Ah, the Internet browser. A simple software that opens the world to you right at your desk - surfing the information superhighway so to speak. While browsers used to be simple a affair with basic functions, they have since come a long way. No longer do folks want to just read pieces of text off the web, browsers these days offer greater functionality for users, from video playback to online games or even basic office productivity tools (like Google Docs).
Therefore it's no surprise to find that browsers are very much in the forefront of the competition that's heating among the good folks who make the browsers that we are using. Cloud computing is very much on their minds as more as more applications moving onto the web. As such, browsers that can handle more complex functions easily, offer speedy response and good compatibility are the trump cards to entice users to make the switch.
While Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been the dominant force in the browser market for quite a while now, it has seen its market share dipping steadily the past year while Mozilla's Firefox browser has been steadily inching its share upwards. Apple's Safari and Opera's Opera browser are also hanging at the sidelines, while Google decided to join in the fray last year with its own Chrome browser.
Google's Chrome has certainly shaken things up with its blazing performance, but other browsers too have speed improvements in the works, with Mozilla prepping Minefield, the next version of Firefox that promises to be faster than Chrome. Of course, Google wasn't going to take this sitting down and has released Chrome 2.0 beta, and have claimed that its 2.0 version brings to the table even more speed increases, though whether the final build of Minefield or Chrome 2.0 is faster remains to be seen. Apple, too hasn't been quiet and has also released a beta version of Safari 4, with touted speed improvements.
Of course we can't neglect the software giant Microsoft who recently struck back with its eight version of its web browser. Even though it is the first browser to break its beta duck, IE8 looks to be a solid contender and offers plenty of speed refinements among other improvements over its older versions.
With so much competition going on, we decided to take a snapshot view of how all the latest browser builds from the various vendors match up at this point of time, even though they are in a beta stage. We'll be giving you a detailed rundown of the browser wards over the following pages.
Test Methodology
For our browser wars showdown, we decided to go with the latest version of each available browser. This means we'll be using the beta versions of the browsers or the live version if there no available betas to test. For this article, we'll be looking at the five most popular browsers in the market:- IE8, Firefox (Minefield), Opera 10 Aplha, Safari 4 Beta and Chrome 2.0 Beta.
There are of course other browsers available like Konqueror, Amaya, Flock, but we'll be giving these three a miss this time around as they aren't quite as popular as the five that we're looking at.
We'll rate each browser based on three factors:
- Features
- Performance/Speed
- Compatibility
We've used a freshly installed system using the Windows XP operating system and has the following specifications:
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz)
- RAM: 2GB DDR2-667 memory
- HDD: 200GB HDD
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS
Features
As mentioned earlier, browsers these days do more than just surfing the web. With add-ons, plug-ins and extensions, browsers now deliver rich interactive media content right to your desktop with ease. Some browsers also offer additional security enhancements to ensure a safer browsing experience or GUI improvements for better surfing experience.
For this section, we'll be looking at what each browser has to offer and listed some of the more interesting features for you reference.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8
We've covered in detail what the new browser has to offer, so if you would ike a more in-depth read, , feel free to hop on by to the articles. Otherwise, here's a quick round up of what Internet Explorer 8 has to offer for current IE users or folks thinking to make a switch.
Accelerators - Accelerators offer users of IE8 to quickly jump where they need to go. Highlight a text and a button pops up. Click on it, and you'll be able to quickly access services to search the line of text, whether be it an address (to a map) or just a phrase (to run through a search engine). Just some convenience features to shave off those seconds.
Web Slices - Think RSS feeds, but in a visual form. If the website supports it, you can easily grab a "slice" of the page that you can view directly without visiting the page. There are not many websites that have this support at the moment, but you can expect more popular sites to eventually support this thanks to the software giant making its presence felt.
Phishing Security - IE8 now comes with improved security in the form of a phishing blocker, warning users when a malicious site is detected.
Compatibility View - In a bid to ensure that users who are upgrading to the new IE8 are still able to surf their favorite sites without problems, IE8 has come up with compatibility view, a one-click button allowing users to view websites using the older engine.
InPrivate Browsing - Need to hide your surfing habits from anyone else sharing your computer
? The InPrivate feature allows you to do so without leaving a trace on your computer. Bear in mind though, whatever you download and save to your PC will still be present.
