A Cheat Sheet To All the Browser Betas

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

Comments

Re: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: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:Google Chrome browser

[WingCmdr]

Is anyone expecting Google to ever leave beta?

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: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.