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

Whom is the better?

[arizwebfoot]

I did not read TFA entirely, but which browser is the better browser?

Re:Whom is the better?

[digitalunity]

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.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Midnight Thunder]

I did not read TFA entirely, but which browser is the better browser?

The one I use, but I am not telling you which one that is ;)

Re:Whom is the better?

[moderatorrater]

Depends on your tastes. If you like minimalism, try Chrome. If you like tons of features and don't mind a heavy footprint, get firefox + plugins. If you like apple, try Safari. If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Windows_NT]

IE 3.01 ;)

Re:Whom is the better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Argg, I hate to do this but... "Whom is the better?"? First, a browser is a thing, not a person, so you are correct with your 'which is a better browser?'. Secondly, even you were talking about people it would be 'who is the better?'. Just remember, replace the who/whom with he/him. If you would use he, who is correct. If you would use him, whom is correct.

Re:Whom is the better?

[ParanoiaBOTS]

IE, while it may still lack acid compliance is making progress on the features front and security is supposedly improving.

So give IE another 5 or so years and they should catch up to where firefox is...today?

Re:Whom is the better?

[couchslug]

"If you like leather and ball gags, try IE."

They added a newsreader?

Re:Whom is the better?

[AmberBlackCat]

Leather and ball gags can be good.

Re:Whom is the better?

[buchner.johannes]

IE, ... is making progress on the features front

Does it still require you to buy the extensions (like download-manager) or is there some free extension community?

Re:Whom is the better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the acid test a test for how well you cope with broken and non-standard code?

Re:Whom is the better?

[f1vlad]

IE8 would be ultimate winner _if_ they opted to support CSS3 at least to the level that firefox and webkit does. Sadly they opted to do something selfish which in the end will help them loose market share even further. Time will tell of course, but I am convinced that is the case.

But apart from those negative things, IE8 is actually quite good, I was impressed when I tried it. Big step forward.

Re:Whom is the better?

[buchner.johannes]

If you like minimalism and windows, try Chrome.

There, fixed this for you... Though now it doesn't make sense anymore ...

Re:Whom is the better?

[arizwebfoot]

How the hell can this be modded redundant if it's the first post??

It was a question.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Artifex]

IE also lacks a supported OSX version. So it's a non-starter for a growing segment of the market.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's plenty of free extensions to IE! I can add smiley faces to my email with a simple IE extension, and I can get a nice search bar from 1800search. That little gorilla search buddy makes my day. The only downside is it makes the browser so small it's hard to view websites.

Re:Whom is the better?

[ilovepolymorphism]

No. The ACID tests are for seeing how well the web browser follows standards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3

Re:Whom is the better?

[anexkahn]

My major Beef with IE8 right now is speed....very slow on my P4 3.2 Ghz with 2 GB of Ram. I know it is not yet a final release, but I hope the performance improves. Other than that, I think it is a major improvement over IE6/7. For now I think I will stick with Firefox.

Re:Whom is the better?

[AliasMarlowe]

If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.

And guess where the ball-gag goes...

Re:Whom is the better?

[naylor83]

haha, n1

Re:Whom is the better?

[grumbel]

I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.

Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom function when it will make all images look like crap? Bilinear filtering isn't all that complicated, yet Firefox doesn't have it and goes the ugliest possible route in making an image larger. I just don't get how such a basic feature is still not in there after over a decade.

Re:Whom is the better?

[ChameleonDave]

Argg, I hate to do this but... "Whom is the better?"? First, a browser is a thing, not a person, so you are correct with your 'which is a better browser?'. Secondly, even you were talking about people it would be 'who is the better?'. Just remember, replace the who/whom with he/him. If you would use he, who is correct. If you would use him, whom is correct.

Moreover, "the better" is only correct if there are only two options. He meant "Which is the best?".

Re:Whom is the better?

[Morlark]

Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser. If the website is designed in some dumbass way so that all the boxes are absolutely positioned, fixed width/height, because the designer is naively assuming that "surely all the text on my precious creation must be in this fabulous font that I've chosen at this specific size" then funnily enough things will break if the font is not just so, or if the size is not just so, or if the window is not the right size. It's not the browser's fault that the website is shit, it's the website's fault.

It's exactly the same as back in the days of olde, when shitty web designers used shitty IE-specific tags, and encouraged users to blame the browser if things didn't look the way they were supposed to. Only now those same designers have cottoned on to such concepts as "standards compliance" and turned it into a buzzword without trying to understand what it means. So they create all their web pages, run it through a validator and then pretend they're good to go, when in actual fact their web page might contain dozens of braindead design flaws like absolute positioning on every single element, or fixed width/height on boxes that will need to expand if the font size is changed.

I guess I can't disagree with you on the image zoom point, although I zoom images infrequently enough that it doesn't bother me. :P

Re:Whom is the better?

[Ihmhi]

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.

Firefox's simplicity and robust features are all that matter in the real world for most people. Most people aren't going to use a browser because it's standards-compliant - they'll use it for one or more of the following reasons:

1) It's easy to use.
2) It has a lot of add-ons and customization capabilities.
3) It's safer through a combination of good security practices in the programming and continually updating anti-phishing features.
4) It's not IE - a lot of people use Firefox, Opera, etc. as a big "fuck you" to Microsoft and for that reason alone.
5) This last one is a minority, but some people use browsers based on principle. For example, they might support FOSS and thus wouldn't use Safari or IE because of its closed-source status.

That aside, what is the Acid Test and why is it so important? The last time I heard about an Acid test was when my buddy ended up dehydrated in the Mississippi woods with his pants on his head.

Re:Whom is the better?

[grumbel]

Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser.

The trouble is that this isn't an isolated problem, it affects pretty much all webpages that have a non-trivial layout, some fall apart later then others and some have worse errors then other, but pretty much all of fall apart when you increase the font enough, the Firefox homepage, Slashdot, just to name a few. In fact I don't even know if you can achieve some of those effects (round corners, gradients as background in boxes, etc.) in a way that doesn't break when the font size changes a lot.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Zarel]

I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.

Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom function when it will make all images look like crap? Bilinear filtering isn't all that complicated, yet Firefox doesn't have it and goes the ugliest possible route in making an image larger. I just don't get how such a basic feature is still not in there after over a decade.

Firefox 3, Opera, and IE all zoom without changing the layout, and reviewers praised them for adding those features. Firefox 3 does bilinear filtering on image scaling, and has been stable for 6 months now.

It's kind of ridiculous to say something "still isn't there" when it's been in the latest stable for six months.

Re:Whom is the better?

[f1vlad]

I didn't notice slowness, but also I haven't really tried. I just used it to test how a number of websites look as well as to make them look okay on ie8 :). One of the things I liked on IE8 is how tabs are grouped by colour. I heard IE8 has some sort of inspector (aka firebug) but it's not obvious how to use it at first. I haven't had time but intend to discover how to use it on IE8.

Re:Whom is the better?

[grumbel]

Firefox 3 does bilinear filtering on image scaling

Not on Linux, which of course makes the zooming rather useless, since it would causes all webpages to look rather ugly.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I fine IE8 breaks on a lot os stuff compared to beta versions of Chrome for example.

