Windows Mobile 7 were saying that will ship by the end of the year with IE8 and , of course, Silverlight.