Mozilla's Firefox 3.6 Alpha (Minefield)
Mozilla's Minefield latest alpha is basically the next version for Firefox and boasts of speed increases via TraceMonkey while tacking on other features such as Private browsing and multi-touch support. This is of course, in addition to current available features already present on Minefield like extensions, for example. On the other hand however, Minefield remains low on extra features that other browsers have and require the aforesaid extensions to provide this missing functionality. The main reason for this however, is to reduce bloat and keep the browser 'light'. This does not mean that the browser is missing in features but it is more streamlined. Here are some of the browser's highlights:-
Extensions - As mentioned above, the Extensions capability of Minefield is what makes the browser attractive to most users. While the browser runs fine by itself, users can choose to add-on features that suit their needs. Though it's not new, it's still a very important feature for the browser.
TraceMonkey - The latest beta build uses TraceMonkey, an add-on to Minefield's JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey to boost performance by up to 20-40 per cent.
Private Browsing - Minefield also jumps on the private browsing bandwagon with this feature in its latest build, allowing users to enjoy what Safari, Chrome and IE8 browsers have.
Multi-touch Support - The latest beta adds multi-touch support for the browser, allowing users to easily navigate via flicks, gestures and twists.
Tab Thumbnails - Now you can easily see what lies in your tab when you're dragging it out. Also, a new tab management system is in place that you can access via Ctrl+Tab (seen in the picture below).
All these are in addition to what's already available on current builds of the 3.0.8 live version. On an additional note, these changes are interesting enough for Mozilla to update the version number from 3.1 (the original planned beta release) to 3.5. Despite the improvements made, it's interesting to see that Mozilla reckons this build is not version 4.0 as they already have other plans for that build.
Opera 10 Alpha
With everyone vendor tweaking their browser for increased performance and responsiveness, Opera too has a fresh new version that aims to increase user experience. Opera 10 promises to be 30 percent faster via a new Opera Presto 2.2 engine (compared to the older Presto 2.1) and offer better compatibility support. These of course, aren't just the only features so let's take a look at the rest shall we?
Opera Presto 2.2 - Opera's newest rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2, will be the foundation for all future Opera products and claims better performance than the older Opera Presto 2.1 engine used in Opera 9.5.
Spell Check - Minefield already offers this, but having a built-in spell checker is something we never could disagree for any browser. Finally Opera will have this natively soon. So if you're a heavy Google Docs user, this will come in really handy.
While the Alpha release of Opera 10 is lacking in features, do note that this is really an Alpha release targeted at delivering the speed promises that Opera wanted to showcase over its predecessor. We'll have to wait a little more to see what other new features Opera 10 will bring in the Beta version, so for now, we'll just make do with a few highlights from the existing Opera 9.5 which we feel are some of its important traits:-
Download Manager - Opera's download manager is strong in the Force perhaps, with capabilities such as doubling up as a Bit Torrent client in addition to the standard pause, resume, start download controls found in better download managers.
Mouse Gestures - Don't waste time moving your mouse cursor up and down to hit the back button when a simple flick with the right mouse button held down will allow you to traverse back and forth between webpages. Scrolling through the tabs is also an easy affair with the mouse gesture feature which uses the right mouse button and the scroll wheel.
Image Loading - Image loading here refers to how Opera is able to load a webpage with the graphics disabled. A simple yet functional idea that allows you to get right into the gist of the webpage's text without waiting for the image servers
to play catch up. This also helps ease accessing overloaded websites too.
Apple's Safari 4 Beta
Speed, speed and more speed! Yes, even Safari 4 is not safe from the need for speeding up and has added SquirrelFish as its new JavaScript engine to help beat its competition. That's not the only change that Apple's browser is going through though. This time around, it looks like Safari has been influenced with a Top Sites tool that's similar to Opera's Speed Dial and a more sleek and streamlined tab page that borrows heavily from Google's Chrome. Here are Safari 4 Beta's key highlights:-
Cover Flow - Browse through your history or bookmarks with Cover Flow like how you would view stuff in OSX or your music in iTunes. Sure it's flashy, but it's a flashy way of doing things.
Top Sites - We've mentioned the Top Sites features above, but it's still an interesting feature to highlight - though we did notice that it was quite slow to load when it first started (as it pulled a thumbnail of each website to display). Subsequent start-ups were much speedier though.
Tabs on Top - Like Chrome, the tabs are now located right on top, maximizing your screen space with even more content. Strangely enough, it even looks similar to how Chrome manages its tabs. However with both browsers using WebKit as a foundation, we suppose some similarities are bound to occur.
Native Looks - Instead of forcing the browser to look like it was running on OSX while on Windows, Safari 4 visually adapts to the OS it's running on so there's no need to re-skin your desktop themes to make it compatible with the browser; this time around, the browser adapts to your theme.