Re:Whom is the better?

[darthdavid]

The acid test uses pure html to render an extremely complicated page and compares the way your browser does it to the way an ideal test browser does it and assigns a ranking to how well it does that. Honestly I prefer the pants on head test myself...

Re:Whom is the better?

[uhlume]

Parent is very nearly correct: the Acid test series purposely test CSS edge cases in order to catch rendering bugs. The CSS they use to do so looks very little like any CSS you would be likely to find in a production web site. That doesn't invalidate Acid, but it should be recognized that the tests are essentially synthetic, and any results should be evaluated with that understanding.

Re:Whom is the better?

[SleepingWaterBear]

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.

So, to paraphrase, you're saying: There aren't any clear winners, Opera is the best at following web standards, Firefox is popular and feature rich, and IE doesn't suck quite as much as it used to.

There may be no clear winner, but if this is the best someone can say about IE, it sounds as if there's a clear loser.

Re:Whom is the better?

[shutdown -p now]

If you like tons of features and don't mind a heavy footprint, get firefox + plugins.

And if you do mind the heavy footprint, get Opera ;)

Re:Whom is the better?

[thetoadwarrior]

Yes you can achieve these effects and you can do without ruining the page upon changing the font.

A lot of site problems are down to a lack of skill or laziness.

Re:Whom is the better?

[Your.Master]

Press F12 (same hotkey as firebug).

Re:Whom is the better?

[f1vlad]

Thanks for the tip! Just tried, works quite well. That should make my workflow much more pleasant soon.

Opera?

[TubeSteak]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9122719&intsrc=news_ts_head
Opera 10 alpha aces Acid3 browser test
Newest preview boosts browsing performance by 30%, claims Norwegian company

Re:Opera?

[Repossessed]

No, Opera, and every other browser, failed Acid 3*, then the developers made changes to try and pass the test, without any work at all in fixing the underlying problems that caused it to fail. If you want to be impressive, work on passing Acid 4.

*Opera was the least shitty iirc.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

it does exactly 'ace' the test, it does pass tho..

Failed 0 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 112ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 4 attempts (less than perfect).
Total elapsed time: 1.27s

Re:Opera?

[blai]

Hope they get an interface speed increase in Linux (Ubuntu) too. It's been plagued for quite some time now: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-789894.html, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/174209, and http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-426722.html

galeon?

[Janek Kozicki]

Yet still galeon is my favorite browser. I have like 200 tabs in it, while in opera I have just about 30 tabs and in firefox just one window with 8 tabs...

Re:galeon?

[exley]

Yet still galeon is my favorite browser. I have like 200 tabs in it, while in opera I have just about 30 tabs...

If you like tabs, you may be interested in another feature a lot of browsers have. Depending on the browser, it goes by various names -- "bookmarks," "favorites," et al. Check it out sometime!

Re:galeon?

[TheRaven64]

Bookmarks come from the same school of thought that says you should quit applications. They are a work around for the fact that your operating system can't handle resources properly and that your browser doesn't handler persistence properly.

Re:galeon?

[hvm2hvm]

Still, unless galeon has some really smart way of handling tabs (and by a quick screenshot check it doesn't) I don't think having 200 tabs open is going to be easy to manage (by the user). The first poster probably thought about bookmarks or sites he visited but said 'tabs'.

Re:galeon?

[houghi]

So you like Galeon better because you have 200 tabs in it? Put 500 in Opera and you will like that better, I assume.

Re:galeon?

[dollargonzo]

A bookmark is just a reference to something you've looked at and might be interested in in the future. Your browsing experience would become far too cluttered if everything was always kept open. As much as the desktop paradigm has limits to its power as an analogy, I think it's applicable in this situation. You don't keep 20 books lying open at the pages you care about-- you put stickies on them and put them away-- to keep clutter manageable. the same goes for browser bookmarks. even if the contents of the page for each bookmark was stored with it (which is essentially what you are suggesting), there is a difference between what you happen to be looking at at a particular moment (which may or may not be important), and a bookmark, which signifies a certain level of importance. in your scheme, everything is equally important. either way, bookmarks are a useful concept, regardless of resources.

Re:galeon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! People scoff at me for keeping all 20 games I have installed open and running at the same time, but they don't understand that savepoints are just a workaround for OSes which can't handle resources properly.

Re:galeon?

[hairyfeet]

Which brings up why I love the way things are today: choice. I remember the bad old days when it was either IE or if you wanted to suffer the really crappy Netscape edition(4 IIRC) and now we all have so many more choices. In my family alone we have Seamonkey for my mom(who refuses to surf without her "blue bird"), we have Kmeleon for my sister(who loves its layout and speed), we have Opera for my oldest boy (who says anything after version 5 sucks and refuses to update) and we have Flock for the youngest(who loves social sites) and finally Firefox for me,because of Adblock+ and Noscript,along with FEBE and iMacros.

So IMHO it doesn't really matter who is the "best" as long as we have plenty of others to choose from. Because I can tell you that the way it was before really sucked the big wet titty. But thanks to free software and plenty of choices my family can each have their own browser that suits their personality and can stay the hell out of mine, which is always a good thing. That and the fact that I can have IE removed from the program list and blocked at the firewall and nobody in my family seems to care. So if any of the designers of the above browsers read this: Thank you. You have made my family very happy and made it easier for me to keep the peace. So thanks.

Re:galeon?

[MikeBabcock]

Actually, if you think about how Microsoft designed their VM system (mapping an app's VM to its EXE file), or how the Apple Newton Soup system worked, it would be possible in many cases to allow all software to be essentially in stasis at the same time, mapped into actual RAM as necessary.

Of course, in practice, it won't work because people like using more software than they have VM to handle such a situation, and software likes to believe its always running and deserves cycles.

Re:galeon?

[MikeBabcock]

The Firefox "smart bookmarks" feature is quite nice too, but honestly, I want to tag my own bookmarks, and share or not share them with others (del.icio.us) explicitly, and not have my browser 'helpfully' remember all the annoying pop-unders a Poker site happens to display.

See, I have additional knowledge the computer doesn't have -- I know what's important, and what's not. Now granted, bookmarking should be MUCH simpler; I'd love a simple true/false box of some form on each tab allowing me to mark it as 'yeah I like this' with no other interface involved.

Re:galeon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I'd rather not have 200 tabs open at any given time, even if they didn't affect my system at all.

Re:galeon?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I have like 200 tabs in it,

The slightest bit bored at work, are we?

Re:galeon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just use the word 'persistence' while talking about the internet?

Oh dear...

_AC

Re:galeon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you, therefore, search through your 200 tabs as you can with bookmarks etc?

Re:galeon?

[lekikui]

While not the GP, I can in my browser.

I'm using conkeror, and C-x b gives me iswitchb-mode to change buffers, with searching through, tab completion, etc. Easiest way to do it ever.

Re:galeon?

[Janek Kozicki]

are you serious? I have right now 11 galeon windows with about 15 tabs in each.

Of course I'm using bookmarks, galeon has a nice feature "bookmark all tabs in a window into subfolder...". And I'm using galeon more than firefox or opera, just because it's damn so good at handling hundreds of tabs open. And still uses less memory than firefox 3.0.3 with only 15 tabs open.

