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9 Browsers Compared For Speed and Features
notthatwillsmith writes "Counting public betas and release candidates, there are a whopping nine different web browsers out today with enough market share to be considered mainstream. Maximum PC explains the differences between the browsers, future and present, so that you can make a more informed decision about the primary tool you use to browse the web. From the rendering engines used to the features that set the different browsers apart, this is a comprehensive, blow-by-blow battle between Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6, Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1, IE 8, Safari 4, and Opera 10."
And their conclusion is...
There is no conclusion?
FTA: "In our testing, the answer is no. However, we did notice a difference among browsers, just not as pronounced as the benchmarks indicate. Safari 4 and, to our surprise, Internet Explorer 8 felt the snappiest, though neither version of Firefox ever felt slow by comparison."
They need to get someone with a backbone to say one is definitely better than the other, so that I can tell them that they are wrong.
shouldn't v1 be in the current section, and the latest nightly be in upcoming?
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
So many engines ...
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
How could they miss Seamonkey?
I won't use a 'browser' that doesn't have an integrated WYSIWYG html composer. It's in the tradition of Netscape for browsers to also be composers. In the early days of the WWW, the vision was that people would be creators and communicators, not just 'browsers' in the spirit of cows on a feedlot. Blogs have replaced 'personal home pages' (PHP anybody???) but not completely. And the integrated Editor isn't just for creating sites. With Seamonkey, you can cut and paste off web pages to your local system in a fashion far more powerful than anything from Microsoft. Firefox is a gelded browser.
Internet standards are a known entity and have been so for a long time. Can somebody tell me why programmers of open source browsers decide not to code to standards? Why?
Why then should we expect Microsoft to code to standards?
http://www.maximumpc.com/print/5491
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Am I the only one who noticed this story tagged with "lynx"? Sure. We all know that no browser renders pages faster and with less resource overhead than lynx, but it wasn't one of the browsers being compared.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
This statement from page 4 of TFA bugs me:
It may be true that Apple started the Webkit project, but they did so by forking the KHTML codebase. Saying that Apple "gave birth" to WebKit is stretching the truth. It implies that they created it from scratch, when they didn't. Many other people put in a tremendous amount of work to create the foundations upon which WebKit was built.
A nitpick, perhaps. But it bugs me that the contributions of the KHTML team are being forgotten.
This idea of people making their own sites is what gave us myspace and the like. So sorry, but for the good of humanity and to stop your idea you must be shot. It is for the best.
Also, this function has been taken over by wysiwyg javascript editors in the website itself which is a reason the next bullet will go to the guy who thought this up.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, according to the website, I should be using IE7, since it is the fastest browser. I can see myself using it, instead of this pokey firefox 3.0x. In fact, I suspect I'll type this poast much faster under IE7.
Um, anyone know where the Linux version of IE7 is?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
He is simply stating the truth. Webkit is a fork of an existing project. Apple did NOT create webkit from scratch. Of course, that is not a bad thing, in fact it is one of the goals of opensource that you can take existing projects and modify them for your own needs BUT it is usually considered nice if you mention this. Apple sure as hell ain't advertising it loudly and sadly a LOT of people on the net seem perfectly happy to ignore it.
It also shows that Apple doesn't exactly return the favor because Safari is not available for Linux. So they used opensource code but do not contribute in the full spirit of opensource.
No law that says they should, but it is important to remember that the only difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that Bill was succesful in being a monopoly. If the 'success' had been reversed things wouldn't be all that different and perhaps even worse (who do you think is in bed with the media companies more. Bill "MSN" Gates or Steve "Disney" Jobs? Though call)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Their opening graphic uses the old style Firefox logo - odd that it was the first thing I noticed... Odd that they'd test 3.1 and use the icon from 1.0.
It is a shame they did not do Firefox on Linux, Firefox on windows XP and Firefox on windows Vista, all on the same hardware. It would have been interesting to see how the underlying OS affects the performance of the browser. Then further compare IE on Vista vs Firefox on Ubuntu.
With netbooks final end user experience is driven by the application on top of an OS and the interface that is used access and control that application.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Can somebody tell me why programmers of open source browsers decide not to code to standards? Why?
The standards can be a bitch. Not just a bitch, but a major bitch. Standards at their best are forward looking and interesting because they are stated without much thought as to how they would actually be implemented and part of the problem is figuring out how too implement them.
