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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?
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
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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).
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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.
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!
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!
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).
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
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.
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.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.
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