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The Features That Make Each Web Browser Unique
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a look at 13 promising features unique to one browser. From Chrome's support for SPDY, to IE9's emphasis on energy efficiency, to Firefox Sync, browser vendors are working hard to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. And while speed and HTML5 compatibility remain key in the battle of the Web browsers, unique features often point the way forward. 'Given the pace of browser updates these days, don't be surprised to find the best of the bunch being copied by competitors soon,' Wayner writes. 'After all, yesterday's browser bells and whistles are today's must-have features.'"
It made me find the actual article and that is apparently 4 pages.
Again thank you
Is IE9's touted energy efficiency really a feature that sets it apart from the other browsers? It really feels like Microsoft was reaching pretty hard when they released that data, much of which only showed that IE9 was only marginally more energy efficient on many of the tests than Firefox.
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Safari 5: Easy user agent alterations
While most modern web sites do not check for user agent, at least not to prevent access, there are a few that still are loyal to MS, so block non-IE browsers from accessing content. In a perfect world we could just all ignore these sites and let them fail, but unfortunately most of these sites are corporate and so much deal with them to keep our jobs. I was sad to discover that most browsers had removed this functionality, and that Safari was pretty much the only one that had it build in,
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
per usual. Opera Software innovates (tabs, spell-checking, syncing of bookmarks, turbo compression) and others copy.
>>>There was a time when Mozilla combined the email program with the browser, but it stopped this integration long ago.
No. Not really. Look at Mozilla SeaMonkey (direct descendent of Netscape Navigator/Communicator). It includes not just email, but also Usenet newsgroups, relay chat, and a composer.
>>>Safari 5: Easy user agent alterations
Opera has had this for years, allowing users to display sites as Internet Explorer or Firefox-compliant.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
And so the size of browsers increases, until they all become unusable bloatware.
So long as its reliable, easy to use and isn't full of security holes I doubt many people give a damn about their web browser. Can you imagine an entire article about the relative merits of ftp or telnet clients? All most people want is for their browser to render pages properly. End of. If a new standard comes out and web sites use it then yes, browser should support it. Otherwise, apart from the browser developers themselves and a few fanbois, does anyone really care?
The rest of the browsers lack decent plugins that can remake the whole browser experience. You can turn it into a ten foot browser for your living room or make it easy to use for a sysadmin with vimperator.
I love how Chrome is the browser that gets the credit for coming up with the multiprocess model within the browser. I know that history is also revisionist, but it was Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 that first demonstrated to the multiprocess model in March 2008, almost six months before Google's first public preview. I'm sure someone is going to point out that IE doesn't isolate per tab (and neither does Chrome necessarily), but the model is the same, as are many of the implementation details.
Where Chrome does take this to the next step is in attempting to process isolate plugins and extensions.
And Opera Mail is the quickest, easiest, stablest, safest and all-round lowest impact email client I've ever used. And that's coming from someone who's tried everything from Pegasus Mail through to the Mozilla horridness.
Search is instant-narrow, even over 8 years of email from multiple POP/IMAP accounts. Tag a message with a label, every similar message gets the label. Want emails with that label to appear in your inbox, or to be pushed out to a seperate "folder" or both? You can choose. Spam filter is fabulous and easy. Multiple account support without any hassle (literally a dropdown when sending, and multiple accounts / a combined inbox depending on your taste).
Pull all the attachments out (of an email, or a whole account, or your entire email collection) in one click. Instant sorting by date, subject, sender even with thousands of emails.
Seriously, when someone sticks Pidgin into Opera, I have everything I'll ever need. Hell, it even does integrated Bittorrent like any other download.
Firefox does it with plugins. Is it really that big a deal to go get a plugin to change the user agent?
No, but it's far easier when it's already built in.
Putting moderation advice in your
Disclaimer: I haven't used Opera 11.
Even though it's not an "official" Mozilla project, you can nonetheless continue to use an integrated web browser and email suite in the form of SeaMonkey -- it's been around for years and years. Hard to see anyone else make grand claims about email functionality.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Multiprocess was standard on early unix browsers - you opened a link in a new window it spawned a new process. It was only later that netscape switched to multithreaded presumably so the codebase was easier to port to Windows which as everyone knows has a piss poor process model and still can't even do fork() never mind sophisticated parent-child process interaction.
The correct phrasing of the meme should be "... called and left a message". It properly indicates the 1-way situation.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The Android version of Firefox on your phone can suck down all of the bookmarks, history, passwords, and even open tabs. Then when you're back at your desk, you can push back the changes you've made while you're typing on your phone.
And if you delete or edit a bookmark on on machine, firefox sync will replicate multiple copies! Except when it deletes them all, of course. Essentially its a write-only filesystem which occasionally truncates.
Every time I've tried it, FF sync has been an absolute nightmare. xmarks, on the other hand, actually works.