In a perfect world, yes, you could go and code something completely to a standard, but a turn of a phrase could blow a design. Then you have to backtrack, re-implement, and repeat the process. You could go for years without a release and one thing that the world shows is that someone who implements most of the standards and delivers on time is better than the guy who is perfect with them. Indeed, quite often, shipping "enough" of a standard is quite often cause for a midcourse correction in the standard itself.
HTML isn't the only culprit here, but it stands out to end users because it is as prevalent as it is comparatively complex. C++ itself relies very heavily on standards and even with numerous holes to allow for vendor implementations, it took years to get good implementations of C++.
Why then should we expect Microsoft to code to standards?
The basic simplistic explanation is that Microsoft recruits what it feels are the best programmers from the best universities and has in the past been willing to invent some rather complicated products and forward looking designs. One asks Microsoft to comply with standards, because, if anyone could be able to, they would, and that, in some circles, is sort of thing a responsible leader of the computing community should do. They are members of these standards bodies, after all, and as such, -agreed- to them.
But, Microsoft is just as prey to the backtrack problem as anyone else, and having all those brains can sometimes mean that when they do have to backtrack, they have to do it spectacularly. That is, the degree to which you have to backtrack in a design tends to raise the costs of modifying your product significantly, and its likely that even they cannot resolve some issues in a timely fashion.
Of course, in the case of IE, they damn well could, but have chosen not to. For them IE is a problem. If they spend money on IE, they might well lose it all because the EU and other anti-trust bodies might well make them give it away or discontinue it or, something. And, until recently, IE has been "good enough for government work". But, with Firefox really coming on, and Google Chrome showing so much promise, now IE8 looks like Microsoft is to re-engage.
This is my sig.
Single page version
"For those who hate ads"
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
I'm absolutely fed up with Firefox, and no longer care about it's performance. I started out LOVING it back in the 0.9 beta days and still love the web developer extension and tabbed browsing (though that's become standard) but lately it's just been one issue after the other:
* Tired of opt-out upgrades. I don't like software that automatically updates itself or that blocks you from using the full functionality of old versions by, for example removing the ability to search for and add compatible plugins. Don't believe me? Try running firefox 1 and installing updates off the web. Good luck.
* Awesomebar is awful not awesome. I don't care if other people like it. I just want to be able to turn it off. As it stands the only way to get back an address bar that doesn't look like a circus and flash every bookmark up at any passer by is to install TWO extensions: oldbar to get rid of the look and hideunvisited to stop showing off every bookmark in your collection to anyone watching you use the browser.
* Firefox 3 includes "security" functionality (that thankfully can be turned off, ONCE YOU WORK OUT WHAT'S HAPPENING). Symptoms were that if I downloaded a file with firefox and tried to open it with IE, the images would be missing and none of the scripting would even come close to working. At first I thought it was an IE problem, but no. It turns out that each and every file being downloaded with firefox is being flagged as being in the Internet Zone by means of hidden file streams on the NTFS file system. This behaviour is turned off if browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is set to false, but it's set to true by default. Thanks for the headache, FF devs. I guess I could just not upgrade....except...err...for the point above.
* Somehow infected with pop-up window Spyware (Advertisemen) that only affects firefox cut and copy functionality and only when running as firefox.exe. (Renaming it was enough to work around the spyware. Of course the real solution was to get rid of the spyware itself, but this was one nasty bug to find). At first the FF devs were in denial and were less than friendly about the whole thing but have since included information on this spyware in the info files.
* The extensions are wonderful aren't they? But have you ever looked into coding an extension for FF? It's horrid horrid stuff....and then you'd be constantly having to change it to keep it up to date with the latest version since they constantly break backward compatibility. As you might have guessed by the tone of what I'm saying, as time has gone on I have wanted to bother with this less and less.
Only problem is I hate Chrome even more and there aren't many options, especially if you want something cross platform.
Go on, tag as flamebait or troll. If you really think I'm just saying these things to stir up trouble, you've got wax between your ears.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
From TFA, on Google Chrome:
All the navigation tabs -- Back, Forward, Refresh, and Home -- sit to the left of the Address bar.
All the navigation tabs-- except STOP! No other browser puts Stop and Reload on opposite sides of the screen like Chrome does. Unfortunately, Ben (Goodger?) always WontFixes bug reports on the issue. At this rate, the only hope is for someone to create a Stop-button extension, once that becomes possible.
In the meantime, is it true that nobody uses Stop nowadays, and thus don't care?
