Browser Comparison - Firefox 2 b1, IE7 b3, Opera 9 528
mikemuch writes "The browser wars have heated up again, with Microsoft putting Beta 3 of Internet Explorer 7 out for all to download (not just developers anymore), Firefox coming out with the first beta of its version 2, and Opera releasing version 9. ExtremeTech has a shoot-out of the three browsers, with feature comparisons and tests of resource usage, startup time, and Acid2 standards compliance. Standout features are Opera's built-in BitTorrent support, Firefox's spellchecker for forms, and IE's Quick Tabs view. Firefox is still ahead in extensions, while Opera has some slick UI conveniences."
Re:Beta? (Score:5, Insightful)
Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unneccesary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it.
Now if only they could fix Gecko's inability to render display: inline-block properly, it might become a halfway usable browser. Quite why it's taken so long is beyond me. It's was originally logged as a bug 7 years ago (it's bug 9458, if you want to vote for it). So, Mozilla Organisation, *please* stop adding more and more features that I really don't want, and fix your fscking layout engine. Wasn't that meant to be one of the original goals of Mozilla? To have a browser with a rendering engine that didn't suck? What happened to that concept?
Spelling checkers (Score:5, Insightful)
How can Firefox's spelling checker be a "standout feature" when Opera, Safari and Konqueror already have it built in? It's more of a "catch-up feature" than a "standout feature".
What about extensions? (Score:5, Insightful)
One example of not doing this is in the feature comparison table where it says that Firefox can't remember open tabs for the next session. My copy of Firefox not only does that when I want it to, it also has crash recovery so when I restart I can choose to reopen all of the tabs or not.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Also from TFA: in Firefox requires going through menus, or double clicking on the empty space to the right of the last tab (if you knew about that--usability is about making needed features obvious)
Having it in the search bar makes it practially hidden. Having a second bar, which by default has the Google icon, makes it a little more obvious that the browser has built in search capabilities, and where it can be accessed.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the Firefox developers should do a build that has every (non-conflicting) extension that exists just so the comparison will really show the power of Firefox. How else will people know what it really can and can't do?
After reading this I would think that Firefox lacks a few features that I use, in Firefox, on a regular basis. Maybe the author of the article doesn't use Firefox on a regular basis. Otherwise you'd think he would know about this stuff. Not like these are real obscure extensions that you can't find on the main extension sites.
A bit off-topic, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just keep that in mind before jumping into the "MSIE7 has nice proprietary features" train.
Re:It's unfair (Score:3, Insightful)
It's unfair to compare Beta versions with a completed version...
Why? This is a comparison of features, not stability, compliance or even speed. Betas are supposed to be feature complete.
Re:It's unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on, don't be such an apologist. Are you seriously saying "It's unfair! They're only behind on that because they didn't work on it!" How is that unfair? They had just as much opportunity to fix things as Opera did, the difference is that they chose not to. That may or may not be a good decision to make, but you can't exactly call it "unfair", can you?
That doesn't matter, what's planned for Firefox 3 doesn't make Firefox 2 any better. When Firefox 3 is released, we can compare that with Opera 10 and Internet Explorer 8, which will both have moved forward too.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zooming images accordingly with the text should be a basic feature on all browsers, zomming the text only makes no sense IMO.
Paste and Go (Score:1, Insightful)
ie on acid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Insightful)
Seven years ago, that was a proprietary Internet Explorer property. It's been added to the upcoming CSS 2.1, but that's still only a draft. It's not like it's been a missing part of CSS support for seven years, until recently it was totally non-standard, and technically it still is.
Re:Beta? (Score:4, Insightful)
Three points: First, which generates more revenue - fairness or page hits?
Second, by the time some products are released, everybody who cares has been using it routinly for months or (in a few cases) even years anyway.
Third, in a lot of cases, it's hard to tell the difference between beta and released software anyway. Let's have a quick show of hands of all the people who believe that IE 7 will have been officially released for an entire month before a major security hole is found. Hmm...I'm not seeing any hands...and I don't think the fact that I can't see any of you really makes much difference in that.
Re:Apples to Oranges? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being extremely customizable is not always a good thing. Most people would never bother and some will probably be scared by excessively complicated customization.
I used to go out of my way to customize everything I can, and in some cases I still do so. I went as far as creating new visual themes for my Sony Ericsson phone. But more often than not it's a waste of time. Additionally, the vast majority of skins available for every application are unprofessional and sloppy.
Apple interfaces are successful not because of customization. In fact, you're usually stuck with what they give you. However, they clearly put a lot of thought into usability. Those interfaces work because they're clean. I don't necessarily like the visual style, but I appreciate the simplicity.
