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."
One Page (printable) version (Score:5, Informative)
Submitter did a nice summary. BTW, another table shows memory usage, and looks like Firefox Beta 2 comes in a bit heavier (compared to 1.5.04) at least for startup and an initial load of six tabs - unknown if the memory leaks that cause this to skyrocket when viewing dynamic sites (such as this) [watching-grass-grow.com] are fixed.
Also talks about the anti-phishing protection, but says they were unable to have this engage, so maybe it's not functional yet? That seems to be an area where more inovation could be done.
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:3, Informative)
Then again, I'm not using the Windows version either.
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:3, Interesting)
That aside, I've used the Firefox beta, and while I will no doubt end up using the finished 2.0, there's no way I can use the beta. I appreciate that it's slow because it's compiled in debug mode, hasn't had last minute optimisations applied, etc - but that doesn't change the fact that for me, on a P4 3GHz with 2 gig of RAM, it's slow enough to be unusable.
I don't use Opera or IE, and
Re:One Page (printable) version (Score:5, Informative)
Alphas and betas are not shipped in debug mode.
It's unfair (Score:4, Informative)
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:3, Informative)
Looks to me like they are comparing all those things. And that being the case, I also don't believe it's fair to compar beta with relased versions.
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:It's unfair (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah... about that... really... quick... dev..el..op..ment.. time
Re:It's unfair (Score:3, Informative)
As far as I can tell it's just a meaningless statistic. It reminds me of the processor clock speed wars. You don't buy a processor because it runs at 3.3 GHz as opposed to 1.9 GHz, you buy it because it's actually faster in real-world usage scenarios.
And in real-world web rendering tasks, Firefox is the best browser I've used.
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:It's unfair (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft has high marketshare but its not all one version either. A 90 percent defacto standard is one thing but when some people still use ie 5.x, it lowers the numbers. In some circles firefox is at 25 percent. That
Re:It's unfair (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's unfair (Score:2)
While i'm as much of a Firefox fan as the next guy (maybe more), this is not an argument, no one cares whether or not work has been done on Gecko, what's tested is the output, and the output is that Firefox doesn't pass acid2.
I've seen better (Score:5, Informative)
And the author mixes up kb and mb on another page.
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?
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:Searching from the address bar (Score:3, Informative)
Dan East
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.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Funny)
Hooray beer!
Wait... what were we talking about?
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:2)
And I *certainly* don't want the search to default to bringing me to the first result automatically.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:2, Informative)
Now, to search with the address bar, just type "g searchterm1 searcheterm2 etc"
In conjunction with the alt-d "goto address bar" shortcut, this rocks.
--Murph
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: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
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, it sounds like Dvorak was right about something.
*ducks*
*no, fuck that, runs*
*runs for his goddam life*
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:2)
I'm totally with you on that. Although I can understand why newbs^H^H^H^H^Hsome people might want a separate search box, the c
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:2)
I assume then that you've been on Firefox for a while now. Keyword based searches have been in FF for many years.
In the prop
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:2)
Voted.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Informative)
You should learn to use Quick Searches.
I don't use the search bar in firefox (custumise toolbar and drag it off), rather search directly from the address bar.
These are some I have (removed http:/// [http] so
g: www.google.com/search?q=%s
img: images.google.com/images?q=%s
w: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
man: www.linuxpakistan.net/man.php?query=%s
fm: freshmeat.net/search/?section=projects&q=%s
ext: addons.mozilla.org/search.php?app=firefox&type=E&
sf: sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words
sl: slackware.it/en/pb/search.php?v=current&t=1&q=%s
pkg: www.linuxpackages.net/search_view.php?by=name&nam
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, you don't.
If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search.
We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be.
Re:Searching from the address bar (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not a problem with the concept it's a problem with the implementation.
Konqueror does this right:
just type in something => url
type "gg:something" and you get a google seach for something
It's both unambiguous, and not wasteful of screen real estate.
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".
Re:Spelling checkers (Score:2)
My understanding from the context of TFA is that it stands out because none of the other (reviewed) browsers support it.
Re:Spelling checkers (Score:5, Informative)
I know that's what the article says, but it's highly misleading. Opera hooks into the native spelling checker on each platform it runs on. On OS X, this is an official system service. On other platforms, it uses Aspell - which comes as standard in virtually every Linux distribution and installed on most UNIX systems. Windows doesn't provide a standard spelling checker, but Opera still uses Aspell if it's installed.
So "third-party add-on" is a long way from the truth. It's automatically available without any add-on necessary on most platforms, and it automatically recognises a common spelling-checker if it's installed on Windows. It's nothing like Firefox 1 and the Google extension at all.
well, (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish they would all get their act together and pass the ACID2 test though.