Take this post with a grain of salt, I'm fairly heavily skewed toward opera (and against safari, but that's irrelevant). Opera has many of the features that are being highlighted in other browsers, such as FF's Awesomebar thing, and the Accelerators of IE8. I don't think this was very well done, they ought to have had all the browsers shown to them by someone who was very familiar with them, and given a better features list. Also, they should be decisive, as many others have said.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
With all this talk about people giving up their computers for mobile devices, it would be nice to see a mobile device browser rundown. From what I have seen, most mobile browsers are atrocious.
For instance, Safari on the iPhone, which is a descendent of Konqueror, has no option to constrain text to the screen (just as Konq-e did not). There is no Firefox derivative for the mobile world. NetFront is ugly and slow and missing lots of character sets, but at least constrains text. PocketIE is so stupidly slow, memory inefficient, and painful to use it is hard to discuss without liberal use of expletives. Android's webkit browser is designed not to link to local URLs (ie: file:///).
That is only one criticism each, but a more appropriate figure would be much higher for each. The bugs in these browsers are sort of unbelievable. Even worse, unlike downloading from the net, these browsers all have a price. When one buys a mobile device, these browsers are included and part of the purchase price goes to these browsers. Why are the for-pay browsers worse than the free ones?
About the only mobile browser I would even say nice things about is Opera. Opera is missing some features I want, but considering the competition -- or lack thereof -- I cannot complain too much.
It is hard to believe that when everybody seems to believe that we are on the eve of the mobile computing revolution that there can be only one decent mobile browser to choose from. Further, it seems absurd that with all of this browser code floating around on the net, one cannot download and install any given mobile browser but must, instead, be stuck with a device vendor chosen browser for good or ill.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
...at:
Netscape's source was released in 1997. Firefox 1.0 was released at the end of 2004. During those 7 years, Internet Explorer 6 strangled innovation on the web. We're still far from free of its legacy.
If the writers of the article have such a poor sense of perspective on browser history, I'm not trusting their views on browsers now.
They list Chrome 1.0 as an upcoming release, but it has already been released and is no longer in better. Chrome 2.0 is already in development and easily accessible to anyone who uses the chrome dev-channel switcher utility.
no winner declared.
The dillo browser is getting pretty decent these days.
But then again I mostly use lynx on OpenBSD of course....
Firefox sucks. All that money they're making from
their embedded search engines should
be going to the user of the browser not to themselves.
I won't stop using firefox until there's one with at least comparable features to my firefox + addons. I have a very specific setup, weather, noscript, adblock, proxy button, etc. that might not be the fastest browser but it's so useful I can't live without it.
Nine is no where near whopping.
Netscape's source was released in 1997. Mozilla 1.0 was released in the middle of 200s. During those 5 years, Internet Explorer 6 strangled innovation on the web. We're still far from free of its legacy.
Also, I understand the history of the Mozilla project. I've been pedantic about their history here before.
Mozilla 1.0 was released in the middle of 2002.
How can you talk about the "early days of the WWW" without realizing that Netscape Communicator (which you obviously reference when mentioning that "people would be creators and communicators")and other in-browser editors were middle-age for the Internet?
Those days, to me, are when browsers really began to get too bloated.
And I'm still a few years from 30. I wonder what the 30 year-old geezers on here think of your comment.
Two Internet Explorer. Two FireFox. Two Safari. Two Opera. But zero Konqueror.
"What version of HTML did you write that page in dude?"
"It's version six AND seven man!"
"Whoa! Anybrowser!"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, Opera 9.6, Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1, IE 8, Safari 4, and Opera 10."
Man, it's almost as bad as the gaming industry. Nothing but sequels.
Firefox 3.1's support for the CSS @font-face rule. With this ability, web developers have the option of specifying web fonts that must be downloaded for their website to appear as they intended.
If you are not logged in to your machine as Administrator/root, then how will this work. Well - it can not ever work, which is good!! I don't want some application to change my system.
Same with Firefox's AutoUpdate "feature" - it assumes that you're logged in as Administrator/root. How else could Firefox update its program directory? Please correct me if I am wrong.
If there's anybody out there still surfing the web as Administrator/root, then ... well - I give up. Then it's your own fault if your system gets messed up.
Microsoft even recommends the Principle of Least Privilege for User Accounts in Windows XP. I wonder how many people know about this and actually use their computer according to these guidelines.
On Linux/Unix this is the first thing you learn - you only login as root when you need to do administrative work (and only then). Web surfing definitely does not fall into that category.
The next Firefox release will be called 3.5 not 3.1 according to Mozillalinks.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
Remember the browser wars, round 1? It seemed that everytime you turned around, there was a new version out with new features and new tags to learn. Features like VRML and javascript, CSS, a dizzying array of choices that seemed like it could go on forever.
