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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.
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.