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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think he is afraid that so many people will post it as a reply to the FP (or something further up), by the time mods get to his post they will be tired of the suggestion.
They also didnt bother to test how fast each browser rendered html either, which is just as important, if not more so than how fast it can render javascript.
I disagree. HTML always renders fast enough. Slowdowns are from scripts and ads.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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.
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.
I disagree- I run with javascript OFF and some horribly buggy html saturates my CPU for tens of seconds while my poor browser tries to figure it out. Ebay pages- look at the code someday. Even slashdot- lots of html errors. I have my theories about it all...
I know you're joking, but were you seriously expecting a solid statement anyway?
I can't remember the last time I saw a scathing review of... pretty much anything. Companies have reviewers so scared of lawsuits for libel and their publishers have become such milksops, afraid they might alienate an advertiser, that nobody will say anything is bad anymore. There are only varying degrees of "good" now.
That's a really cool idea, dude :-)
Post the code somewhere!