Re:galeon?

[hvm2hvm]

I did say "unless galeon has some really smart way of handling tabs". I guess it does have some nice features (I only looked at a screenshot, I was more interested on how a window with 200 tabs opened would look). OTOH, why do you need 11 galeon windows open? Do you really work with all 150+ tabs at the same time? If you spend 2minutes on each tab at a time, it takes 5 hours to go through all of them. Why not just bookmark, close, and open back?

Re:galeon?

[Janek Kozicki]

Well it's just a matter of browsing habits. I tend to keep good stuff forever until I finally am in the mood to go through it (and read/hack/implement/apprecieate/whatever) then bookmark it and close. So they usually wait few months. If I bookmarked it immediately and closed I'd never remember to go back to it, because I have just so many goddamn bookmarks. Although really very well organized I think :) Bookmarks are to remember old useful stuff. Non-closed tabs are to remember new useful stuff.

And of course those 11 windows are very well spatially organized across virtual viewports on my desktop (I prefer viewports to workspaces, because they are 2D spatial). With each viewport having its name depenging on the general topic it is for. But only 7 of my 40 viewports actually have galeon windows on them. Other are full of xterms, gvims and other junk (40 viewports? crazy? I prefer viewports to minimizing windows. In fact I never minimize any window). Uptime measured in months is a way to go :) I never reached a year, yet, due to kernel upgrades. Of course galeon restores whole session very nicely after restart or crash (previous version of flashplayer was causing crashes, but it's fine now ;).

Small correction - with 150 tabs (in 11 windows) galeon 2.0.6 uses 290MB of RAM, while firefox 3.0.3 with 8 tabs uses 160MB of RAM. Though, galeon is still the winner here :)

Re:galeon?

[Janek Kozicki]

I'm using opera too :) I have 3 opera windows open with roughly 30 tabs total. And it fares quite good. But it doesn't have the features which made me to use galeon, so I'm not going to switch.

BTW: switch? Switch? I'm using all those three browsers (galeon 150 - 200 tabs, 290MB of RAM; opera 30 tabs, 160 MB of RAM; firefox 8 tabs, 160 MB of RAM) for different kind of stuff. It's just another way to organize things on my desktop. Sometimes I fire up dillo, seamonkey, konqueror or epiphany if I need even more "browsing categories" :) (and I tell you that epiphany is the worst browser ;)

Re:galeon?

[VeNoM0619]

Strange... my Firefox has 11 tabs open and only uses 142mb... 3.0.4 each tab is maybe 0.5mb as I open new ones. So 75mb + 142mb = 217mb for 160 tabs...

What add-ons and functionality does galeon have besides tabs...? I think no script is the main reason I use Firefox. I would prefer functionality over resource management.

Acid

[ojintoad]

I judge all my browsers on Acid; my scorecard is a a blur of dinosaurs dancing, blue e's laughing, and JZW laughing at me. And I'm eating a lot of delicious delicacies.

Re:Acid

[alexandreracine]

Mmmm, I think you should stop using the web!

Google Chrome browser

[Dareth]

Reasons not to download it: ...you can't get the Google Toolbar for it.

Surely this should have been in the "Reasons to download it" it section!

Re:Google Chrome browser

[denis-The-menace]

IMO, if it becomes part of Chrome and you cannot remove it from Chrome, it become a reason NOT to use it.

Re:Google Chrome browser

[MicktheMech]

Is anyone expecting Chrome to ever leave beta?

Re:Google Chrome browser

[WingCmdr]

Is anyone expecting Google to ever leave beta?

Re:Google Chrome browser

[Hal_Porter]

Yeah it's mentioned in Revelations, just after the seas boil and and the cities burn.

Re:Google Chrome browser

[Anonymous Coward]

yes.. in 2012 or so they should release the first RC

uhh

[Anonymous Coward]

what about linux? We need pr0n too.

Well..

[Creepy Crawler]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Konqueror: Too bad I mainly run Gnome and dont usually run KDE, but where's this browser? It traditionally has ran rather well for me, but Im not sure of the recent features.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot and Opera is far superior to them all.

Re:Well..

[Creepy Crawler]

And I also posted this post so long ago. And I still stand by it.

Re:Well..

[comicbookman333]

I agree I especially like the coloring tabs and morning coffee add-ons. Chrome is a close second but really is too simple.

Re:Well..

[EvanED]

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.

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.

Re:Well..

[Donniedarkness]

I like Firefox, but I disagree with the comment that it is "the only real browser right now". I much prefer Opera (which you apparrently didn't know still existed), and Safari (which you refuse to try) isn't that bad either. I WOULD rank Safari under Firefox, but Opera's download manager, speed-dial, and the fact that it seems a lot less bloated definately meets my needs better than Firefox does (Disclaimer: I have, and regularly use, both).

Re:Well..

[Creepy Crawler]

When I said that (under a previous account), it was not free. It was ad-ware or pay-ware.

Even now, I have a problem with possible sources of spyware as evidenced by Opera as a form of ad revenue. I also have questions about firefox, but Iceweasel fixes those concerns.

Re:Well..

[Bert64]

Is there any other webkit browser for linux aside from konqueror? I don't want the burden of all the kde libraries when i won't use them for anything else...

Re:Well..

[VJ42]

And I also posted this post so long ago. And I still stand by it.

I don't use Opera myself, but you are aware that it hasn't had ads for quite a long time now. You don't have to buy it any more, so that old post is almost meaningless in today's context.

Re:Well..

[Bert64]

Firefox doesn't compile on BSD anymore? What happened? Isn't it in ports?

Re:Well..

[akincisor]

Try arora http://code.google.com/p/arora/

It needs the Qt4 libs but has no KDE dependencies.

Re:Well..

[Zarel]

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

Re:Well..

[filterban]

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.

iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.

Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.

Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

It works just as well on FreeBSD as on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Typing this very comment from Firefox 3 on a FreeBSD machine (no it's not dead yet).

Re:Well..

[rm999]

iTunes and Quicktime are horrendous on Windows; they noticeably slow my computer down after installation - even when they aren't running!

There are much leaner and quicker alternatives to both, so I refuse to install them on my Windows computers.

Re:Well..

[EvanED]

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.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

Havent looked at them since their software didnt fit on a floppy.

Since when Firefox can be squeezed info a floppy? And why whould you do that in our 21th century anyway? --- Hard troller!

Re:Well..

[Mad Merlin]

Konqueror isn't a Webkit browser, it's a KHTML browser (and Webkit was forked from KHTML).

Re:Well..

[Creepy Crawler]

Exactly. I've used a mac (dont want to buy one though) and have used Safari and Itunes on Windows and Mac. The Mac itunes is well done, but Windows one is cobbled together as some sort of crashing software heap.

On Linux (the only host OS installed - ubuntu) I use Amarok as it only categorizes my 100K + songs. When I ran Windows on a prior laptop and installed Itunes, it crashed on a subset of my library.

Re:Well..

[MaxiMouse]

Midori uses webkit. It's still alpha, but is usable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(browser) It uses GTK+ 2, so it shouldn't have any KDE dependencies.

Re:Well..

