Browser Review: IE, FireFox, Chrome or Opera, who's better?

[GreyWolf]

I am currently running Opera 9.63 (posting here), while I have my webmail open in FF3. For some reason Chrome has stopped working on this machine (not the browsers fault, I was fiddling and I broke it).

Anywhoo, I am starting to like Opera, but to be honest, there is nothing much in it.

[Anakha56]

GW try 10.

[GreyWolf]

hmmm...not now, just started 9.63 3 days ago. And my previous experiences with Opera alphas was bad. Rather wait for the stable version.

I was looking at the features. The "Alpha" thing looks great! Except, you design your website with a lot of transparencies, then some tjop will look at it through IE6, and will get a garbled mess.

[Ron2K]

Except, you design your website with a lot of transparencies, then some tjop will look at it through IE6, and will get a garbled mess.

Are you referring to transparent PNGs? There is a Javascript workaround for IE6 that you can use that will get them to display properly.

Having said that, it's absolutely hideous, it forces all images on the page to be reloaded which has obvious bandwidth implications, and obviously only works if the user hasn't disabled Javascript. Best solution is to get the user to use IE7 if they absolutely must use Internet Explorer - even better, get them to use a proper standards-compliant browser such as Firefox or Opera.

[GreyWolf]

Except, you design your website with a lot of transparencies, then some tjop will look at it through IE6, and will get a garbled mess.

Are you referring to transparent PNGs? There is a Javascript workaround for IE6 that you can use that will get them to display properly.

Having said that, it's absolutely hideous, it forces all images on the page to be reloaded which has obvious bandwidth implications, and obviously only works if the user hasn't disabled Javascript. Best solution is to get the user to use IE7 if they absolutely must use Internet Explorer - even better, get them to use a proper standards-compliant browser such as Firefox or Opera.

HA! dude, if there is one thing I have learned as a web designer, you CANNOT get clients to use anything. They are hard headed that way. For example, I recently did a website for a client. I do all my websites in flash. It is much easier, looks better and you get a much more pleasant experience I find, never mind that you don't have to worry about different rendering methods.. So I do the website. Next thing you know they complaining cos some of their workstations run on Cytrix, and they don't run flash. So I did some research and found that it can be enabled. Would they do it? NO! SO I had to make a freakin HTML version of the site.

[shiv]

FF 3.0.5 gets 71/100 for the acid 3 test
IE 6 on the other hand gets 5/100

[Ron2K]

*casts Scroll of Resurrection on thread*

This article is on MyBroadband this morning - nice to see the other browsers eating into IE's market share, although I do find fault with the lack of mention of Opera.

Just as the browser wars looked as if they were fading, a spate of new releases has re-ignited them. And this time Internet Explorer is losing ground rapidly to its opponents. Since January this year the Internet Explorer family of browsers have lost more than 17% market share according to analysts StatCounter.

Last month Apple released its Safari 4 browser and this month Firefox 3.5 was released which has been downloaded more than 19 million times already. Earlier, in March, Microsoft released its latest browser in the form of Internet Explorer 8 which is already showing good uptake, although not enough to keep Internet Explorer on a positive growth curve.

According to StatCounter, the Internet Explorer family of browsers held a combined market share of 73.5% in January 2009. Beta versions of IE8 accounted for 1% of that total and IE6 and IE7 held 19.3% and 53.2% respectively. In comparison Firefox 3 held 16.6% and Firefox 2 a 2.5% share.

At the end of June, Internet Explorer's total share had dropped to 55.7%, despite a healthy increase in IE8 use. A 22% decline in market share for IE7 over the six months suggests that Microsoft has been quite successful in migrating users to its newer IE8 browser, although clearly not all IE7 users have jumped to IE8. Many of them appear to have migrated to the Firefox 3 browser which showed a very healthy 10.2% increase in market share between January and June 2009. At the start of July Firefox 3 had 26.8% market share, just slightly less than IE7's 30.8% share.

Until its release in March, IE8 beta versions accounted for 1% share. On its release the browser quickly climbed through the 5% and 10% marks to reach 14.4% share by the end of June.

Good news for web developers is that while IE6 is still very much in evidence with 9% market share at the end of June, its profile is definitely on the decline. The browser, which has stubbornly held onto its position in the market despite being eight years old, slipped by a significant 10% over the first six months of this year, down from 19.2% in January. Internet Explorer is widely disliked by web developers for its particular implementation of HTML rendering which is significantly different to established web standards. Internet Explorer 7 made some headway in rectifying this and IE8 is Microsoft's most standards-compatible browser to date. Nevertheless IE6 continues to be a significant player in the market and developers still need to cater for it to make their content available to as wide an audience as possible.

One of the big gainers in the StatCounter data is the "other" category which increased from just 2% in January 2009 to 12.8% at the end of June. This category encompasses the likes of Chrome 2.0, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 which are not included in the June numbers. Once those numbers become available there is a good chance that Internet Explorer will look even worse off.