No new tab buttion? (Score:4, Informative)
Not exactly rocket science to add one (Right-click > Customize > Drag the new tab button > Done) but I wonder why it's not there by default.
Re:No new tab buttion? (Score:2, Informative)
Loads a new tab for me just fine with only one click. Or did you mean a single keyboard button?
For that, I suggest "e" =D
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: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.
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.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about extensions? (Score:4, Informative)
Apples to Oranges? (Score:2)
So they're comparing the first FIRST of Firefox 2.0 to the THIRD beta of IE7 and the RELEASE version of Opera 9.0. Call me crazy, but wouldn't a proper comparison look at all three browsers after they have reached their final release versions?
Re:Apples to Oranges? (Score:2, Insightful)
my views (Score:4, Interesting)
The only problem I am having with any of the three is with the firefox beta 2.0 crashing with Vista. The last alpha version did not.
Its going to be an interesting battle.
Re:my views (Score:2)
Overlooked: Printing (Score:3, Interesting)
A bit off-topic, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just keep that in mind before jumping into the "MSIE7 has nice proprietary features" train.
Re:A bit off-topic, but... (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:A bit off-topic, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
"Favorites button" (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox: No
Opera: No
wtf is a "Favorites button" button? Is it like a bookmark button?
Re:"Favorites button" (Score:2)
Or maybe they're referring to the "Add..." button on the Favorites sidebar.
Either way, I'm sure that if anybody cared enough to create this feature it would be an extension. It sounds like the sort of thing you do as part of a tutorial titled "My First Incredibly Easy Extension". It hardly sounds like a feature on par with a pop-up blocker. And in
Quick Tabs vs Tab Thumbnails (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really unique. In Opera, just hover over the tab for a second or two...you get a thumbnail of the page.
ie on acid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ie on acid (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
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.
Opera does have themes. Table says otherwise. (Score:2)
Strictly speaking the comparison table on page 2 is incorrect. Opera does have themes, many of them, albeit the browser isn't shipped with them as such.
Some Personal (Score:2, Interesting)
Jumping to conclusions... (Score:2)
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.)
Re:Pro IE 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Be warned (Score:3, Informative)
DOM Inspector is horribly broken to the point of almost being completely useless in Firefox 2 beta 1. At least it was for me.
It also will crash Firefox very easily.
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: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:Printing support (Score:3, Interesting)
Memory usage charts wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
Opera 9.0: 52K
IE 6.0: 155K
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K
A single image on one of those pages could require more RAM than what the entire program is consuming. That's way, way off. What's even more amazing is, going by their charts, Opera actually consumes LESS ram with 6 pages loaded than when it first starts up! 53k -> 52k
Dan East
Re:Memory usage charts wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Memory usage charts wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Opera gets no respect (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Opera gets no respect (Score:5, Insightful)
IE 7 and PNG (Score:3, Interesting)
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:/.-ed in the first 5 seconds (Score:2)
Re:Beta? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Beta? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comparing, say, Firefox 2.0 (beta) to MSIE 6.0 isn't a very fair comparison.
Re:Beta? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2)
Just use a theme for godsake. It's not like firefox isn't built on themes tool. Of all the things to bitch about, this one's ridiculous.
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2)
Like I need another winamp type app that refuses to use UI standards.
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2)
Re:Opera's UI is slick? (Score:2)
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Offtopic)
which by the way Opera on the PocketPC is worth the money it beats the crap out of all mobile browsers
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
Free, of course.
Re:Opera? (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you meant "never". And FYI, it's been a free download for a very long time. IIRC Ubuntu has it even in the package manager
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
I didn't realize Opera was still a player (very understood the "pay for a web browser" bit),
It's very much a player in mobile applications. I have no less than three devices which were bundled with Opera, and for that Opera gets money. For the same reason that the most popular chip is the ARM (not x86 as most people would think), Opera might well become the most popular browser by numbers if not by mindshare.
(The three devices are a Nokia phone, the Nokia 770 and an early Sharp Zaurus).
Rich.
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
ActiveX empowers webdevelopers. FF extensions empowers users. ActiveX can be used by bad people to exploit your system because it allows remote sites to do stuff on your system. FF extensions are run only on your own system, most of them have nothing to do with the webpages you load. And the ones that do just filter out ads. Some are more complex, such as greasemonkey, but you only run those only on sites you trust.
Also extensions aren't installed by default, so there isn't any danger of a feature you never use compromising your system.
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Opera? (Score:4, Interesting)
The facts that exceptions don't install under the hood without telling you helps a lot, I guess.
The fact that it takes you 2 clics to list your extensions and 2 more to delete an offending one also helps.
The final reason is that Firefox' extensions are actually extremely useful and add wonderful flexibility to the browser thanks to XUL. They also allow the Firefox dev team to see what the users want (they just have to check the most popular extensions and find out why they're popular in the first place).