Finally I understand we must all bow to worship the mobile smartphone and ignore legacy platforms, such as everything else with a CPU in it. But... Is there anyone out there with access to ONLY one full sized machine? I've found the killer app for xmarks is syncing every machine I have access to, not just my "one PC" to my phone. Aside from the fact I have no smartphone nor use for one.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Before the Internet, there was a collection of nets, like Compuserve, Minitel, MSN, and AOL. Then the 'Inter' prefix was added by linking these nets altogether, and everyone was given the freedom to request information from any computer out there."
The Internet predates CompuServe, AOL, etc., and wasn't created by linking those walled-garden services together.
Thank you for linking to print page It made me find the actual article and that is apparently 4 pages.
This is interesting in an article about unique browser features. Maybe a better article would go through features rarely known about. Like in Safari you can click the "reader" button in the URL bar and it consolidates multi-page articles in to a single page including the images. There is a Firefox extension called "repagination" to do the same thing. Given how much I see people complaining about multi-page articles, it would have been nice for this article to have covered this.
Similarly, Safari and some Firefox plug-ins allow the user to grab the corner of text input boxes and resize them, which is an indispensable feature once you've used it, but was also overlooked in this article.
A manufacturer of mobile devices called, they want your "only obsolete PCs have that little RAM" joke ram.
Let's face it, browsers are very complex pieces of software, they have to implement numerous protocols, chase a moving target, attempt to deal sensibly with non-compliant input and provide a decent user experience. And the big names all do a pretty decent job for most people. None of them are perfect yet, though, and given the constantly changing nature of the game, its hard to forsee a time when they could become perfect. I feel quite a lot for the developers of browser software (being a developer myself), an audience of millions, many of whom have a deep-seated dislike of your product. If you met a developer of [the browser you like least] would you rant and rave at him, or just have a friendly chat? :-)
In this day and age, is it too much to ask that a web browser have a built-in spell checker for filling out web forms? IE still doesn't have one.
Amen to that!
People use a lot of web based applications these days. A spell checker (and spelling suggestions) built into the browser seems like a no-brainer. Why the IE team continues to neglect such an easy-to-implement but yet invaluable-to-the-user feature is mystifying.
As of version 9, IE is starting to get interesting again, but missing such basic features still means IE is an undesirable browser.
What do you think of the SPDY protocol, listed as Chrome's unique feature?
Even if it's faster, is it a good idea for the unity of the web Google to have come up with, and push this idea all on their own?
What would we think if M$ or Compu$erve had come up with their own protocol, to be accessed by their own application program?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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IE9 runs only on bloated resource-hungry Windows, yet Microsoft still --- in an effort to find something, anything, positive to say about IE9 --- falls back on the current "energy efficiency" buzzword.
Funny, in a sad way. How far the once giant has fallen.
Yeah, Firefox only has that silly App tab thing, which is not to be confused with site pinning.
The answer, as I feared before and as I now know from experience: you can't. (Note: this is in the context of client-side applications designed to run in the framework of the browser -- and isn't referring to basic HTML tags, rendering, etc. All you "get off my lawn the web is about serving documents" types need not reply :p)
If you are targeting mobile devices, it's a little less painful: simply target Webkit and you'll get most of the modern mobile devices and OSs, with minor variations between them. Even so, each device platform has its own webkit version - and because the HTML "standard" is changing, so too are the features across versions. With that in mind, I have been able to produce a couple of cross-platform HTML5 "apps" that I'm decently content with - though the experience will never match a native app for each platform, of course, it is relatively consistent across platforms. Though even this solution - targeting webkit - hearkens back to the days of IE-specific code; however it's a marginal improvement in that the webkit extensions you're using will *probably* be made an official part of the standard. If and when other browsers decide to adopt the features, you'll be able to use your app on them too - that is, after you go back and add the final, offiical names/tags for the features to your js and css files.
When you look at the situation across browser engines, it's much worse. Each implementation has cleverly prefixed non-final features with their own namespace in CSS3 for one thing. That means - you guessed it - each CSS entry has to contain declarations for a given feature from 1-4 times depending on the specific feature you're trying to use - and if a given platform provides it at all. Not to mention if it works the same across platforms (it's close, but not exact).
Because the standard is evolving, there is NO standard in terms of which features a given browser engine will choose to implement. None, zero, zilch. Is there a common baseline? I'd say about 90% of one. You absolutely cannot get away from browser-specific implementations if you want to code in HTML5/CSS3 -- you know, the very thing a standard should be preventing.
It's bad enough that I'm not planning to use HTML5 for anything but simple data delivery apps; and will be committing the egregious sin of using Flash for more complex applications that I want to deliver across platforms in the mobile space. Why? It's simple: say what you will (and trust me, I've said the same things and worse about Flash ): it *does* provide a relatively consistent experience across platforms. It provides a single, standard-in-all-but-name means to deliver applications across modern devices, systems, and OSs. (Even iOS now, with appropriate third party tools.)