[flappinbooger]

I tried chrome along with everyone else when it came out and I thought it was "good" but missed one critical thing- plugins. Specifically, I don't want to run a new browser without foxmarks. I have the same set of bookmarks whichever computer I'm on. No going back now.

Foxmarks and ABP are two critical plugins that chrome needs to either duplicate or be compatible with. I imagine google would allow something like ABP since their ads are text based.... hmmmm....

Re:Well..

[A12m0v]

You are quite wrong on Chrome, Opera and Safari. I suggest you give them another try.
Latest beta of Chrome is very stable, and has more features than earlier betas.
Safari on Windows was highly unstable, until version 3.1, then it became on par with any Windows browser in terms of stability.
Opera is still around, has some very unique features, and it is my second favorite browser.

And one more thing, you can install Konqueror on Gnome, give it a try, the latest version has improved compatibility with the most websites out there.

Re:Well..

[TheRaven64]

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

Really? Does 3.0.4 not count as 'since the 1.x branch'? If you don't like 3.x, 2.0.0.18 is also in ports.

Re:Well..

[cleatsupkeep]

Epiphany can use WebKit to render, and runs well in Gnome.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

http://www.mactips.org/archives/2005/12/01/switch-between-safari-tabs-with-keyboard/

http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

No idea about GreaseMonkey though. I've never bothered playing with it in FireFox.

Re:Well..

[abigor]

Adblock for Safari: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I dunno what the fuck you are talking about. every version has worked just fine here on my FreeBSD machine. perhaps you just cant admin your system for shit?

Re:Well..

[Shados]

iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows

iTunes and Quicktime, along with the major anti-virus (McAfee, Norton), are the source of a large chunk of the complains you'll get about Windows. The difference in the stability of the OS and the experience are major before and after. Quicktime STILL tries to hijack PNG rendering in IE, and it totally ignores when you tell it to return things to normal (the option is THERE, it just ignores it). iTunes install some system drivers (that it seriously shouldn't need) that sometimes can make the file explorer slower or even unstable (not as bad in Vista, quite bad in XP). Lots of conflicts (which you may or may not see depending on which software you use), and all around makes things slower in general, and do some stuff really weird.

They're easily in the top 20 worse pieces of Windows software currently (that is, when compared to current versions, and ignoring stuff from the past), up there with Norton, AOL, etc. They work fine on Mac as far as I can tell, but on Windows...ewww. Just ewww. Sometimes I wonder if Apple does it on purpose... since now virtually EVERYONE has itune installed... helps gain arguments to make em switch to MacOSX

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there's a Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] to switch tabs, as well as arrows, but they're both really awkward compared to Ctrl+Tab, which is what I'm used to on every other browser. Incidentally, it's one of the few Safari key combinations I can't change.

I'm kind of amused your mactips.org link found out the functionality by asking on the MacRumors forums. In fact, the person seems not to understand Cmd+Shift+[, and complains that Cmd+Shift doesn't do anything. The combination is given in Safari Preferences, which you'd think would be straightforward enough. Then again, I have a habit of messing around with the preferences of every program I use - among other things, it's a good way to discover functionality.

It also still lacks the ability to open new tabs next to current, which I need.

Re:Well..

[Creepy Crawler]

Are you a moron, or can you not read?

I know Opera still makes their browser, but I thought it was relegated to do-little platforms like the Nintendo DS, the Wii and some smartphones..

If you do count the DS, I use opera at least once a month.. As I only really bought the cartridge for the memory expansion.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

There are much leaner and quicker alternatives to both, so I refuse to install them on my Windows computers.

to quote grease: tell me more tell me more ...

Re:Well..

[Donniedarkness]

Sorry that I was unclear. Where I said "that you apparrently didn't know still existed", I was referring to its existance on the PC. I -can- read, however I only read half as well on Tuesdays and Fridays. My writing, however, is equally bad on every day of the week.

Also, I wouldn't really make judgements based upon the DS/Wii/Smartphone versions of Opera (I've used the Opera-based browser on my phone and the Wii, but I have never seen the DS version).

Give it a try--- a couple suggestions, though. First, get rid of that god-awful "tools" thing that is next to the tab, and the retarded "status bar" at the bottom.

Re:Well..

[francisstp]

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.

Ctrl+F works just fine, in addition to "." and "/".

Re:Well..

[Zarel]

Ctrl+F works just fine, in addition to "." and "/".

It's not inline find (i.e. it doesn't find while you type). Compare it to the Ctrl+F functionality of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or IE.

Re:Well..

[shutdown -p now]

Ephiphany/WebKit.

Re:Well..

[sdhoigt]

I think your real point should've stuck to the fact that current versions of Firefox do not run on FreeBSD. The other points you make are the same fluff we've been hearing about Opera for years.

I few months back I put Firefox on the sidelines and used Opera for a good solid month. It is a nice browser on many levels (fast, clean UI, etc.), and I would probably use it all the time and be happy if it weren't for Firefox/Firebug/NoScript. I know you can block JS, etc. from running per site w/Opera, but No Script gives you a granularity that Opera just doesn't have. And Firebug is just ridiculously awesome; nothing comes close.

Just my two quid.
SD

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you consider basic features? Nightlies even have GreaseMonkey support.

AdBlock

Thats the only reason I never use Chrome.

Re:Well..

[JonLatane]

Safari doesn't have Ctrl-Tab because you switch between tabs using Cmd-Shift-[ and Cmd-Shift-].

Re:Well..

[hkmwbz]

"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."

Still around, and doubled their user base from 2006 to 2008. 53% revenue increase from the desktop version last quarter. 1/4 of Opera's total revenue comes from the desktop browser.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's not inline find (i.e. it doesn't find while you type).

It most certainly does - I just tested it. And, if you like that it's bound to Ctrl-F in Firefox , just remap Opera's keyboard settings. You could swap the functionality of Ctrl-F and /, for example.

Make a duplicate copy of the default Opera keyboard layout, and play around with the duplicate, so that you have a way back if you mess up badly :)

Most of people's gripes about Opera seem to fall under the "It doesn't work the same as Firefox" category, which pretty much translates to "I don't want to have to learn a new way to do something". And, certainly that's fine - but it's not a valid criticism of Opera.

Re:Well..

[Zarel]

I probably should've clarified that, but I realize that. I often criticize browsers for not having the standard keyboard shortcuts - for instance, IE is the only browser that doesn't go to the location bar with Ctrl+L - it's Alt+D instead, and that throws me off.

Same with Safari's Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] - not only is it different from every other browser, but it's also a really awkward key combination that can't be remapped (strange, too, since most other key combinations can be remapped just fine, and their Windows version even uses Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab).

Re:Opera CSS3 let-down

[Tumbleweed]

As I mentioned in another posting regarding Opera 10 alpha:

No border-radius? *sniff*

Is it specified in some stupid way like Mozilla & Webkit do it?

Still no replies, so I dunno...that's not promising. I wants me some border-radius, multiple background image, and border image support! (among other things) A small subset of the major CSS3 features would go a LONG way.

