The Seven Hidden Browsers In the Windows Ballot

Barence writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft started rolling out a Windows update within the European Union, giving every Internet Explorer user the option to switch browsers. As well as the five big names, anyone who scrolls the ballot window to the right will find seven further browsers, none of which is exactly a household name. There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area. But what are these unknown browsers actually like? To find out, seven PC Pro staff installed a browser each, used it exclusively for a day, and ran a variety of tests. The browser-by-browser verdict on the hidden seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."

Comments

IE engine with a new GUI

[TorKlingberg]

Many of these are the IE rendering engine wrapped in a new user interface. They appeared in the days when IE development was dead and provided useful things like tabs and popup blocking, while staying compatible with the IE6-only websites that used to be everywhere.

Maxthon for one is very popular in China because it supports ActiveX which many Chinese banking websites rely on (bleh), and it is much nicer to use than IE6. I am not sure how it compares to IE8 though.

Re:IE engine with a new GUI

[Eskarel]

To be honest, there are currently only 4 rendering engines worth talking about, I believe their used to be five(I think that Konqueror used to have it's own rendering engine though I was never a KDE man, so I may be wrong) so looking at a list of 12 you're going to see a fair amount of overlap. Add in the fact that to the best of my knowledge only Opera uses Presto and the overlap becomes even more extreme.

IE has caused me huge amounts of dramas and still continues to do so, it is probably the one thing I will never forgive Microsoft for, but what else would you have put in the other 7 slots(8 if you want to make sure that a rendering engine is only represented once). Once you've put in the big 5 and a few of the moderately tolerable gecko ports what have you got left. Especially since they have to run on Windows. I suppose one of those slots could have gone to seamonkey, but as a browser it's identical to firefox so there's not much point. I don't know who decided that the number had to be 12, but with that large a number you're really bound to have some pretty awful stuff in there. Rendering engines are complex beasts, which is why there are really only 4 of them. Javascript engines are even more complex which is why there are only 4 of them(I know that Safari and Chrome have different Javascript engines even though they have the same rendering engine and I'm counting those, but IE's is so godawful it doesn't count). It takes a large team of programmers years to come up with something halfway decent, and that requires serious amounts of money or trying to snag open source developers when most of the people with the right skill set are already likely to be working on Gecko or Webkit.

Missed the point

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? This is about remedying anti-competitive practices. "Our product is better than theirs so they should be locked out of the market" is not a valid defense to an anti-trust lawsuit.

Testing?

[natehoy]

From TFA:

we installed each browser on the same Windows 7 computer and tested their speed in the SunSpider benchmark, their memory usage with the Google home page open in a single tab, and their startup times – measured from the moment we clicked the icon to the browser window appearing.

Expectation for any sort of consistency in the testing parameters has been set to zero. But, at least we get to see which browsers are most-liked and offer a nice user experience, right?

Then we asked seven members of the PC Pro team to abandon their favoured browser and switch to one of these alternatives. To say they were delighted to do so would be a lie: there was gnashing of teeth, wailing and screaming pleas for mercy. All these fell on deaf ears. We provide full reviews of each browser in the Reviews section, but for a helpful summary click through to the next page.

OK, expectation of any sort of positive review of any browser has been set to zero.

The only consolation is that the popularity of the top 12 browsers is re-examined every six months.

Which means PCPro will have a steady ad revenue from writing meaningless reviews cobbled from the barest minimum of testing where the browser used by the least whiny of the random-picked team gets top marks just because that person hates change the least.

In fact, maybe a PC Pro browser is exactly what the EU needs

If it's written with the same attention and care to detail as the articles, the first installed instance of it will crash the Internet and bring civilization to a smoking ruin.

Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE

[petermgreen]

I don't think it's up to MS. They just include the browsers the EU tells them to. The EU supposedly base the lists on "market share" though I haven't seen any reference as to exactly what they mean by that.

What manner of testing is this?

[clone53421]

They ran it through one Javascript test (SunSpider), so that’s at least something, I suppose.

Their other “benchmarks” are woefully lacking in the usefulness department. They gave the startup time (in seconds)... I’m much more interested in how quickly pages load. They gave the memory requirement at startup (with Google loaded as the homepage)... I’m much more interested in how much memory it’s consumed after a few hours of browsing.

Not to mention that certain browsers (*cough* IE) take way longer to give you a usable browser than they do to just display the window. That’s just the same trick of showing your desktop while Windows finishes loading; it looks like it accomplished something, but you still can’t click anything yet.

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[Anonymous Coward]

Come up with one (single) instance of Google misusing customer data and I will henceforth refer to myself as a fool and stop using Google altogether. So will millions of others, I assume.

BTW, you know that Chrome's callback features can be disabled in the options menu, right? And if my memory serves, IE and Firefox also call home (less extensively).

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[clone53421]

That’s weird... it specifically said that users who already didn’t use IE as their default browser weren’t supposed to see the choices screen.

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[grapeape]

For most its not a matter of if Google has played nice with their customer data so far, its the fact that they have all of it to start with. Some people are just uncomfortable with google having access to so much about them and see it as potentailly orwellian, if its not already.

  Knows where you are.
  Has access to your e-mail.
  Has access to your medical records.
  Stores your word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.
  Facilitates chat, voice and video conversations, as well as text messages.
  Tracks what you search for and view on the Web.
  Keeps track of your upcoming appointments.
  Knows your contacts.
  Knows what you read.
  Knows what you buy.

And of course the tin-foil hat types will argue, how will we know if they are abusing it, they are in charge of the search engines most use to find out and we know they have no problems with censorship.

As for me I could care less at the moment, nothing to hide...but its still an encroachment on freedom and privacy, its not that hard to understand why some are concerned.