Which Web Browser And Why?Which Web Browser And Why?

Stuck in a browser rut? Maybe it's time for a change.

Over the past year, every major browser has undergone an equally major revision. Sometimes the revisions are reflected to the left of the decimal point, sometimes to the right, but always with big changes in functionality, performance, and under-the-hood optimizations.

The results have provided the best crop of choices for Web browsing in a long time -- possibly since Firefox 1.0 appeared and made one's choice of Web browser a topic of serious competition once again.

What draws people to a particular browser? Speed, reliability, features, or some combination of those factors -- the hands-on experiences. So rather than talk mainly about performance benchmarks or ACID test compliance, I'll focus on what the biggest draw for each browser is -- the best and worst features, reasons to switch from others browsers, and a few notes on where each one is going.

Chrome 2.0
Google, Inc.

Nobody expected Google to release a browser, but here we are. Chrome's already in its second major revision and still developing by leaps and bounds. Its future as a platform unto itself is intriguing, but it's a good browser right now thanks to its speed, lean design, a solid spate of developer's tools built into the product, and a smart internal architecture. Future revisions ought to be nothing short of a knockout.

A big part of what makes Chrome so snappy is what's on the inside. Multiple tabs and windows each run in their own distinct process; if one of them crashes or hangs (for instance, due to a plug-in gone wild), it won't cause the others to blow up. End result: on modern dual- or multi-core hardware, multiple tabs or windows open in Chrome still run fast.

IE has had something like this for a while, albeit implemented differently; Firefox is moving toward such an execution model, but it's still in the planning stages. That said, the bookmark manager could still use some work: for instance, there's no tagging of bookmarks as there is in Firefox, which is a handy way to assign something more than one categorization at once.

Chrome's good for browsing, but it's also being incrementally turned into a platform through which Google intends to deliver more of its OS-neutral Web applications -- Gmail, Docs, and so on. To that end, some of its best features are those aimed at developers: its JavaScript engine, and especially its object inspector for Web pages. The latter is spectacular, rivaling that of some standalone Web-page development applications -- you can manually inject properties into any element on a page and not only see but interact directly with the results.

As with Firefox, betas of the next iteration of Chrome are readily available and are generally stable, but are much rougher in their implementation than the release version. Still, for the curious, they're eye-opening glimpses at how fast the program's shaping up. The newest beta of Chrome 3 clocks in a 30% performance improvement from version 2, although raw numbers alone always mean more when backed up with real-world behavior.

The biggest omission from Chrome, for the time being, is a culture of add-on components along the lines of what Firefox and even IE have to offer. Odds are we won't have to wait too much longer, especially if Chrome's core technologies are to be at the center of Google's forthcoming Web-based OS. If you're already a Google fan or have little investment in an existing browser's tech -- you don't use Firefox plug-ins, for instance -- Chrome is more than worth a look.

Firefox 3.5.2
Mozilla Foundation

Once upon a time, Honda used the tagline, "the car that sells itself"; Firefox has the same cachet. The best way to sell someone on it is just to put them in front of it and let them browse. Snappy, stable, good-looking, customizable, compatible, cross-platform -- the list of positive adjectives goes on and on. What's more, there's very little to turn you off from Firefox once you've gotten accustomed to it.

Much of the way that Firefox gets and keeps its loyalty revolves around the way the program subtly augments conventional browsing behaviors.

Type a name into the address bar, for instance. As you type, likely candidates for what you're typing are presented from your history and your bookmarks. Many people find it faster to get to where they're going by typing a few letters from the domain name and hitting Enter instead of fishing for it from a bookmark folder. Intelligent touches like this persist throughout.

A big portion of Firefox's appeal is its library of third-party add-ons. They make Firefox into an application platform unto itself, and allow things that would normally need to be performed with third-party programs directly in Firefox.

Greasemonkey, for instance, lets you change the way Web pages behave by running custom-written scripts against them. I've used Twitterfox, Yoono, FireFTP, and NoScript at different times, although it can be a little too easy to overload Firefox with plug-ins and add-ons if only because there are so many genuinely useful ones. (In a similar vein, there's Firefox's new skinning/theming method, called "Personas".)