Lynx?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Lynx on my 19.2kbps modem ever since the Intarweb revolution kicked me off AOL.
Why haven't they mentioned the new kick-ass beta of Lynx? I hear it supports Unicode text!
Runs great on DOS 6.22

Arachne is another great DOS web browser...

Speedy Chrome

[jmichaelg]

I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.

Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[jfengel]

I'm not a big fan of add-ons either, but I find some sort of anti-flashiness blocker absolutely essential. No flash, no animated gifs, no dancing javascriptiness unless I say it should go.

Get that into Chrome and I'm all over it. I keep it around for certain pages that I know don't suck but which need a performance boost.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[hattig]

The good thing with Chrome is that you can be browsing after booting up windows, whilst all the other crap and startup software is still loading in the background that somehow gets in the way of Firefox starting up.

In addition I don't spend all my day moving bookmarks around and so on. So Chrome is quite a reasonable browser if you don't need all the other options that are available in Firefox. OTOH I'm in Firefox on my home systems :) And they're not Windows :D

Re:Speedy Chrome

[GiMP]

"My OS is slow and broken, so thats why I think Chrome is better than Firefox."

Huh? I don't get it. While I can see why this is a good thing, how often are you rebooting your computer for this to really matter? Oh, and it shouldn't matter even then, because your OS shouldn't be so broken that this would even be a consideration!

Re:Speedy Chrome

[Colonel Korn]

I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.

Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.

On a 2.5 year old $600 box running Vista, Firefox loads along with my home page (a my yahoo page with a lot of stuff going on) within 2 seconds after a cold boot. You're really short on RAM, running a computer from the 90s, or you need to reinstall Firefox. The browser itself opens with no detectable lag (meaning no more than 150 ms or so) after I run it, and the content fully loads 1-1.5 seconds later.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh it will come sooner or later.
I hope the add-ons API won't take that long to build up.

But it will be available at one point, that is for sure.
(Adblock referenced already on their initial goals)

I tend to stick to sites i trust in Chrome, those i know won't be filled with crap.
Then use Firefox for NoScripting sites i don't trust that much.

I personally don't care for the flash blocker stuff.
I just generally block any flash abusers and gif abusers forever. I'm just a heartless bastard, but not as heartless as them!
I don't want to hear some silly smiley telling me to go away, WHY DON'T YOU GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME! OH GOD THE NIGHTMARES, THEY'RE EVERYWHERE!

Re:Speedy Chrome

[hattig]

1) Chrome brings up a working web browser in under a couple of seconds.

2) The OS is Windows, and it's got all the slow software that work requires on it. It takes ages to get to an operational desktop. Firefox takes 30 seconds to launch if other things are launching after a reboot. Chrome therefore solves a massive problem.

3) Are you calling Linux a non-slow and non-broken OS? I've rebooted this Linux box 10 times in the past 3 hours getting compiz to work on it. By your metrics that means the OS is totally broken. Anyway Firefox launches quicker on a 1.2GHz VIA C7 in a netbook on Linux than it does on a dual core 2GHz Core 2 Duo in Windows XP.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I've rebooted this Linux box 10 times in the past 3 hours getting compiz to work on it.

That's you problem. Don't use compiz.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[GiMP]

I wasn't specifically referring to the vendor OS, as much as I was the OS configuration. However, I have found that regardless of the configuration, Windows seems to have bigger problems with this out of the box (even with a clean installation). Yet, Linux certainly isn't immune, its customizable enough that it can be as bad as you want it to be.

Re:Speedy Chrome

[hattig]

I did get it working eventually - had to switch the via_chrome9.ko with one appropriate for the kernel I was using, that the VIA installer had switched out. Cheers, VIA!

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

With my crystal ball... I see... more CSS headaches.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[iknowcss]

Oh no :(

Slashdot Disagree Posting

[Atraxen]

I disagree with the summary. These days, having a ton of browsers in beta/prerelease probably means they're all buggy, but they'll be released as betas anyway, and if you'll pardon the pun, we may never see polish on the Chrome! But, perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic - we may not have to suffer through the betas if the rolling blackouts take down our computers.

prerelease

[buchner.johannes]

I can't remember another time when there were so many Web browsers in prerelease form â" 2009 should be a really, really good year for final browser versions.

There are no final version any more. There is only beta. The software lifecycle ends with beta!

Re:prerelease

[Jeoh]

I am Beta and Beta, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

Opera 5

[TypoNAM]

I remember back in 2002 when I bought the Linux version of Opera 5 because at the time Mozilla was a bloated resource whore and I needed a fast graphical web browser on a poor old 233MHz Pentium 2 box. I'm not exactly sure how much I paid for it, some where around $20 bucks I believe. I think still got the email receipt when I purchased it in one of my ancient email archives. I'll have to find it and post it sometime.

what the deuce?

[jps25]

Overall, how promising is it? Iâ(TM)d never argue that improving support for Web standards or souping up performance is insignificant, but overall, it looks like this is Opera 10.0 not because itâ(TM)s a huge deal but because the last version was 9.6. In other words, itâ(TM)s only .4 of a great big upgrade. If that.

What the hell is "it's only .4 of a great big upgrade" supposed to mean?
What about Opera 10 using a totally different engine? And since when are we back on measuring software by its version number?
The rest of the article is just as pitiful, if not entirely wrong.
Opera's mail client could always delete old mail, the new thing here is that it can automatically delete after n days.

OWB always missing from the list??

[AmigaHeretic]

These article always seem to miss OWB for AmigaOS 4.1.

http://strohmayer.org/owb/

It gets 100/100 on ACID3, check the screen shots on the site.

Geez!! :-)

Re:OWB always missing from the list??

[Bert64]

It got 100/100, but still failed the test on a number of small points...
http://amigaowb.googlepages.com/screenshot2.png

Re:OWB always missing from the list??

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets 100/100 on ACID3, check the screen shots on the site.

Sure, it SHOWS "100/100", but it doesn't pass. The output is not exact "pixel for pixel" the same as the reference rendering.

Re:OWB always missing from the list??

[Anonymous Coward]

So I look to the right side of that page, and I notice it uses WebKit. Just a minor detail, sure. :P

Re:OWB always missing from the list??

[Anonymous Coward]

So what I think I hear you saying is that it's a lot damn closer than MS has gotten with a multi million dollar budget?

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:Opera can block adverts if you want it to

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/

You are welcome.

Re:Opera can block adverts if you want it to

[shutdown -p now]

You don't need to manually edit urlfilter.ini to block ads in Opera!

Ever since version 9.0 (I think), you just right-click anywhere on the page and choose "Block Context" from the menu, then click on all ads on the page you want to be gone, and click "Save". That's it.

Or, if you want to edit the list directly, it's in Tools -> Preferences -> Content -> Blocked Content.

The main remaining use for urlfilter.ini - which is still there - is to get premade blacklists from other sources.

Re:Opera can block adverts if you want it to

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you have no idea how easy it is. Right click, hit Block Content..., then click on all the pictures you never want to see again. No files, no blocklists, you just... click the ads, and they go away...

Re:Opera can block adverts if you want it to

[AnalPerfume]

They don't exactly make a song and dance about being able to block adverts in Opera do they? I didn't know about the block content function, I guess that means having to see stuff before it can be blocked. I had to search for a how-to on ad blocking and that urlfilter.ini was the only one I found.

