A Cheat Sheet To All the Browser Betas

Harry writes "I can't remember another time when there were so many Web browsers in prerelease form — 2009 should be a really, really good year for final browser versions. I have posted a quick recap of the state of the upcoming versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari." It is nice to see a healthy market of competition driving innovation in a market that has been largely stagnant in recent history. What do other folks see on the scorecard?

Comments

Re:Well..

[ducomputergeek]

I've been using Opera now as my default browser for about a year now. Why? It's the only browser that will run natively on every platform I use, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. Firefox can't claim that last one, at least not since the 1.x branch. Not in any recent versions. And it's had a bunch of the new "features" that people talk about with chrome, like tabs above the address bar and that dial pad thingy that I never use.

One all the platforms, I've found that it is fast and isn't a memory hog like FF. Opera will also do it all, from block ads to bit torrent, all in one place. Now I can argue that there are better bit torrent clients out there, but in a pinch I have used it to pull down ISO's without any problems.

Opera gets almost no press outside the mobile market. It still has issues with some JS out there, but it's pretty rare these days. And it's a shame, because they probably have the best browser on the market.

Opera can block adverts if you want it to

[AnalPerfume]

This may be off-topic; if so....sorry.

I've liked Opera each time I tried it although the interface is different it's a damn good browser. The reason it never grabbed me was the lack of any useful (Chuck Norris trivia anyone???....I'm serious, they have one so I guess at least one person on the planet has a use for it) plugins, specially for blocking adverts. In the settings you can disable JavaScript etc but there's no way to block adverts. Well I found one....and it works.

http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/index.dml/tag/urlfilter.ini

The above link explains how to create a blank urlfilter.ini file in your Opera profile directory, copy and paste some urls to filter out and restart Opera. Every site I tried before and after, it was like surfing in Firefox with AdBlock.....bliss. I don't think it's perfect, it depends on the site and the type of advert but it's a damn good start. It's also easy to add a new line to the text file if you come across an adserver not on the list.

Having said all that, I'm still blown away by how fast Opera is, even WITH adverts. Being able to block them helps speed that up further. I've been a Firefox user for so long that I don't think I could switch but Opera is a damn good second browser for site testing.

I recently tried Epiphany with Webkit, it may be one to watch for the future but it's a bit early yet.

Re:Won't Work with Hundreds of Favorite Sites.

[dedazo]

"Instead of making IE8 standards compliant, M$ is telling high volume sites to change and generating a list of "compatible sites".

You're joking, right? "M$" is making IE8 standards-compatible by default, and it's telling web site operators (especially high-volume ones) to add a tag to make the browser drop down to "compatibility mode" or "quirks mode" that allow the site to be viewed if it was designed for the lower standards of IE7 and IE6. They're also giving you an UI to add sites that you know are *not* standards-compliant so that IE8 can degrade gracefully in those cases and let you use the site, as opposed to just displaying garbage.

The end result is that people don't have to rush to update their sites that were already proven to work with older versions of IE just because of the next release.

This is a mess Microsoft got themselves into, undoubtedly, but your ignorance isn't helping much here. I'm sure that will make the front page though, since you seem to have that little game down, all ScuttleMonkey would have to do is remove all the dollar signs and we'll be all set.