The people who review software should realize that a browser is something that will be used by common users, for them the javascript rendering engine or ACID tests are as good as the number of memory addresses that can be accessed by the processor. Which means they don’t give a squat & they shouldn’t be made to give a squat! What matters is not how fast the page loads in a test but how well the browser does when it comes to user experience. But I guess the quickest way to give a verdict without actually spending time on something is use benchmarking tools. Page load times are a part of it but aren’t the make or break for a browser. I was a Firefox user till I realized that it had caused me enough mental trauma by freezing my whole machine for opening a tab or by taking more than 2 whole minutes to become usable on start, not to forget the insane amounts of RAM it consumed. Of course there are those who haven’t faced it, I haven’t seen my Windows BSoD either. I switched to IE 8 and loved it till it caused me my Facebook vanity URL. Currently I’m on Safari & Chrome. So here’s my take on all these browsers from a user’s perspective & the perfect browser.
As I said I don’t give a squat about javascript rendering times, Acid test & Base-Alkaline tests, what matters to me how well the browser responds & what it offers to make the browsing experience better. Let’s talk about the browsers:
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Internet Explorer 8
No matter how much people might hate the brand IE, IE 8 is a good browser, it’s not right up there IMO but it is by no means a bad browser, pretty much all commercial & business websites are supported by IE, it is the browser that is available out-of-the-box in the most widely used OS (sorry Europeans). It CANNOT be avoided by developers.
The Good:
Accelerators: I love them. They make browsing so much more easier, the most used Accelerator by me is the ‘Search’.
Web Slices: Mentioned a lot, implemented by a few, this is a neat feature to have. Don’t really know why it didn’t take off.
Tab Isolation & Session Management: The tab isolation & Session Management in IE works better than Chrome. This comes after using both these browsers for a sufficient amount of time.
Incorporates Windows 7 Superbar features: This is a neat feature, wherein if you have multiple tabs open, you can browse through them as if they were multiple windows.
Easy on resources
Syncs with Live Mail (desktop): Being a user of Live Mail for my RSS dose this is amazing.
The Bad:
No Download Manager: 8 versions done, yet somehow a download manager hasn’t made it into IE.
No rounded corners: From what I’ve heard this is because of Redmond not implementing some CSS/HTML feature or whatever. But it sucks not to have rounded corners.
A bit slow: This is true, IE is slow when it comes to loading pages. Note that I mentioned loading pages, IE does extremely good in responding to Ajax components like Videos & notifications in Facebook. Also, when opening a new tab, the ‘loading’ that comes for a noticeable time is irritating.
Inefficient Crash Recovery: Lets just say that my experience with IE’s Crash Recovery hasn’t been very positive.
Plugins: Unfortunately as widespread as it maybe developers haven’t really bothered with creating useful plugins for it which is definitely a dampener.
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Chrome
Chrome is a nice browser in a lot of aspects & responsiveness is not one of them, for me it lags a lot when browsing Ajax heavy websites. It freezes itself for a couple of seconds & then comes back to life, which essentially makes for a horrible browsing experience. I love the way Chrome shows the status bar.
The Good:
Clean interface: This probably is Chrome’s USP.
Easy on resources
Task Manager
The Bad:
Tabs on top: It’s not that you can’t get used to it, tabs on top make navigating tabs a bit more of a work (On a laptop with such small trackpads it is an annoyance.) Not to mention it’s difficult to drag & snap your Chrome windows in Windows 7 because of this. In general you can conclude that I hate tabs on top.
Can’t re-open recently closed tab
Response time: Here is where benchmarks don’t matter. Chrome decides to take small 10 second breaks every time I want to right click a link or I open a new tab. It does so on its own with no specific pattern. It just keeps on doing this. AND IT’S ANNOYING! It’s what I would call Browsing #FAIL! This might not be happening to every Chrome-user & that’s why I said, benchmarks don’t make or break browsers.
Plugins: As far as I’m concerned, they don’t exist. On a recommendation I tried installing a plugin it wanted me to switch to the Dev-Mode, Chrome kept on crashing every 15 minutes. IE’s got better plugin support than this!
No RSS Support
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Safari
Being an iTunes user not by choice but by compulsion, I thought Apple can’t code for Windows or they simply don’t want to write efficient code on Windows, but with Safari 4, I’m impressed. I love Safari 4 as a matter of fact it’s my default browser these days.
The Good:
Top Sites & History: The Cover-Flow display of Top Sites & History is so much more elegant as compared to Opera or Chrome. I simply browse my History for kicks in Safari 4.
Response Time: Much better than Chrome & Firefox on par with IE (this is ajax component loading on various sites.)
Incorporates Windows 7 Superbar features: Neither Chrome nor Firefox (add-on needed) make use of Windows 7’s Superbar features where you can browse through tabs like windows. Though I miss Jumplists, it’s still a lot better.
RSS Support
The Bad:
Address bar won’t search
No Tab Isolation
Can’t re-open recently closed tab: Sucks all the way. (Draft issue.)
Weird behavior with links: For some reason Safari 4 has an advanced annoying algo which opens some links in a new window & some in new tabs even though I’ve set the default to open new tabs.
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Firefox
Ah! Firefox the loved-by-all-but-is-still-a-crappy-browser.