Maybe a little redesign by the Opera people would get them more market share from people who won't surf without an ad-blocker. Perhaps calling it an ad-blocker would be a start, even though it can do more. As a new user looking for that type of option, having came from Firefox where it's added as an optional addon, the plugins for Opera are kinda laughable; and not any mention of an ad-blocker.

That cross platform guide is great, although the .Opera folder is all I needed personally and found it fine. Knowing you can right click and block content is also useful for the stuff the filer let's past. It'll be handy to be able to add Google to the list too.

Yeah, Right

[Nom du Keyboard]

2009 should be a really, really good year for final browser versions.

Yeah, lots and lots of versions as they fix lots and lots of bugs due to everyone trying to beat everyone else to market.

on the scorecard?

[MrKaos]

What do other folks see on the scorecard?

Bit's of my brain as I try to deal with cross browser Javascript incompatibilities. I think it will go something like this...

aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - BOOOOM

fago82

[Anonymous Coward]

comprehensive may do, may( not over to y3t another OpenBSD, as the

Firefox will soon make up the difference

[Joce640k]

...by removing all the crap from web pages.

All that flash+advertising isn't free to download.

for the ignorant anti-microsoft bloviating:

[circletimessquare]

onhashchange

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/03/ie8-html5-and-a/

msie8 is the first to implement this event. don't know what that is? ajax is the most important technological development in browsers in recent history (invented with microsoft's xmlhttprequest object, btw). however, ajax breaks history and bookmarking (can't go forward/ back, can't bookmark deep into an ajax session)

a way around this has been to hijack the hash part of anchor links, since they stay on the same page, but create a history. initially, this hack didn't work for msie, because msie didn't consider hash changes to be part of the browser's history, invoking valid msie hatred (msie7 fixed that oversight). but now, from the back of the class, msie jumps to the front of the class with onhashchange, becoming the programmer's best friend

currently, there is no way to tell when a browser's anchor hash link changes other than with extremly ugly, resource wasting kludges like putting a "heartbeat" on the web page (every 200 milliseconds, see if the url's hash link has changed... vomit). however, here's a recent history emulator without the odious heartbeat kludge (but no bookmarking functionality):

http://www.zachleat.com/web/2008/08/21/onhashchange-without-setinterval/

but now, msie, with onhashchange, makes ajax programming for history/ bookmarking elegant... for the very first time. there's plenty of reasons to hate microsoft folks, but hate them for actual real technical reasons

want one? ok: there's msie8's bullshit compatibility button. since msie8 tries so hard to be compliant for once, it is faced with backwards compatibility issues for rendering sites that only really work on msie now

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx

ugggh

so the lesson is: by all means, hate microsoft and msie. but make sure your hate is grounded in reality, not ignorant bias which i see in a lot of comments here

Here it is

[Anonymous Coward]

If you never use Flash (Youtube/most videos), use Chrome. For whatever reason, Flash sucks in Chrome. Hard. Chrome is super fast, though, and is not a memory pig.

If you want the ability to customize website behaviour, use Firefox. Someone, somewhere has created a Greasemonkey script or an extension to create the behaviour you want.

If you want sane defaults and the stuff Firefox will have in two years, choose Opera. It's fast, and it has stuff you have to jump through hoops to get in Firefox. Don't believe me? Tell me when Mozilla offers this:
http://www.opera.com/link/

Firefox will offer this, just in two years. Trust me, it's how it has gone down in the past.

If you're on Windows, you've got IE by default. I would never recommend using it unless you have to. It's a virus vector like no other, it's a bloated pig, and the only upside is the tight integration with the OS. If you aren't programming, it's really not worth looking at.

PS: If you are at all worried about viruses, there is one solution that will keep you free of viruses while you browse.

Grab Virtualbox and a Linux ISO. Both Puppy linux and DSL are good options. Boot a virtual machine off the ISO, and surf inside the virtual machine. There you go: no viruses, ever while you surf. The nice thing about Virtualbox is that you can suspend the virtual machine, so you don't have to wait for it to reboot.

My 2 cents.
Slade

Re:Here it is

[TCM]

Tell me when Mozilla offers this:
http://www.opera.com/link/

Great! What could possibly go wrong with uploading one's complete bookmarks, history and search queries to some corporate entity?

Re:Opera CSS3 let-down

[Mystra_x64]

It's still an alpha. Personally, I think there would be border-radius support, but who knows.

dear firefox:

[circletimessquare]

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)

Can I do disable-output-escaping?

This is actually pretty close to the question above. And in short, no. Disabling output escaping requires us to add a parsing step to our output generation, which we don't. In most cases, there are pretty easy workarounds. The only use cases we have seen are bad XML or bad XSLT. And RSS feeds. The latter is pretty much the only issue to us, and we're sorry that we can't support it. But mixing parsing with XSLT is brittle and we rather not support d-o-e than either crash or be even slower.

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

Re:dear firefox:

[Anonymous Coward]

I migrated to Opera over this issue. It made me look at the Firefox history. I started with Phoenix back then, it was simply a simple browser. But over the years it got bloated and annoying. I also despise the Google advertisement. Maybe I will switch to Midori once it is more polished, but Firefox? Never again.

Re:dear firefox:

[Crosma]

Ugh.

You don't need to disable output escaping unless you want to allow poorly-formed HTML. If the input is well-formed XHTML, you can just recurse through the elements, outputting them with their attributes. You'll end up with the same output without the need to disable output escaping. Hey presto! That's what I always do. You can work around escaping issues if you're not lazy.

Mozilla are correct that supporting arbitrary HTML through disable-output-escaping would require an additional parse of the output mark-up. Badgering them into it is telling them to sacrifice performance for your laziness.

disable-output-escaping is for non-HTML/XML output solutions. Like, if you are trying to output plain text. You should not be trying to do that in a web browser.

Also, innerHTML is still read-only in Firefox in true XHTML situations. However, you can write an XHTML snippet to the DOM by generating an XHTML fragment using XSLT and appending it as a child (no silly recursive functions necessary). Much cleaner and more reliable. Do that instead!

Yes, IE only generates strings from XSLT in JavaScript, but you can always fall back to innerHTML in that situation, rather than using it all of the time.

Re:dear firefox:

[BZ]

I think you pretty much completely misunderstood the FAQ. Right now XSLT in Firefox transforms one DOM into another. There is no output happening, so no output escaping relevant.

What you want is to transform one DOM into another, then serialize the second DOM, without escaping things, then reparse it into a third DOM, different from the second DOM (because you put things like '' in your text nodes and asked for them to not be escaped).

That's a fine desire, but it adds a lot of complications and the use cases really just aren't that compelling.

Now in XSLT engines that have to create text anyway (e.g. IE, because the XML DOM and the browser DOM are completely different things implemented by different applications in that case, and are totally incompatible, so the output of the XML library _has_ to get serialized), there is no additional price to pay for supporting disable-output-escaping on top of their _existing_ serialization mechanism. So they do.

Won't Work with Hundreds of Favorite Sites.

[Erris]

Really. Have they even managed Acid Test 2 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.

