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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."
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.
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
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?
...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.
You are joking, right?
Which HTML standard, 4.x or 5.x which css standard, 2.0, 1.0 , which DOM version etc. etc. etc. said in my best Charley Chan voice
These "standards" are a moving target and just when you think you have it right, some fucking pencil neck gets a hair up his ass and decides this one little thing needs to be changed, it is no small miracle that web even works at all.
There are so many kludges in HTML/CSS/XHTML - pick a flavor of the month that it simply boggles the mind. Then there are semantic arguments that this is a "structure" element, not a "display" element and there for it should not be affected by CSS when the whole god damned point of CSS was to be able to change the look and feel of a page without changing the HTML building blocks.
I would like to take most of then WW3 committee out and shoot them because far to many of them have their heads firmly up their ass so far that can;t tell shit from shine-ola.
Those standard's as the exist need to be junked, take what is good about the them, and re-build it into something that approaches logical, rather then what we have no which borders on lunacy.
If you were to take what currently exists and write the specs up with all the shit that has been crowbar'd into them and present it as a set of coherent specifications you would be laughed out of any standards body and told to go and bring something back that worked.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I agree, web standards are painfully difficult to implement. Just think about what it would take. It starts with 3 languages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) that all have different syntax. Even if you'd pull that off, you'd end up with an unusable browser, because it wouldn't be compatible with all the broken HTML out there. And then you need plugins, or the kids won't be able to use their dear Youtube. By the time you have all that done, the standards will have evolved. Meanwhile, meticulously implementing the standards gains you very little, because actual web pages don't use them, or only use them to a very limited extent. The reason? Many people who make web pages don't know any better. Or the tools they use don't know any better. And even those who do are limited by what Microsoft Internet Explorer supports.
In the face of all that, I'm happy to see that we're still _trying_ to be standards-compliant and pushing for others to do the same. Standards are the only way to interoperability. Interoperability is what gives us freedom to use the software we prefer.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
The circumstances that make NECESSARY to kick the crap out of a suspect.
Circumcision is child abuse.
HTML always renders fast enough
I wrote a program a few years back that used a genetic algorithm to generate HTML. First I wanted to just see if it would crash browsers (which wasn't all that hard for the most part), but one of the things I used to score "genes" when there was no crash was the rendering time. Naturally enough, this led to long rendering times - even on relatively short (20K was the usual limit) files. Firefox once took almost 24 hours(!) to render a single such page, but the amazing thing was that it did not crash in the process. Perhaps I should dust that off again and try now.
Or, more generally, on the web itself. For example, see the new Mozilla Labs project, Bespin.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Dude you got it about half right. As someone who lived through it and actually jumped from Netscape to IE let me clue you in on a little secret-Netscape 4 sucked. I mean really sucked. I mean buggy as hell, dammit why won't this stupid thing work, about as fun as a kick in the nuts kind of suck. So while IE being bundled helped them amongst the clueless, honestly even those that WANTED a choice back then didn't really have one. Because as much as you hate IE the simple fact is Netscape nuked the fridge with Netscape 4 and simply never recovered.
And you also seem to forget that back then Netscape was as bad about using proprietary tag crap as IE. So really there was no good guys and bad guys in that first browser war. Just two companies trying to lock in as many customers as they could and one of them nuked themselves by putting out a giant POS alpha quality browser and running off all their customers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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).