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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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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"
Opera's had that for ages. Literally 4, 5 or maybe even 6 "major" versions.
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.
Oh my god!
Did you warn them about 9/11?!
http://xkcd.com/875/
>>>so block non-IE browsers from accessing content.
These sites don't actually "block" the content - they are just poorly programmed. For example I cannot access Youtube Mail from Mozilla's SeaMonkey or Opera's opera, because the idiot web programmer didn't recognize the browser as "IE" or "FF" and simply didn't send the HTML (or javascript). He made the stupid assumption that the browser was incapable of displaying youtube. Either that or he was lazy.
>>>Safari was pretty much the only one that had it build in
Opera has had user agent strings since the early 2000s. You can set it as Opera, or Internet Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox, or IE/opera, or FF/opera.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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.
Firefox doesn't have it built in because the vast majority of users never need it. Nearly all sites work with Firefox's default user agent string.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
"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.
Firefox does have it built-in. You go to about:config and add a "general.useragent.override" string. Plugins just make changing it an easier and friendlier process.