Stop modding comments with browser summaries up

[Bearhouse]

And just read the artcile, which is OK, and certainly better than most of the user-submitted comments with their own insightful (ahem) judgements.

Ah yes, I know this is /. and no I'm not new here...

Mind you, nothing in the article that most people here will not already know... /end grumpy rant

Would've Been Much More Interesting. . .

[igibo]

. . .if the story was actually about what I read it as the first time:

A Cheat Sheet To All the Browser BEATS

You know you're all a bunch of fly-skimmers. Admit it!

Mmmm. . .DROP!

the cheat sheet is missing way too much

[Anonymous Coward]

If the article is to mention reasons in favor and against using each given browser, it should also review fringe browsers. Midori (an XFCE browser) is in beta stage and if you're going to compare Safari and Chrome (both webkit browsers), Midori ought to be thrown into the equation.

It would also be neat to compare extensions wealth (especially its relevance to the latest versions), seeing as top available extensions are almost as relevant as the browser itself.

Re:Opera CSS3 let-down

[Korin43]

Isn't CSS 3 not officially out yet? I think that's why mozilla and webkit have weird ways to do it.

Re:Opera CSS3 let-down

[Tumbleweed]

Isn't CSS 3 not officially out yet? I think that's why mozilla and webkit have weird ways to do it.

I believe border-radius has been in the CSS3 spec since the working draft from 2002. Should be time to standardize on 'border-radius' instead of 'moz-border-radius' or at least alias it to -moz-border-radius or something. As it is, one has to use -moz-border-radius and repeat with -webkit-border-radius to get it working in both, plus they each do individual corner specifications differently. Very irritating, but not as irritating as browsers that don't support the functionality at all.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k93/chrishorgen/Funnay/facepalm.jpg

Prerelease Forever

[Doc Ruby]

For most of human history, all browsers were in prerelease. Until 1995, only a few weren't in prerelease, like www and w3.

In fact, almost all browsers are still in prerelease. As they always are, except momentarily when they are released.

And this isn't just pedantry. All these browsers have the low quality that prerelease versions of software used to have before browsers were released, in the mid 1990s. They've lowered the quality of released software of all types down to what rarely would have been released.

Stagnation?

[actionbastard]

"...largely stagnant in recent history."

Whereinthefuck have you been for the last five years?

Of course there is.

[uhlume]

I know you're trolling, but: http://www.ieaddons.com/. (Mostly crap, but then, so is https://addons.mozilla.org/.)

Even better: http://www.bhelpuri.net/Trixie/. Trixie enables user scripts (ala Greasemonkey) in IE.

Chrome built-in stealth

[a whoabot]

Firefox has stealther, but its an add-on and so obvious that you've installed it to look at porn. (Obviously you could always set and reset privacy settings everytime, but that could be a pain)

But Chrome has a stealth feature built in, so you're not a fiend just for having it. Although you're still a fiend. But a fiend with some shame at least!

Webkit nightlies

[Cochonou]

You can download Webkit nightlies for Mac OS X and Windows here, and you do not have to be a developer to do so. They will come with the latest version availiable of the Safari shell, which is right now 3.2.1.

MOD PARENT DOWN, SIGNATURE TROLL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you.

As long as they all work with Gator....

[Tomsk70]

....after all, what would we do without the original and best unasked-for app?

Microsoft won't keep up

[FreeFull]

I predict a massive speedup in javascript execution in most camps... except for the Microsoft camp. I also predict that the browsers will be more streamline than ever... except for IE.

oh, i see you share their arrogance

[circletimessquare]

so i write a comment board. someone wants to put < > & " ' &lt; &gt; &amp; &quot; &apos; in their comments. rather than just disable-output-escaping, now i have to (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString the content, and then tediously work through all of the markup, then turn it back into a node tree

in javascript. or on the server. everytime i want to display the fucking content. special, for firefox. not opera, not safari, not chrome, not msie. those browsers have seen the light, why haven't you?

but noooo.. every time i want to use disable-output-escaping, i'm just a bad programmer, right?

fucking bullshit you arrogant fuck: IT IS THE MAJORITY OF CASES where it is perfectly necessary and important and appropriate to use disable-output-escaping. remember innerHTML? every time you use that, you're just a hack, right?

because assholes like you lack the imagination to consider real world programming tasks, outside of your holier-than-thou ivory tower mental straightjacket of how the world should behave, rather than how it actually DOES behave. there is the universe of programming tasks before you as determined by your stunted ability to understand reality, then there is the actual and real universe of programming tasks real programmers face. ever hear of RSS? jesus christ you arrogant fuck

but don't mind me, i'm obviously just some sort of low level hack. the need for diable-output-escaping is purely imaginary if you are good programmer. right?

fucking ignorant, arrogant ivory tower prick

Re:oh, i see you share their arrogance

[Crosma]

On RSS, it's not my fault that people use CDATA instead of namespaces.

Re:oh, i see you share their arrogance

[Mr. Slippery]

so i write a comment board. someone wants to put < &gt...in their comments. rather than just disable-output-escaping, now i have to (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString the content, and then tediously work through all of the markup, then turn it back into a node tree in javascript. or on the server.

And why, in the name of all that's holy, would you even think of trying to do this in Javascript in the browser? Filter special characters on the server side.

Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[Erris]

"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

It's funny how no other browsers need this tag and how much work this simple tag requires. I'm afraid the simple tag did not work. Most of these so called "optimized" sites already use browser identification and should have already implemented M$'s quirk tag in their IE8 specific code.

Who the hell gave you an "informative" modpoint for spouting the M$ party line like that? Two minutes of thought with the most rudimentary of knowledge proves your explanation implausible.

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[f1vlad]

One microsoft official, from IE engineering team, has claimed (in an unofficial interview that can be found on the web) that IE8 is the more standards-compliant than Firefox or Webkit engine for instance. That is why it breaks sites that aren't usually anticipated to be broken and that is why they have that readiness page or developers.

So let's assume that is true (and probably is). I would have a tremendous respect to IE8 effort if only they've chosen to adopt crucial CSS features:

- ???-border-radius (WHY!?)

- opacity

- RGBA

- :last-child (WHY!?)

and more .

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how no other browsers need this tag and how much work this simple tag requires. I'm afraid the simple tag did not work. Most of these so called "optimized" sites already use browser identification and should have already implemented M$'s quirk tag in their IE8 specific code.

Someone please tell me this "Erris" account is some sort of joke bot unleashed by Taco for our collective amusement? Please?

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[Nurgled]

Microsoft has stated a number of times (I don't have any citations to hand; sorry) that their priority for IE8 is good support for CSS2 and other "current" standards; they've explicitly declared CSS3 (where most if not all of the things you listed are from) as being out of scope for this release.

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[GNUChop]

Other M$ people claim that OOXML has a purpose, ActiveX is better than java, C# is "cross platform" and so on and so forth . How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes before you realize M$'s efforts at standardization are one lie after another?

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I don't have to tell you, but just in case, 'GNUChop' is the same person ('Erris') you replied to. They're all accounts of the same person (twitter). He has like 30 accounts now or something like that.

Re:Ignorance is believing what M$ has to say.

