Most people don’t give a second thought about surfing the web — just hit the big blue “e,” and you’re off to the races. However, the truth of the matter is that there is quite a wide selection of browsers that will all get the job done — to one degree or another.
The fact of the matter is that your web browser is your closest, most personal link to the web. Your browser is the constant amidst a sea of ever-changing web pages and applications. There is no one “great” web browser because there is no one set way to use the web — everyone does things in their own way. Therefore, I believe the best browser is one that stays out of the way. As a web developer, I don’t want my viewers distracted by a clunky interface or by bothersome incompatibility errors. Put simply, I want people to use a browser that “just works.”
To that end, I evaluated three of the most widely used browsers against that “golden rule” of minimalism and functionality. I also limited my search to free browsers. Although commercial browsers are a rarity nowadays, they do in fact exist and may merit some consideration as well. However, the free options comprise virtually the entire market, so I decided not to write about them here.
Internet Explorer — IE is undoubtedly the Goliath of the browser world. Bundled with every release of Windows since 1995, current estimates place IE’s market share at easily over 75 percent of all browsers. IE has a long and storied history at Microsoft, having landed the software giant in antitrust court at the end of the last millennium.
Despite your feelings towards Microsoft — and in my line of work, those are usually unequivocally bad feelings — IE is certainly the browser that most of you are likely to have used at one point or another. The latest edition, version seven, was released at the end of 2006 and comes pre-installed with Windows Vista. Users of Windows XP SP2 can also install IE7 as a free software update.
IE7 marked the first major upgrade to Internet Explorer in over five years. With Microsoft facing renewed competition after winning the browser wars of the 90s, the folks in Redmond decided the time had come to up the ante, and that they did. IE7 comes with a completely revamped interface, which is a huge improvement over previous versions. The new look is much more streamlined, providing for a more pleasant experience. IE7 also introduced a tabbed browsing feature, allowing you to keep multiple pages open within the same window. Tabs comprise an insanely useful feature that nearly every browser — including all of those reviewed here today — had already provided before IE.
Although IE7 is a huge improvement — if you are still using IE6 or earlier versions, stop reading this column and go upgrade now — I still find the overall browsing experience to be clunky, stodgy and unpleasant. Simply put IE is a slow browser — on modern hardware, it is slow to boot up, it is slow to load pages, it is slow to open a new tab, etc., etc. Additionally, despite being the dominant player in the market, IE is lacking in features. It has a rendering engine that can only be described as “screwed up beyond all hope of recovery,” and it has only a limited capability for third-party extensions. With these shortcomings, I simply cannot recommend IE for use beyond those corner cases of the Internet that insist on IE for compatibility.
Firefox — Firefox is the free, open source offspring of Netscape, the original mass-market web browser that Microsoft used its powerful monopoly to crush into oblivion. In the last four years, Firefox has enjoyed soaring popularity, accruing an aura of attractiveness that has drawn a market share of approximately 17 percent. Firefox is available for download on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and for the latter it (or any of various derivatives) is usually the default browser.
Firefox is the Swiss Army knife of web browsers. It provides a powerful extensions interface that lets you choose from hundreds of third-party modules to add on to the core browser’s functionality. For example, one of the most popular Firefox extensions is Adblock, which allows you to filter out all advertisements from the web pages you visit. Using extensions, you can construct a browsing experience that is highly tuned to your own personal needs. However, you also have to be careful with extensions — installing too many can create a ton of clutter and can cause Firefox to become slow and bloated.
The currently released version, Firefox 2, also has some performance issues. Firefox is slow to start up, and if you saddle it with too many extensions it can become even slower than IE. Also, Firefox 2 is prone to a particular problem in software architecture known as “memory leaking.” If left open for too long, Firefox can expand to take up much more of your computer’s memory than it actually needs. This can cause your computer to become slow and unresponsive, and can even cause crashes. Mozilla has a new version of Firefox in development right now, with a release tentatively scheduled for this summer. My testing with Firefox 3 was very positive — developers have addressed many of the most important performance issues, and Mac users will definitely appreciate the more polished and Mac-like interface in OS X. With a strong present and a bright future, I’d highly recommend trying out Firefox if you haven’t already.
Safari — Apple’s entry into the browser market is the both the most recently introduced and the least used. Born in 2003, Safari has been the default browser on Mac OS X since version 10.3 in 2005. However, unlike IE, Safari is no longer limited to a single operating system; Apple introduced Safari for Windows last year, and now users of both environments can use the browser.
Safari is my own browser of choice, both in OS X and Windows, because it best fulfills my desire for an unspoiled browsing experience. Especially in Safari 3, which shipped with Leopard, Apple has embraced a very light-weight design philosophy and programming architecture that provides for a very pleasant browsing experience. In general, the browser is fast and responsive, and the underlying WebKit rendering engine combined with Apple’s Quartz graphics engine generally renders pages in a very smooth and aesthetically pleasing manner. Safari is also one of relatively few browsers that can pass the Acid2 web standards test, meaning that it properly implements the core technologies that web developers use to produce their web pages.
Despite this standards compliance, ironically, Safari’s biggest problem is in fact compatibility. As Safari only has market share of less than six percent, many web developers elect to code improperly, with an eye toward appeasing IE and Firefox’s idiosyncrasies rather than developing well-structured code. Fortunately, as Macs and other web-ready Apple devices like iPhone and iPod touch gain popularity, this problem is well on its way to solving itself. Unfortunately though, it is still sometimes necessary to switch to another browser to use certain web sites.
Apple’s growing popularity also raises another problem with Safari: security. As a relatively obscure browser, Safari has not been subjected to the intense spotlight that Internet Explorer or even Firefox have endured. As a consequence, there may very well be security vulnerabilities that have simply not been discovered yet. For instance, at the CanSecWest, a computer security conference that was held in Vancouver, Canada last week, hackers were able to take down a brand new MacBook Air within two hours by exploiting an “undisclosed vulnerability” in Safari.
Despite these problems, I still find Safari to be the best of these three major browsers. With time, Safari can only become more hardened and the Web more standards-compliant. At the same time, however, there are definitely exciting things on the horizon with the other browsers as well. Firefox 3 is a tremendous improvement and will be released later this year, while Microsoft is hard at work on Internet Explorer 8, which allegedly will be able to pass the Acid2 test.
Bottom line: anyone who says the “browser wars” are over is just plain wrong. And you know what? It’s a good thing for us, because competition is clearly forcing all major players to up the ante and deliver better products.