Slashdot Mirror
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?
There really aren't any clear winners. Opera has acid compliance in its favor. Firefox is extremely popular, easy to use and has plenty of features.
IE, while it may still lack acid compliance is making progress on the features front and security is supposedly improving. In the long run, the increase in popularity for alternative browsers will hopefully steer them all towards greater standards compliance leading to a big win for end users and content developers.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
You do know that Opera has been free for ages, right? Even without ads?
I'm not saying it's the browser for you; I use Firefox. But Opera is a very good contender nonetheless.
Here, I'll say something more constructive, rather than just criticizing browsers I've never used.
Firefox: The only real browser right now. Supports a bunch of anti-crapware plugins (like adblock plus, which gets rid of /. ads) and general power-user scripts for those who want them. Aside from that, its everywhere on every platform that supports any form of graphical manager.
Still starts to lag if it hasn't been restarted in a while, although it's gotten a lot better about it lately. It does have very many good add-ons, and I've only found around three bugs in its rendering engine, ever (and one of them had to do with nested tables, which shouldn't be used, anyway). However, it's much slower than Safari or Opera about passing the Acid tests.
The problem with add-ons is that the more you have, the slower Firefox gets (and the more cluttered the interface gets - I still haven't figured out how to get rid of all the addons adding their logos to the bottom right).
Remember, add-ons (such as GreaseMonkey, Adblock, Tab Mix Plus) are different from plugins (such as Flash, Java, Silverlight).
IE: MS has had to work because they prior have sucked and dragged down most every website that does "IE only" websites. It's a good thing that Firefox and standards are taking a front seat.
Well, it's arguably "not bad" now. Although I don't use it much, my impression is that it can't get you viruses just by accidentally clicking the wrong link these days. And its standards support is steadily improving, although it still has weird bugs crop up, it doesn't support more modern technologies (SVG, canvas, HTML 5's <video> tag...), and I often have to use weird hacks like hasLayout to get it to render correctly. It's also very slow compared to other modern browsers.
Still, it's on par with last-generation browsers, which means it's come a long way from the mess that was IE6.
Opera: They're still around on X86 platforms? I thought they died out and only did DS and Wii browsers and diddled with X86 adware. Havent looked at them since their software didnt fit on a floppy.
It's a pretty good browser, and still as fast as ever. Its benefits include coming with most of the functionality built-in that Firefox requires plug-ins for, as well as support for GreaseMonkey scripts to add the rest of the functionality. The benefit is that its interface is nowhere near as slow as Firefox with all those plugins.
Notably, it's the only browser here that doesn't have inline find with Ctrl+F (even IE does these days), but inline find can be brought up with the / button.
It's also one of the few browsers resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing.
Chrome: eh? Its alpha buggyware with none of the plugins we're used to. Im not going to even look at it until it has more what I would consider basic features.
For "alpha buggyware", it doesn't have very many bugs, and is as stable as any other browser. In addition, its interface is very well done, and arguably much easier to use than any other browser currently available. What would you consider basic features? Nightlies even have GreaseMonkey support.
It's also the only other browser on this list resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing.
Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.
Safari on a Mac is a very good browser. It lacks Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, GreaseMonkey-like functionality, or ad blocking. Aside from these, it's the fastest browser around, especially in nightlies.
Safari on Windows works fairly well. Aside from the debatably ugly color scheme
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
When I said that (under a previous account), it was not free. It was ad-ware or pay-ware.
Yeah, but you brought up your old post as if the point was still valid.
fucking support disable-output-escaping already
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168
your reason for not supporting it is arrogance:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XSL_Transformations_in_Mozilla_FAQ_(external)
really? a desperately needed piece of functionality is bad xml?
you had pretty much the same holier-than-thou attitude behind your resistance to supporting innerHTML, and you reversed yourself, for good reason: its what programmers need and want. programmers are your friends. keep us as your friends
we shouldn't have to spend time coding special scenarios to support your browser, for the most stubborn and shortsighted of reasons
leave that kind of hatred for msie, ok? thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it