Microsoft won the last browser war but failed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am somewhat optimistic about IE 7, Vista... Microsoft sience IE 6 and XP has been getting a lot of heat and their stock shows it. Even a company Microsofts size can only make so many mistakes until bulk amounts people start switching. The Aditude has changed a lot sience then too. Before around Windows 95 and 98 Microsoft was (wrongly) considered the Technical Leader and their products were considered to be the best available. Now it is more of a deffeetest aditude of well I am stuck and I don't want to switch and it is not bad enough to switch yet but I am keeping my eyes open. I am not dumb though IE 7 and Vista will not be as great as the PR people make it out to be but it will be better then what they curently have. Much like Windows 2003 Server I havent seen any major problems with it nor do I see people wanting to switch to in in droves.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. However, it is an essential layout ingredient (to the point, where many layouts can't be implemented without it, short of resorting to tables). Also, the W3C is shooting itself in the foot by releasing specs so slowly. The last officially approved CSS spec was released in 1999. At this point, no one really expects any significant changes to CSS2.1 before it's approved, and there's not really any excuse for not implementing it fully in a browser released in 2006.
Re:It's unfair (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... about that... really... quick... dev..el..op..ment.. time
Pro IE 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
"But there are extensions for all that!"—In fact that gets me to what I hate most about Firefox. Extension hell. Every time I install Firefox on a new system I have to hunt down a list of extensions for it or my user experience is going to change radically. And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
Another thing I like about IE 7 is its sandbox mode on Vista. That should, I think, provide several security advantages over competing browsers. (In fact, IE 6 with ActiveX turned off was already reasonably secure.)
Printing support (Score:5, Insightful)
e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.
Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print.
Re:ie on acid (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beta? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comparing, say, Firefox 2.0 (beta) to MSIE 6.0 isn't a very fair comparison.
Re:ie on acid (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how well Firefox and Opera employ W3C standards, they still need to be able to display poorly created pages just as well as valid, semantic, XHTML-driven sites.
Yes, there are a lot of people who make a lot of workarounds for a lot of browsers. Those who lament this fact should get over it. The companies involved know damn well by now what business they're involved with. Folks have got to stop belly-aching and bitching over these now decade-old problems. They're well-defined problems, which is a good thing. It takes some tricky work to keep your backwards compatibility and introduce new ways of working, ala Internet Explorer's DOCTYPE mode. If they are concerned about people introducing hokey work-arounds that they would eventually have to work around themselves, browser makers would do well to be more involved with the design community.
Re:Not free. But MS can afford it. (Score:1, Insightful)
they could achieve the same effect by putting "i have no scruples, self-respect, or sense of taste" in their bio section.
Re:Printing support (Score:5, Insightful)
Just define a separate stylesheet for printing. This stylesheet can hide the navigation items and specify how the fixed page layout has to be scaled on the paper when printing.
Of course, not every site designer is careful enough to include a printing stylesheet.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ie on acid (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the rub is this. IE doesnt support current standards. FireFox has some issue but it is much better then IE and Opera and Safari seem to fully support current standards. Yes web developers have every right to complain about Microsoft ignoring standards and making their life more complicated. Because of IE I can not use PNG files with an alpha channel on websites I design.
Just because most people use junk that is no reason to
a. Not tell them that is junk.
b. Try to get the producers of said junk to make it better.
c. Try to get people to use a better product.
Even if IE was only 10% of the browser market good web developers would still put in all the hacks to support it. It is a stupid professional that wants to send away one tenth of their potential market.
Telling the to get over it? Hell no. Microsoft fix IE 7 before you release it. Get PNGs working and ACID 2.
Mozilla we are still waiting for ACID 2 from you as well. Get it done NOW.
Re:Memory usage charts wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's unfair (Score:5, Insightful)
Browsers are lousy in terms of supporting the various specifications people have published that define useful things web developers want and need to do. This has numerous effects:
All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?
The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them.
The more browsers that pass the Acid2 test, the better support there is for web developers. The better support there is for web developers, the higher the quality of the work they put out. And you, as an end-user of that work, benefit. It's too many steps removed for you to see, but it's certainly not the meaningless statistic you think it is.
To use your analogy with CPUs, imagine if every CPU screwed up 10% of the time, and applications like word processors and mail clients had to have 30% more code written to work around the bugs in CPUs. Would you say that was a problem, and demand better quality CPUs, or would you say "Hey, not a problem, the application developers can work around it, right?" Because that's the analogous situation; the "processors" of the WWW are utterly broken, and a huge amount of effort is being wasted because they aren't getting fixed.
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparing Betas on memory size and speed is just a dumb idea...
Friedmud
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, Apple's UI is wonderful, isn't it?
So intuitive [upenn.edu]. So clean and simple [asktog.com].
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Apple's UI sucks. It just sucks less than anybody else's; like democracy, it's the least worst idea anyone's come up with. But that doesn't make it perfect.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:4, Insightful)
They should make Extensions part of their introductory spiel, and they should make them more accessible and drawn in. They should have "Extensions Packages" wherein you can download 5 XPIs at once and have them all install. I'm a power user, and even I'm turned off by the prospect of hunting through dozens of extensions to find something worthwhile.
Irrelevant comparisons (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really care about features (except tabbed browsing, a must-have, but they all have that). I care about standards compliance. Apparently Opera is in the lead here, with the rest nowhere.
Re:It's unfair (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Opera gets no respect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:3, Insightful)
I often use it when I'm in 'reading' mode and am not using the keyboard, but am copy/pasting a URL using the mouse.