Nitro Engine - Safari 4 claims to be the world's fastest browser with off-the-charts performance for web applications. Sounds like SquirrelFish is working overtime but we'll see how true this is in our performance section.
Google's Chrome V2.0 Beta
If we had to hazard an educated guess - we would probably say it was around the time when the first version of Chrome went live, folks started taking note that browsers were capable of being fast. At that time, Chrome was the king of speed with its JavaScript V8 engine, though the upcoming versions of other browsers have claimed to beat it. Google isn't going to stand still, and the latest Chrome V2.0 offers even greater speed improvements with a 35 per cent boost to the original V8 engine. Here's the main improvements you can expect coming your way:-
Side By Side View - Chrome is unique for being able to drag your tabs out and then easily merging it back into the main browser window. Chrome V2.0 however, builds upon it with the ability to drag a tab out and getting both tabs to automatically resize side by side.
Full Page Zoom - With the latest version of WebKit comes Full Page Zoom, which allows you to zoom into your web page while keeping everything in proper perspective (something the current version of Chrome doesn't handle well). Of course, this is already present in other browsers but it's still worth a mention as Chrome originally lacks this.
Faster V8 Engine- Google has made improvements on Chrome V2.0 JavaScript V8 engine and it's supposed to be even faster than before, and we'll be sure to put this to the test shortly.
There's not a lot of features added for the second version of Chrome, but it has always been more of a no frills, zippy and fast browser though we won't be surprised if Google decides to tag on other stuff before releasing the final version.
Performance Benchmarking
Putting our browsers to the test is the ever reliable SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, which measures the performance and speed of the browser's JavaScript engine. With each browser claiming to be faster than the other, it would be interesting to see how these claims hold up. For our other performance indicator, we've also thrown in Google's V8 benchmark suite into the fray, but we won't be too surprised if the results seem skewed towards Google's Chrome. Next, to test the graphical rendering features of the browser, we used a simple SVG and Canvas test to see how each browser handled the workload dished out. Whether the other browsers will live up to their claims as a fast browser remains to be seen, but we have high hopes for all of them. Finally, our last performance test would be to load 20 tabs of webpages and see how long it takes for each browser to fully load all of them.
SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
Latency isn't really an issue for this test as it is more focused on how fast the JavaScript engine is able to render and finish the individual tests that form the whole of the SunSpider benchmarking suite. So don't be alarmed to find that the scores are reported in milliseconds, as it's more indicative of how fast the test completes as opposed to the more standard form of measurement for latency.
Generally speaking, our test scores showed that the fastest browser is still Chrome V2.0 Beta, with scores that easily outperform the rest of them. IE8 is still lagging behind the others with performance that's six times slower than Chrome, though it's still much faster than IE7, when we did a quick reference test. It's quite interesting to see how the beta versions of the upcoming browsers were so much faster than the non-beta IE8 browser. Even more interesting is that Safari 4 Beat managed to beat everyone but its fellow WebKit browser (Chrome). Then again, it's probably no surprise here, since SunSpider is designed by WebKit and Safari 4 as well as Chrome is based on WebKit.
V8 Benchmark Suite
Google's V8 test is much more stressful on the browsers. While it's safe to say that Google's Chrome will perform well in this test, we were looking forward to see how the rest managed this. Take note that larger scores are better here. The result? None of the other browsers did as well as Chrome, though Safari came through with very good scores. Minefield and Opera didn't fare too well here followed by IE8 taking up the rear position again. While it may be argued that the V8 test is more suited for a browser with a V8 JavaScript Engine, do note that Safari 4 scored better on two tests compared to Chrome and actually managed pretty well on the rest of the individual tests too (in relative comparison to the other browsers).
SVG and Canvas Test
It's a really simple test that anyone can try, but it also helps to show how good the browsers are at handling Scalable Vector Graphics and the canvas element (in HTML5). This time around, we got a mixed bag of results, though do note that IE8 was unable to complete this test as it doesn't support SVG and canvas. Looking at the results, it seems like Opera 10 is probably the overall best for both SVG and canvas. Minefield on the other hand, while having the similar results for both tests, was much slower compared to Opera.
Safari and Chrome did much better on the Canvas test, which is somewhat understandable if you know about the origins of the Canvas element, Webkit and Apple. Apple basically created Webkit and canvas for use in the Safari browser. As Chrome is also based on WebKit, you can see why both browsers are able to perform much better on the canvas aspect of the test.