Don’t be surprised I’ve been a Firefox user from 2.xx times, loved a lot of features that it has only to dump it since version 3 which is nothing less than bloatware. Hoping that 3.5 brings me back to it.
The Good:
Plugins & Themes: This is a huge reason to use Firefox, you can find plugins to do anything that you want, a huge developer community & an equally good repository backend. But then again it works against the browser as well, too many plugins spoil the broth.
Across platforms: This makes you feel at home when you’re playing with some other OS.
Crash recovery
Smart Location Bar
The Bad:
Resource hungry: The only reason I left Firefox was for the insane amount of RAM it consumed, even 2 tabs would clock over 200k which is outrageous.
Response time: Unlike Chrome’s behavior (which freezes for a couple of seconds), Firefox takes ages & I mean a really long time on first start, not to mention that if you were to minimize the windows & restore it after a couple of minutes, you can go make yourself some good juice for Firefox will freeze your machine for a good 5 minutes.
No Tab Isolation
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As good as implementing Windows 7’s features in the browser is, I haven’t held it against those who don’t ‘coz I’m expecting to see that in the near future.
All said & done about the browsers that I’ve found worth using & mentioning, here’s what my ideal browser would have:
- Memory consumption like that of IE 8
- Cover Flow
- Crash Recovery Console with session management & Tab Isolation
- Windows like access to User Profiles
- Nothing to do with Firefox or Chrome’s code thereby avoid any performance issues
- Firefox like community support for gazillion add-ons
- Chrome like status bar
- Syncs with Live Mail & is a RSS reader by itself
- A Download Manager
- Multi-platform support
- Sync bookmarks to cloud (yeah, that other browser does it.)
PS: Opera what?
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Just want to add that the recent builds of Chrome let you right click on a tab and reopen the last closed one. Also, I think it should have still been in Beta, with the lack of features in it. Specially no RSS support. And if new pages load slowly, you might want to uninstall it, delete all its history and cache and do a new clean one. It fixed the slowness issue for me.
Totally agree on the Safari point you say…Ever since the launch of Safari 4, Ive been using it over Firefox…And yes, again as rightfully mentioned, search support in the address bar would be nice.
One aspect you might have overlooked though is the handling of flash files in Chrome. They aren’t efficiently handled compared to other browsers. One more reason why no chrome for me…
+1 @Imran. Chrome can reopen closed tabs. I’m running Chrome 2.0. Don’t know what build you’re using.
@Imran, I did try re-installing but somehow the same issue kept coming, will again try some tweaks.
@Sengupta I’ve updated the post. Don’t know something could be messed up.
Exactly why won’t you try Opera? LOL, you have managed to make your post incomplete by not including Opera. If its a browser battle Opera has to be there, simply because Opera is an innovator. What opera does today, other browser will do it tommorow. Everytime a new build of fx comes out 60% of the key features are those already present in opera.
You need to experience Opera. It does things differently. The utility of everything in Opera maynot be obvious immediately, but once you get used to it you just wont be able to go back. You will find yourself falling for features that you never realised that you needed before. So stop being childish and try Opera (and I mean seriously try it).
Your idea browser list :
1. Opera is best at handling memory. It even autoclears the ram every 10 mins.
3. Has a crash recovery window. And in fact was the first to implement this.
4. Not sure what you mean by this but you can associate Opera with windows profiles (Default behaviour). If you login as a diff user you will be assigned different profile.
5. Check
6. No addons but has a very dedicated and active community ever ready to support you. You can customise i via toolbars, menu modifications, bookmarklets, panels, userjs and widgets.
7. Has inbuilt email client and an awesome rss reader.
8. Check
9. Check
10. You said it yourself.
Opera is the browser you are looking for. Accept it and move ahead.
Don’t like the name. :D :D Besides, I’m certain once I use it, I’ll find something missing there too :P
There you go. No valid reason. Give it a try dude. Opera is the closest thing to a perfect web browser. Another excellent browser is maxthon. But it uses the bullshit trident engine.
Maxthon sucks.
It has a better collection of features than safari, fx, chrome and IE.
Maxthon has some stuff even Opera doesnt have.
that’s what I’m trying to say … browser experience is beyond features & ACID tests. It might have the best of features but if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t. I tried Maxthon as a replacement to IE some time back (during IE 7’s time) and hated it.
Yeah. I can agree about Maxthon having some rough edges in its UI. But even that argument doesnt hold for Opera. While opera has a distinctive UI everything is just so well thought out.
I wonder if Opera is so awesome why its no where in terms of usage, even the “Open Source Community” chooses the bloatware Firefox over it. Having said that, on S60 devices, Opera is the only option & a good one at that.
For one Opera was paid and then ad-supported. So at the moment when the alternate browser movement started opera wasn’t able to capitalise.
Anyway, you will be in a better position to answer this question as you are one of those people who just wont bother to try Opera due to some ingrained notion.
And marketshare doesnt always reflect the quality of a product.
oh ok I’ll try Opera sometime soon. Cool?
lol..hopefully u will really give it a fair chance..and if u need help myopera.com is always thre.
And now with the new features in opera 10 beta, it has become the most awesomest browser ever built. Features like fridge for notes leaving, music sharing, file sharing from the browser itself, this has made Opera awesome. Although hackers might find a loophole and make the machine that is sharing music and files zombies!!