Between versions 3.0 and 3.5, the Mozilla team implemented a number of important under-the-hood changes. For end users that translates into quicker rendering, a more stable browser overall, and (highly important in this Web 2.x era) faster and more intelligent execution of JavaScript. I've noticed this myself on many sites, where Firefox does a far better job handling pages that bring IE to a standstill. To that end, there's almost no reason not to try out Firefox -- although odds are, you have already.

One potentially negative side to Firefox: the native clutch of developer's tools (for debugging sites) is meager. The browser ships with little more than a JavaScript console and error window. That said, this lack of functionality is easy to fix thanks to add-ons such as Firebug and HTML Validator. It's part of Firefox's philosophy to relegate these sorts of things into third-party products, and keep the core product relatively lean. It's a sensible plan.

Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft Corporation

Love it or hate it, no proper discussion of the browser market out there would make sense without at least some mention of IE. The newest version pushes it a great deal closer towards compatibility with other browsers . It boosts performance, and adds some useful new tidbits. Microsoft-only Web behaviors are finally dying a long-overdue death. But IE's share of the browser market is declining, and possibly for keeps at this point.

First and most crucial: IE now attempts by default to render Web pages a lot more closely to the way other browsers do. A site that appeared fine in Firefox but looked broken in IE should now render correctly in both. For sites that still need the old IE rendering methodologies, click a button on the toolbar and you'll see the site displayed in Compatibility View, which uses the previous IE rendering engine. Most of the Web I browsed using IE 8's default mode looked fine, though, which speaks for itself.

IE 8's other new features are a mixed bag. Many are genuinely good: I liked the InPrivate browsing function, similar to Firefox's Private Browsing and Chrome's Incognito. I also liked the new inspection and debugging tools for developers. The JavaScript debugger, for instance, allows for extremely detailed line-by-line inspection of running scripts, breakpoints, and on-the-spot evaluation.

The bad news is that sometimes you need this much debugging power to figure out the quirks in IE's own JavaScript engine. And sometimes it only helps so much: one page I was debugging failed with an "unknown error" (their words, not mine!) until I found out it was due to an obscure problem with the innerHTML method which didn't manifest on any other browser.

Another new feature of mixed advantages is "Webslices," which are a way to allow users to subscribe to a part of a page. Web authors can implement this without too much trouble: define a DIV on a page and assign it the class hslice, and you're done. Unfortunately the execution of the idea amounts to little more than a glorified RSS feed, and while it's easy enough to implement it amounts to yet another proprietary IE behavior -- the sort of thing Microsoft should be running away from as fast as possible at this point in its history.

In sum, it helps to have IE 8 installed if only as a direct replacement for earlier and more non-compliant versions of IE. But it's now easier than ever to find a superior browser, especially if you're not married to IE as a technology. I suspect a good deal of IE's decline can be traced to the fact that the mechanism for add-ons in IE -- ActiveX -- hasn't been replaced with anything more secure.

Opera
Opera Software ASA

Even though Opera commands a comparatively small share of the browser market, it has also retained a fiercely loyal fan base. It's not hard to see why, either: it's fast, lean, computationally efficient, and packed with all these wonderful little features that make people's eyes light up.

One key thing about Opera is the amount of work that's gone into it for people with slower connections or slower computers, period. They're some of Opera's biggest fans, and each version of Opera has something new to appeal to those people. Example: the "Turbo" function lets you pipe high-bandwidth sites through Opera's proxy server and resample them for fast browsing. This makes images blotchy, but you can always selectively reload the images you want to see in full resolution.

If you open Opera without actually viewing a Web page, you're taken to the Speed Dial menu, where nine of your most commonly-visited sites can be organized and displays in thumbnail fashion. Chrome and Safari have the same function, but I believe Opera actually implemented this before either of them, much as it was one of the first browsers to implement tabbed browsing.

When you actually navigate to a page, the address bar gives you a detailed idea of its loading progress through an "Elements" ticker. This is a nice way to know offhand if one item on the requested page is holding up the loading process.