[dedazo]

ROFLMAO, now you're replying to Slashdot admins with your sockpuppets!

its your fault

[circletimessquare]

for not understanding that messiness is an aspect of dealing with real life constraints, not simply bad code

why?

[circletimessquare]

what's wrong with client side transformations?

except for firefox, that is

that doesn't make any sense

[circletimessquare]

when i request a web page, what i get is serialized content. firefox is processing that stream into a nodetree. nothing you can possibly say gets around the obvious fact that processing serialized content into a nodetree is not only a normal part of a browser's functions, it is THE function of a browser

and now you are telling me that a browser can't do this essential function under some sort of mitigating circumstance?

sorry, i'm not sold. it's like you are telling me you can program a stoplight to play chess, but you can't make it glow red

Re:that doesn't make any sense

[BZ]

I'm saying that XSLT transforms a DOM into a DOM. To get the behavior you want you'd then have to serialize that DOM. The parsing afterwards is not that much of a problem, of course.

That said, the whole point is that it would significantly slow down the process by inserting extra steps for all XSLT users, to benefit the small minority who want disable-output-escaping. That hasn't seemed like a good tradeoff in the past, and still doesn't now.

"small minority"

[circletimessquare]

for values of "small minority" that are actually the "large majority"

d-o-e is the STATUS QUO

(smacks forehead)

you know, we could be having the exact same conversation right now about innerHTML

can you describe to me why firefox caved on innerHTML?

if you can articulte that reason, then you've just articulated the SAME EXACT FUCKING REASON firefox should cave on d-o-e

or not

and i will continue to hate firefox every time i have to browser sniff (as ugly as that is) and write extra javascript to serialize the content, and replace(/</gi,"").replace(/"/gi,"\"").replace(/'/gi,"\'").replace(/&/gi,"&"), and turn back into a nodetree

what was that you were saying about significantly slowing down the process by inserting extra steps?

seriously, do you know what people do with fucking browsers? what kind of content is transferred? opera, msie, safari, chrome... they all seem to know. ITS NOT THE VIRTUOUS MODEL YOU BELIEVE IT TO BE. you really want to stick with this ivory tower approach about how people should process content rather than how they actually HAVE to?

you really can't imagine that the majority of content that has to pass through xslt processing has escaped content? that really is an alien concept to you?

Re:"small minority"

[BZ]

> for values of "small minority" that are actually the "large majority"

Honestly, the bug volume doesn't support that claim.

> can you describe to me why firefox caved on innerHTML?

Sure. There was a very large fraction of websites using it, and it offered significant authoring benefits over the clumsy DOM API (ease of use, and more importantly vastly better performance).

Note that not all of those considerations apply to disable-output-escaping. In particular, it would degrade performance, and its actual usage on the web is minuscule. Heck, client-side XSLT usage in general is minuscule.

> what was that you were saying about significantly slowing down the process by inserting
> extra steps?

Hey, if you're the one who wants extra steps to happen and you pay the performance cost... that's ok. If you want everyone else to pay performance costs for things you want and they don't, then some careful thinking about tradeoffs needs to happen.

> seriously, do you know what people do with fucking browsers? what kind of content is
> transferred?

Yeah. I actually do. They browse HTML, and XSLT is not involved. To a first approximation, of course. We could remove our XSLT support tomorrow, and fewer pages would break than broke when we stopped allowing them to read the full filepath from a file input....

Re:"small minority"

[BZ]

Just to make it clear, we'd like to add support for disable-output-escaping. It's not like the bug is marked wontfix or invalid or anything. However it needs to be done in such a way that there is no performance impact for stylesheets that don't use it, it needs to be done in a way that doesn't cause security holes due to script executing during the reparse, and it's a low priority.

If someone really wants this and implements within the above constraints (and the usual code review rules), we'll take the patch. The source _is_ open last I checked.

two essential miscalculations

[circletimessquare]

1. escaped content is rare
2. client side xslt support is marginal

1. ask anyone who has dabbled in xslt in the browser, and they find out very quickly that firefox's pledge to not support d-o-e is an instant stumbling block, because your essential error is not seeing that serving and transforming escaped content is regular and usual, not weird and strange. and then you find out firefox's reason for not supporting d-o-e is willfull, and you get very angry at firefox, because firefox doesn't understand what programmers want and need, and where the future is

the idea is to keep firefox on top of all other browsers, and the choice made on d-o-e puts firefox at the back of the pack on a crucial function. your point about an extra processing step costing time is 100% true, but it is not the esoteric odd support that you suppose it is. making people using xslt in the browser without any need for d-o-e grind more cycles is PREFERABLE, because their use cases are the MINORITY of use cases. right now you are actually penalizing the MAJORITY of xslt implementers because the need for d-o-e represents the MAJORITY of use cases. this is your essential misjudgment, that not supporting d-o-e speeds up browsing for the majority of users. no, it slows it down

2. "We could remove our XSLT support tomorrow, and fewer pages would break than broke when we stopped allowing them to read the full filepath from a file input...."

absolutely true. except, ironically, for exactly the same high minded appeal to elegant concise code that moves firefox to not support d-o-e, xslt client side support is the future

there once was a time when i could have said "We could remove our CSS support tomorrow, and fewer pages would break than broke when we stopped allowing them to read the full filepath from a file input...."

not true anymore, for all of the obvious observations about style and content you already understand, obvious observations that also apply 100% to XSLT support on the client, in some better future we are inexorably moving towards

so why does firefox support XSLT at all? because firefox wants to remain relevant and on top of the marketplace. someday, someone is going to support XSLT 2.0 in the browser too, and, just as you note "We could remove our XSLT 2.0 support tomorrow, and fewer pages would break than broke when we stopped allowing them to read the full filepath from a file input...."

but again, that's not the point, because the point is where are browsers going in terms of the next intelligent step in the browser model?

now make believe it is 1998

"what is this css thing i keep hearing about?"

{enter search term "CSS" in altavista, read a geocities page on the topic...}

"oh! i get it! let me try... hmmm, netscape supports this css whizzbang gadget just fine. but fucking msie 4.0... hmmm... it says here that msie is refusing to support :hover and other pseudoclasses because they say this adds an extra processing step in their css processing model, and very few people support css, and very few people need pseudoclasses, because if you write 'good' code you handle dynamic page tweaks with javascript, that's what javascript is for, and so you don't need css pseudoclasses (sniff, sniff... looks down nose)"

{face turns purple with rage}

Re:two essential miscalculations

[BZ]

1) There is no pledge to not support d-o-e. Please read my other comment in this thread.
2) I'm not saying we want to remove XSLT. Please do go read what I actually said, and what
      it was a response to. I think you're overstating the XSLT case, but I certainly agree
      that it's a very useful technology in many situations.
3) Patches for d-o-e support accepted, as I said in the other comment. But it's not a high
      priority to spend time on compared to a number of other issues that have much broader
      impact. If it's a high priority for someone, then they can take action on it, of course.

dude

[circletimessquare]

its like shortly before wed 2.0, and you're saying xmlhttprequest doesn't need to support both get and post

show some imagination of where the future is going

a further abstraction, like css represented

thats xslt in the browser

mark my words here, you'll see ;-)