Real World Application Testing and Memory Loading
On to real world testing, we've loaded each browser with a set of 20 different web pages (a total of 20 tabs) to see how fast each browser takes to finish loading and rendering all of the requested websites. Understandably, we did worry about how latency would affect this test since it does play an important part for this test, but to our luck, our connection remained stable during the multiple runs for each browser to ensure that latency isn't a big factor. Not surprisingly, Chrome turns out to be the zippiest among the lot, with Minefield and Opera very close behind. Safari doesn't fare too badly either but again, you'll find IE8 right at the back of the lot. We do like to point out though that Safari 4 may be faster, but we experienced some odd freezes when loading the 20 pages that may have been a cause of its slower performance despite doing so well on the other tests.
For another point of comparison, we'll be checking the memory load of each browser when all 20 tabs have finished loading to see which browser hogs up the most memory. From being the fastest browser, Chrome ends up as the worst browser in this comparison. This is because of the way the browser is designed with each tab treated as a separate process with its own memory allocation. Opera comes out as the lightest of the lot, followed by Minefield, IE8 and Safari. Of course, do note that as these browsers are still in alpha and beta stages, they may be lacking in features that could possibly end up using up more resources.
Acidic Compatibility
With all the browsers having successfully passed the Acid 2 compatibility test (yes, even Internet Explorer 8), it's time to look at a more challenging test in the form of Acid 3. Opera and Safari easily pass the test with a perfect score, while Minefield and Chrome get almost close but fail to pass the hurdle. IE8, well, barely gets anything done right and fares the worst of all five browsers.
Internet Explorer 8
Mozilla Minefield 3.6 Alpha
Opera 10 Alpha
Safari 4 Beta
Google Chrome V2.0 Beta
Concluding the Show
Internet Explorer
If browsers were beauty pageant contestants, then we probably would have an easier time deciding on a winner. Unfortunately, each browser has its own set of strengths that help it to stay relevant for different groups of users. But going with the same analogy, and assuming that each browser was a contestant, we're afraid that Internet Explorer 8 would like most other longstanding contestants be good enough to represent the country but not good enough to win the better titles. It's weakness in the performance department leaves much to be desired but it does have some neat features and has improved tremendously over its predecessors.
Firefox (Minefield)
Minefield on the other hand, would probably be like a Miss Venezuela, always hovering around the wings, occasionally winning the title, but sometimes failing to get ahead of the other contenders. Sure Minefield does fine and the newest alpha, Minefield 3.6, has plenty of speed improvements and features that does the vendor proud. It also retains much of the functionality that makes the browser so popular with more savvy users. Sadly though, Minefield 3.6 Alpha doesn't exactly lead the pack this time around in terms of performance and comes in fourth overall.
Opera 10
Opera 10 Alpha, while not doing too well in the performance aspect despite its claims, still has a lot going for it. Memory bloat is the lowest among all the browsers, while SVG and canvas rendering was amongst the speediest. While it's still lacking in new features (being an Alpha), the browser still has a lot going for folks who like to keep things streamlined. Think of Opera 10 as the veritable second runner up in a pageant. There's room for improvement, but not enough to beat the two others ahead for the crown.
Safari 4
Safari 4 Beta on the other hand, manages better performance against all the other browsers (but one) though its somewhat let down by its appearances when run on a Windows operating system. It does make up for this with a much flashier interface that's borrowed from Apple's best designs. Though it's certainly pretty by any book, Safari 4 lacks the strength to beat its WebKit cousin Chrome even though it has its own strengths. A fitting first runner-up by any book.
Chrome V2.0
Our most promising browser with arguably the best performance of the lot (though lacking in some features which are promised to come soon), the Google Chrome V2.0 keeps its throne as the fastest browser yet, though it comes at the cost of a heavier memory bloat compared to the rest. While Safari 4 looks like it borrowed some elements of Chrome for its latest update, Chrome easily retains the minimalistic feel that has served it well so far.
Ending Thoughts
At the end of the day though, while performance does matter for some folks, it really boils down to the user experience and the drive to try something new. Folks who have sworn by Internet Explorer since forever will probably not want to venture too much out of their comfort zone despite reading up on what the other browsers can do or change the way they use the internet. Folks who have been at the forefront of trying stuff would probably have given all the other browsers a spin and found something that they like. Then there are some who might be unsatisfied at what's available and are probably still looking for "the one" so to speak.
Whether or not you are one of the above folks (or perhaps you defy all description?), we hope that you have gained something from this article, be it a new appreciation of the other browsers or simply just getting a preview and an idea of how the other browsers are fairing in their latest development build.
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