That is, until MS killed the browser wars by bundling their browser and coming up with a browser that was 'good enough'. Innovation stalled almost completely. Webmasters, frustrated with the pain of developing cross-platform web sites, frequently bought the koolaid of the all MS dev stack.
The open, free Internet was, for a time, in danger.
But then the guys behind Mozilla, mostly funded by AOL who only used Mozilla to threaten MS in order to get an icon for the desktop, finally started to mature into something good.
And, though years in the making, the browser wars are suddenly back! Suddenly MS releases two versions of their browser rapid-fire, suddenly there's a reason to pay attention!
Just imagine where we'd be if there hadn't been that near-decade of stagnation in the middle? That's the price of the MS monopoly.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I can't believe lynx wasn't tested in the competition...
What about Konqueror, kazehakase and midori.
Most reviews don't get it and I'm sure a lot of people are mistaken about it, but even if Opera doesn't support "addons" they support a lot more than just adding widgets.
You can customize any and all Opera INI files. There is extensive resources about it. For a few examples, you can:
Of course the INI files are part of your profile so editing them won't affect other users. And I'm not even mentioning the per-site configuration.
Opera doesn't need addons IMHO. It's already really heavily configurable.
I understand some people can't do without AdBlock or a few other addons, so no need to mention it, we know you need it. But for the others there's more than enough functionality available through customization.
So performance is based on something which it is advised to disable for security reasons? Fuck all mention about the fact that Chrome eats RAM like it's gone out of fashion.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
"In a design document, Mozilla developers outlined plans to add extensions to Chrome sometime in the future."
And why the hell would that do that?
advert next to this article "Download Google Chrome"
When I first started building multi-OS compatible webpages, I decided I wanted them to be compatible with everything. That means...
What, no support for elinks or w3m-mode? :(
I'm not even... well, I'm not 100% joking. Sometimes I ssh to my university and use elinks to browse the web from there (for instance, when I need to come from a university computer to download articles from SpringerLink, or when my fucking ISP blocks the pirate bay and I want to read their blog about the trial, or download the audio recordings).
Safari was built as the browser for OS X, in Apple style with Apple philosophy from the beginning. Run Konqueror and Safari and look to their preferences, you will understand what I mean.
To have Safari on Linux (exact same Safari), you will need a lot of closed source binary frameworks from Apple. E.g. that CoverFlow thing, Top 10 sites animation are CoreAnimation tricks. What kind of feedback would Apple get if they did all the work on a OS running x.org, multiple flavors and multiple extensions and shipped Safari.app as binary on Linux? Not good I guess. The Linux market is not really suitable for a browser like Safari. It is like iPhone (and app store) vs. OpenMoko or Android.
As for credit? Safari family claimed to hit 10% and they wonder around with this signature: AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16
See the KHTML part?
You can do all of that and more in Opera:
weather (weather widget)
noscript (Switch off JavaScript and use 'site specific preferences' to enable per site)
adblock (Opera Content Blocker and/or urlfilter.ini)
proxy button (Opera custom buttons [Do a search, many people have created these already])
What's the point in including ads in your RSS feed if the link is dead by the time I click on it? Some piracy whistle blower offering a reward? Gee, nothing sketchy every appears here. What is this, Orwell's 1984? Has someone declared martial law and not told me? Oh, that's right, martial law has been in effect since Roosevelt, but no one has bothered to repeal it.
AdBlock? What about Opera's Content Blocker and urlfilter.ini?
Midori, for one. I got perfect score on Acid 1, 2, and 3 months, ago and I *think* that it was the first. I had a screenshot, but misplaced it. A more recent screeny here: http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/Midori_Acid3.png Can't remember Arora's score - I'm pretty sure it passes all three test as well.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Quote from the article:
Safari 4 makes better use of the Bookmarks toolbar, allowing you to not only add individual bookmarks, but category folders as well.
Do they mean they haven't noticed that Firefox 3.0.X can do the same (and if my memory isn't completely shot, so did v. 2)? Or were they just comparing to Safari 3?
Go figure.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
With Adobe Flash being so ubiquitous on the Web, it is important that your browser handles its flaws in a non-annoying manner.
When Flash misbehaves and locks up and/or crashes, Firefox freezes up completely. Meanwhile, in Chrome you can kill it via the Chrome task manager and continue browsing without having to restart the browser. This is why I use Chrome, and not Firefox.