And while you can choose to use platform-specific implementations of features, NOT doing so still provides you with a rich baseline of shared common functionality. Unlike HTML5 - where completely avoiding platform-specific code restricts you from using most of the functionality.
As much as I hate to admit it, Adobe appears to have succeeded in reaching what HTML5 is still striving to attain: write once, for one platform. Run anywhere that platform runs. HTML5 might have a chance to catch up, but I am doubting it. With the process of creating "standards" subject to more bickering than children unsupervised in the schoolyard, I fear they're still going to be arguing over details of their standard long after it's obsolete.
Be careful what you wish for! I'm trying to switch to Chromium from FF because the memory hogging and CPU spiking in FF 4 is just nuts, but the spelling checker in Chromium based (so far I've tried Chromium and Dragon) is just awful! It seems like no matter how close I get to spelling the actual word it guesses a ton of things NONE of which are even close!
It reminds me of the old search engine they used on MSN, where you would type and it would guess these horribly wrong attempts, like "De"...uhhh...deviled eggs, destroyer, dovetail joints? So be careful what you wish for, as a broken spell checker IMHO is worse than no spell checker at all!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I stick with Safari and Chrome because of the Acid 3 support from WebKit and HTML5 animations support. At least when I view a web page I know it's being rendered properly. Firefox has fallen behind ever since Chrome came out. Safari has always been great. Opera is decent and fast, but I don't like the UI as much as Safari and Chrome. IE9 is not as embarrassing as the previous versions and IE10 might even be respectable (I own a Mac so IE is irrelevant to me), but I'll stick with WebKit based browsers because of the features, clean UI, and reliability.
I'm trying to switch to Chromium from FF because the memory hogging and CPU spiking in FF 4 is just nuts
Personally I'm just reluctantly putting up with it and hoping they fix the horrible memory leaks soon. FF was eating ~720m of VM this morning when I killed the process and restarted it; it's now back up to 420m. This on a PC that only has 1g of RAM... pre-4.0 didn't have anywhere near these problems. I figure they'll get fixed eventually.
Except that Opera has had sync for nearly three years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_of_the_Opera_web_browser#Opera_Link
and I have know need for a stinking spell checker cuz I'm a wizzard and can check spell meself
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Thank you for posting that, I'm so very damned tired of getting told "it works for me!" when on my nettop with Anvir task manager I can literally sit and type in a simple text box like this and can spike the CPU simply by typing in a bog standard text box.
I mean seriously WTF FF devs? For me it started getting bad with the 3.6 branch and FF 4 is frankly unusable on anything less than a 2.8Ghz P4 with 1.5Gb of RAM IMHO and that is just insane! I'd hate to see what FF 4 is like on an Atom or netbook, as frankly on this 1.8Ghz Sempron I keep for a low power browser box with 1.5Gb of RAM FF4 slams the living hell out of the CPU and the memory leaks have it slamming swap after about 5 hours on XP SP3. And it isn't like I'm running any weird extensions, just ABP, NoScript, and Forecastfox!
All I know is I have the same extensions (except for NoScript) in Comodo Dragon and it don't do that. I can leave it running all damned day, no memory leaks, if I close a tab the memory is returned to me (I've noticed FF 4 only gives a percentage of the memory back, if for example the page takes 80Mb and you close it you may only get back 50Mb) and if I dare open more than three tabs it will slam the living hell out of the CPU so bad even simple scrolling is like watching a slideshow.
So all I know is even though I've been a FF guy forever it is simply gonna have to go if it don't get better. I support a hell of a lot of users with all different kinds of machines, from netbooks and 8 year old desktops to the latest quads, and I need a browser that will behave consistently no matter what the machine. There is simply no excuse for why a browser opening a simple bling bling free site like Gmail or Yahoo Mail Beta or /. in classic mode should slam the CPU to 100% and stay there for 2+ minutes, or hit swap on 1.5Gb of RAM with only 4 tabs open. It is shoddy coding, or trying to shoehorn process separation simply isn't working on Gecko, who knows. But I'm slowly but surely having to wean myself off of FF and when I go my users will be going with me. FIX THIS FF DEVS!!!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Chrome's sync not only syncs all settings and bookmarks, but extensions and THEIR settings as well. I can download Chrome on any new PC and log into my Google account, and have everything exactly as my home PC, in seconds.
It's just the nature of the update cycle... all the cool features end up being glitchy and buggy. Mainly memory leaks - those seem to be the last to be found and fixed. In the meantime, just restarting it daily is about all I can do. No different than Windows - one version is unstable and poorly interfaced with drivers (ME, Vista) and the subsequent version will have most of those kinks worked out and end up being a mainstay for a good long time (XP, 7 - I hope). With any luck they'll have the memory leaking fixed mostly in one of the next updates (.0.1 didn't seem to help much, though...).