[Ron2K]

And it gets even worse for IE.

Oracle Goddess sends word that YouTube is presenting IE6 users with a banner exhorting them to upgrade to a modern browser, and TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6 soon. This Twitter search reflects the jubilation breaking out all over the Net at the imminent demise of this most despised and non-standards-compliant browser. The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.

Source

[spearone]

Yay! thats awesome to hear, finally at last! Standards compliant browsers ftw!

[Bluez]

Using FF 3.5 - gave IE8 a try. Stupid thing kept on hanging, so it got uninstalled

[alliesmeister]

That article is encouraging, but I have to say I have some serious doubts over the statistics that are provided. The amount by which IE's marketshare decreased according to the article is doubtful, why would there suddenly be such a huge fall in IE use? I know Internet Explorer is absolute garbage, but average Joe doesn't and even if he does know, the average user won't be bothered or clued up enough to change to FF 3/Opera/Chrome/Safari etc.

[Tribble]

Even if one tab crashes on FF - and it closes the whole program, it opens all the tabs exactly as they were before the crash so that you don't lose anything.

have you tried chrome tribs? I promise you having one tab crash and the browser keep on ticking is almost better than sex

anakha, I know you didn't, but I thought I would head it off at the pass...

Almost? In that case - I will stick to FF and sex. No point in changing for something that is only almost

Naah jokes aside - I would like to look at it - but I luffs the foxy. It suits me and how I like to work. And I luff the addins

[Xiphan]

I tried out Chrome again, I figured it must've matured a bit more by now and in truth I was impressed with it, the WebKit engine is really good and fast however, it kept crashing when viewing Yahoo! Mail for some reason, and it didn't just crash in one tab the whole browser bombed out for some reason? So ty but no ty I'll stick to my beloved Opera!

EDIT: And speaking of Opera, beta 2 of Opera 10 is now available!

[Bluez]

Just got the following in my inbox about Firefox 3.7 http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/firefox-37-screenshot/ ... looks quite pretty, small changes so fare ... hope it will perform as well as 3.5.

[Stuart]

I tried out Chrome again, I figured it must've matured a bit more by now and in truth I was impressed with it, the WebKit engine is really good and fast however, it kept crashing when viewing Yahoo! Mail for some reason, and it didn't just crash in one tab the whole browser bombed out for some reason?

It's probably coded that way.

[FrostiE]

Are you referring to transparent PNGs? There is a Javascript workaround for IE6 that you can use that will get them to display properly.

Yeah, uhm... That's great and all but there are a couple situations where JS and CSS hacks will not work. Period. I spent a couple days in one of my more recent bouts of masochism and managed to get it all to work, but it wasn't exactly pretty. IE would freeze for a couple seconds because apparently DXImageTransform isn't exactly fast, and when its accompanied by a fair amount of JS and all... yeah. All in all, I scrapped it and just got into the habbit of not having tiling alpha transparent pngs in sites, or having them only display in web standards compliant browsers. ie. not IE.

[Ron2K]

Digging our old "browser wars" thread out, because this news article pretty much doesn't belong anywhere else...

The UK government has responded to a petition encouraging government departments to move away from IE6 that had over 6,000 signatories. Their response seems to be that a fully patched IE6 is perfectly safe as long as firewalls and malware scanning tools are in place, and that mandating an upgrade away from IE6 will be too expensive. The second part is fair enough in this age of austerity (I'd rather have my taxes spent on schools and hospitals than software upgrade testing at the moment), but the whole reaction will be a disappointment to the petitioners.

Source

So, when did our Department of Communications emigrate over there?

[Synthesis]

Hopefully they stay with IE. The more people stay with IE, especially government and such, the more IE gets targeted for vulnerabilities and that keeps the normal person not using IE safer for that much longer. So government, take one for the citizens using Firefox and stick to IE.

[KALSTER]

I stick with Opera all the way. Just have to load Yahoo mail in IE on some machines for some reason. Why are so many people still on IE 6? Does it come standard with XP? I can't recall.

I had to update my aunt's Win 95 system to IE 6 with all sorts of extra patches and stuff to get online banking to work a while back. I also installed an old Opera to help out. Getting people to buy newer computers and upgrade software is difficult. How much does an XP capable machine cost these days? Virtually nothing. I sadly know quite a few people that use their computers for nothing other than internet banking, email and decade old games, while connecting to the internet through their cellphones without data bundles (i.e. R2 a MB). My ex-boss spent over R500 in one weekend on browsing before I helped him out.

[Stuart]

Yep, it ships with XP.

[rustypup]

wow! sulinkchannelsch a sparlinkchannelskling review!...

i'm convlinkchannelsinced! :/

[Ron2K]

Sheesh - who keeps on approving the spambot posts?

[Tribble]

Maybe you have a bot approving them? I would say Jerith has a lot to answer for

[Stuart]

Sheesh - who keeps on approving the spambot posts?

Wuzn't me this time.

[Stuart]

TIME's take on IE9