I would have loved to see this article review how Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers handle Flash.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
Oops, I meant Missing category. Sorry!!
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
I'm sure absolutely nobody mentioned iCab here until now. The ones that invented ad-filtering 10 years ago (I said years). And, as I am to it, what about Amaya? THE W3C editor/browser, open-source, multiplatform, wysiwyg in the editor part? http://www.icab.de/ http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Herve S.
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
Nice list & style, works just as good as FF Adblock for blocking, somewhat better for hiding empty spaces.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Seems like an apropos article to throw tangential news at: the WebKit based Stainless (for Mac only, Leopard req.) introduced a completely new browser innovation yesterday, which IMHO is more important than raw speed:
From MacNN:
Version 0.5 of Stainless introduces the concept of "parallel sessions," which let users log into a single site with multiple simultaneous accounts. In accessing Gmail for example, three different inboxes can be loaded across three separate tabs. The content is further integrated into bookmarks, allowing several site logins to be loaded in short order.
Original article here.
You should got used to it by now...
Accidentaly, from the article I have the impression that they tested subjective performance using trivially small number of pages/tabs...
If they would do some heavy & long browsing (as in...weeks) Opera would wipe the floor with other contestants, excluding Chrome (well, I don't know about Safari)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'd upvote you for the Amaya ref if I had mod points :-) Also missing: Omniweb.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I know I shouldn't feed, but this popular freetard fairy tale has been witnessed so often to move into the realms of reality!
sudo mount --milk --sugar
There's your problem...
... everything isn't going to look identical across every platform ... a lot less stress if you can get your management and/or clients to understand and accept this as well.
To continue quoting you: There's your problem. People come to your site and go OH NO! This looks different! I mean, my wife insists on booting the machine to XP, b/c Firefox *looks* a little different on Linux/Gnome (although I put the Strata XP-lookalike theme on her FF). I try to tell her that's another couple of minutes wasted in rebooting, when she just wants to visit the bank's site to pay a bill. Not to mention the somewhat shorter time that I waste when I boot back to Linux.
Non-technical people tend to go apoplectic when their UI looks different, even when you try to explain, that in the new menu/dialog structure most of the tasks can be done with fewer clicks. All you have to do is look around and read what the menu says.
I know, beating a dead horse...
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
Finally! A comparison which not only checks every major browser out there, but also checks both the current and future versions. I was getting pretty tired of these "reviews" and "benchmarks" leaving out certain ones, or using certain beta versions of some and not of others. It wasn't very heavy on the actual speed benchmarks, but at least it was something.
That said, I have to say I'm disappointed in Opera. It used to be the fastest, but I don't know what happened with them lately. I've never been as satisfied ever since 9.5 hit. I've gradually shifted away from it handling my email so that I'm not as dependent on it, and have been using a toss-up between it and Chrome lately. I'm in Chrome as we speak, even. Once they have better Greasemonkey/UserJS support (currently it's pretty terrible in the trunk build), I may be fully on-board.
Seamonkey kicks ass, even just as a browser. It is blindingly fast compared to the others. It makes me happy.
If you've got a low-spec PC, try installing Puppy Linux on it (Seamonkey is the default browser) to give it a new lease of life.
And if you have a really crap spec machine, give Dillo a spin. You'll be amazed.
Squirrel!
The hell? This is Slashdot. How the hell was the parent post marked Troll for Windows bashing?
Isn't "off-topic" more accurate?
Silly moderators....
OK. Source code is here - I though I had it on sourceforge, but a search there didn't seem to work. It is written in java and an adaptation of something far older (trying to use grammars to generate music). Code is not as nice as I'd like, but it is not intended to be production quality - it is intended as a testbed for hackery and experimentation.
Unpack, cd down to the html directory (down a few levels) and run make. There are scripts (unix) to then try to run different browsers ("run-firefox" for instance).
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
I hear the Mr Benn sound then go out through the magic door. I usually have an adventure, then as if by magic, the shopkeeper appears and I return home with a souvenir of my day.
Squirrel!
"Firefox 3 includes "security" functionality .. This behaviour is turned off if browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is set to false"
.. have since included information on this spyware in the info files"
In Firefox 3, if a Windows user has an antivirus program installed, it is launched to scan files when they finish downloading. During testing of the feature, concerns about delays and double-scanning files surfaced. As a result, this preference -- controlling whether the virus scan is automatically triggered -- was created.
"Somehow infected with pop-up window Spyware (Advertisemen) that only affects firefox
What info and where?