The bookmark manager also has plenty of smart touches: global search either through the bookmark manager itself or by typing in the address bar. There's no tagging of bookmarks a la Firefox, but bookmarks can be assigned short nicknames that show up as part of the address-bar quick-selection list. It's also possible to organize and sort bookmarks in a variety of ways, apart from the usual alpha-sort or drag-and-drop ordering.

And then there's the plethora of little things. By default, pop-ups are confined to the tabbed page where they were invoked, which keeps said windows from opening outside the browser itself -- nice if you visit a site that actually makes good use of pop-ups, but don't want them creating a mess.

Built-in BitTorrent support means you don't need to keep track of a separate application for those downloads, either. And Opera's collection of widgets expand on the program's core functionality in various ways. My favorite: the Google Translator gadget, which came in handy when navigating Amazon.co.jp.

Finally, an even faster Opera 10 is out in beta now, and can be installed side-by-side with version 9.

Safari
Apple Inc.

Apple's Safari is something of an oddity -- a Mac program ported to Windows even in the absence of much clamor for it. But here and there inside its brushed-metal interface are some features that other browsers ought to be emulating before much longer. The whole package isn't as impressive, though, especially since the bulk of its features are available in other forms elsewhere.

The good stuff first. Safari's "Top Sites" feature is similar to Chrome's homepage of thumbnails for recently-visited sites, except that Safari uses 3D-accelerated effects to make browsing those sites as snazzy as using OS X's Expos function. Similarly slick 3D effects are used to jazz up the process of flipping through your browsing history -- handy if, like me, you all too often remember what a page looked like, but don't remember its title or what site it was on!

I liked Safari's page inspection and JavaScript debugging tools, although again the vast majority of this stuff is available through Chrome since it, too, uses the Webkit component stack. I also liked the Snippet Editor, which gives you a dual-paned window that lets you compose HTML on the fly to be pasted into a target document.

What's less impressive is the rest of the package. Among the least-developed features, especially when compared to Firefox or even Chrome, is the bookmark manager -- it's got a handy universal search function, but doing more than basic management is difficult. You can't even right-click on a bookmark to modify its properties (although you can do that with folders in the bookmark list).

Migrating bookmarks from Firefox was a little odd, too: the "Import bookmarks" function is nowhere to be found in the bookmark manager itself; it's in the File menu. Safari also munged some of the bookmark names on import, for reasons still not clear. (The Bonjour and MobileMe integration functions are nice, though, but only for people who use those things.)

The app's overall performance also sometimes lags. Quick experiment: try opening the Safari features page side-by-side in Safari and Firefox.

Firefox scrolls a great deal more smoothly through the document; Safari lags and skips. (IE, Chrome and Opera actually did the best in this particular test.) Finally, unlike Firefox or even IE, Safari doesn't yet have a culture of third-party developer's add-ons to enrich the product. Since that's turning into a major way products like this are enhanced and made useful by end users, it's a big omission.

Conclusions
Firefox has garnered a large portion of the browser market share for one simple reason: it's really good. It does most everything well, and the things it doesn't do immediately well can typically be changed in a nondestructive way (e.g., add-ons). It's hard to go wrong with it. But it would also be a mistake to completely count out some very vital competition namely, Chrome (on the open source side) and Opera (on the proprietary side). The former provides strong hints of how a fresh outside perspective can shake things up in a good way; Firefox's engineers are now preparing a new process model that emulates Chrome's.

IE and Safari, on the other hand, now seem to be governed by development that's more reactive than proactive. But neither Microsoft nor Apple, development juggernauts both, can be counted out completely. The former has the newly-unveiled Bing Search (which makes good use of modern browser technology), as well as a new kind of heavily-isolated browser codenamed "Gazelle" under wraps as an experimental project.

If Microsoft takes all the lessons to be learned from the current generation of browsers and applies their research muscle to it, the results might leave not only IE, but potentially many other competitors in the dust.

For Further Reading:

Review: Firefox 3.5 Makes Browsing Better

Microsoft's Gazelle Project Tackles Browser Security

Review: Google Chrome Mostly Glitters

Google Chrome Gets Faster, Learns HTML 5

Review: Safari 4 Beta Takes Page From Google Playbook

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