Browser Comparison - Firefox 2 b1, IE7 b3, Opera 9

mikemuch writes "The browser wars have heated up again, with Microsoft putting Beta 3 of Internet Explorer 7 out for all to download (not just developers anymore), Firefox coming out with the first beta of its version 2, and Opera releasing version 9. ExtremeTech has a shoot-out of the three browsers, with feature comparisons and tests of resource usage, startup time, and Acid2 standards compliance. Standout features are Opera's built-in BitTorrent support, Firefox's spellchecker for forms, and IE's Quick Tabs view. Firefox is still ahead in extensions, while Opera has some slick UI conveniences."

Comments

One Page (printable) version

[xmas2003]

Entire report on one page.

Submitter did a nice summary. BTW, another table shows memory usage, and looks like Firefox Beta 2 comes in a bit heavier (compared to 1.5.04) at least for startup and an initial load of six tabs - unknown if the memory leaks that cause this to skyrocket when viewing dynamic sites (such as this) are fixed.

Also talks about the anti-phishing protection, but says they were unable to have this engage, so maybe it's not functional yet? That seems to be an area where more inovation could be done.

Re:One Page (printable) version

[bwilson]

Ben Goodger is standing over my shoulder (I swear) and says "I've seen some retarded comments, but this is pretty good."

Alphas and betas are not shipped in debug mode.

Re:Opera's UI is slick?

[bartkusa]

Opera's UI is extremely customizable. Skinnable interface and lots of flexibility with toolbar and button placement, on the output side. On the input side, you can set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures if you don't like the default ones.

Re:Opera?

[Troed]

Opera Mini - a-less-than-100Kb Java ME application that makes web surfing on a bog standard phone a joy.

Free, of course.

Re:Opera?

[14CharUsername]

ActiveX empowers webdevelopers. FF extensions empowers users. ActiveX can be used by bad people to exploit your system because it allows remote sites to do stuff on your system. FF extensions are run only on your own system, most of them have nothing to do with the webpages you load. And the ones that do just filter out ads. Some are more complex, such as greasemonkey, but you only run those only on sites you trust.

Also extensions aren't installed by default, so there isn't any danger of a feature you never use compromising your system.

Re:Spelling checkers

[Bogtha]

Contrary to your statement, opera does not have spell checking out of the box. It's available as a 3rd party add-on.

I know that's what the article says, but it's highly misleading. Opera hooks into the native spelling checker on each platform it runs on. On OS X, this is an official system service. On other platforms, it uses Aspell - which comes as standard in virtually every Linux distribution and installed on most UNIX systems. Windows doesn't provide a standard spelling checker, but Opera still uses Aspell if it's installed.

So "third-party add-on" is a long way from the truth. It's automatically available without any add-on necessary on most platforms, and it automatically recognises a common spelling-checker if it's installed on Windows. It's nothing like Firefox 1 and the Google extension at all.