I was using M-builds in late 1999 that were reasonably reliable. Many nightlies leading up to 1.0 were usable enough that I was installing them for the computer-clueless that I supported at that time. Just had to find a good one and test it first.
I'm not a fanboy of where Mozilla and its products have evolved, but I see nothing that compels me to change. I would never think of switching to Apple's Mail, for example, refused to use it when I worked for them (which is why I was often the only person that could open attachments). I like that it is simple and doesn't help me too much. The 2.0 builds are working pretty well right now, although the extensions are lagging.
Agree that development and adoption of Firefox took a long time and that IE 6's legacy on the internet resembles W's on the world at large.
"Fuck all mention about the fact that Chrome eats RAM like it's gone out of fashion"
NO, NO, NO, it's always Firefox that has the memory leak issues. Chrome clones certain features of the Gazelle browser OS that don't exist yet.
"Can somebody tell me why programmers of open source browsers decide not to code to standards?"
The real question should be why do programmers write web apps that display differently on differing browsers. Assuming this isn't willful sabotage unlike the case of MS making Hotmail not work on Opera. This was achieved by moving text 30 pixels to the left so as to make the text look all jagged.
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
http://www.w3.org/
"The standards can be a bitch"
How about testing your web app with different browsers, before foisting it on the world?
My only beef with this article is that in their final comparison chart as well as in their write up, they act like firefox doesn't have a privacy mode, so to speak. Since you can always clear it manually with tools>clear priate data now, or by setting it to do so automatically under edit>preferences>privacy>always clear my private data when I close firefox, I would argue that it does indeed have a privacy mode, even though it's not explicitly called that.
How about testing your web app with different browsers, before foisting it on the world?
Sure, if you are willing to pay for that! Bottom line is, everything costs money, and sometimes, you just gotta drop a browser to keep the whole thing under budget. I have many clients that are only willing to pay for IE compatibility. I do what I can to support Firefox and Chrome largely because I use them more, but at the end of the day, if push comes to shove, its dopey IE's way or the highway.
This is my sig.
The conclusion you can draw from this is that IE is far behind. IE 6 should have been among the tested browsers as it's among the most used in corporate installations. Mozilla Firefox is a good browser with the most features and among the fastest. A good and safe choice! When it has become the most used browser I may choose another browser though.
Per
Neat trick, thanks!
icab didnt invented ad block... i used junkbuster at least in 1997 IIRC and AdBuster in 1998
Higuita
24 hours (or even 24 seconds!) to render 20k of HTML should be considered a bug. Did you submit it to bugzilla? Does it still take a long time on a current version of Firefox?
The names for these Troll pieces make them truly brilliant. "Browser Wars" WOO!
Huhwa? Sorry, I wasn't listening.
I am not devoid of humor.
Dear Nerds, (this is a site for nerds as detailed in the title isn't it?)
I am someone who uses the browser around 12 hours a day for the last 10 years. Of course I have tried extensively avery browser. And I can't believe that Maxthon is not even considered in your ridiculous study.
I know that nerds and geeks don't consider Maxthon a browser since it is based on IE, but give me a break... we final users could't care less about that.
Maxthon is by far the best browser existing decades ahead of the others. First of all, it simply is the fastest in every sense. And what I firts want is speed. It opens in two seconds, loads pages and multiple tabs in seconds, closes in miliseconds, everything is just FAST.
Apart from it, it bring by default hundreds of functions that in other browsers don't exist or have to be oainfully and time-consumingly downloaded. In Firefox it is a nightmare to get them and restart every time you add something. It is true that Firefox has hundreds of add-ons, but trust me, I don't need or miss any of them in Maxthon. All the ones that I need and feel that are practical come witrh Maxthon by default. Everything.
Then we could speak about configuration flexibility. In Maxthon you can change every piece, every button, every bar, making it at your own taste. Who else has that?
Or we could talk about add blocking. Maxthon by default blocks absolutely every annoyance and add and allows to decide on minor annoyances. No one can beat it.
Anyway... I am just an extensive personal and professional user of browsers. I know nothing about web technology and software programming. Maxthon may be based on IE but IE is a prehistoric joke compared to Maxthon. My second option is Firefox, which I need ages to set up by dwnloading and configurating the extensions the way I need and the way it can do what Maxthon does. I ned to save all the extensions everytime and still the reisntallation of Firefox will force me to spend hours seeting them up to my preferences.
Opera, Chrome, Safari... please give me a break... they are pre-history, archaic stuff.
And so you are This comparative study is by definition a piece of crap as you only compare the big companies, not what we users know is better.