Web Browsers: Part 5: Mozilla Firefox
And finally, we arrive at the most used web browser (behind Internet Explorer). Many people consider this the best web browser bandwidth can download.
There are actually two different realms within the Firefox world, that is, with and without add-ons.
While many users use Firefox for the speed and enhanced security it offers over Internet Explorer even without add-ons, other users are more concerned with the huge customization potential of the browser.
Without Add-ons
The browser without add-ons is very similar to every other web browser. Obviously it has it’s own look, vastly different from that of Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and much less scatterbrained. To me, the browser is logical. Buttons do not seem to be haphazardly placed. The back button is larger than the forward button, I imagine because it used quite frequently.
It is relatively fast, faster than IE and Opera but slower than Safari and Chrome.
Safety precautions built into the browser are nice for the average user, but can be a nuisance for more advanced persons. If you attempt to access a webpage suspected of phishing, the browser will come up with a page stating exactly that. The website is suspected of phishing, and you should not proceed. It then has a button to go back to the previous page. Unfortunately, the continue button is hidden, and rather difficult to find (which I suppose may be a good thing so that some users that do not read error messages and such do not click right past the warning).
Stability, stability, stability. For the most part Firefox is incredibly stable. Very rarely do I see a Firefox without add-ons crash.
Firefox also does an excellent job of showing you webpages, but because of this, it partially promotes laziness on the webpage developers.
Verdict
What it really comes down to is that Mozilla’s Firefox is a great browser. It does what it needs to do, and for the most part, it does it very well.
EDIT: I did completely forget about this. With the recent versions of Firefox (>3.0) the browser seems to have a massive memory leak. It will continually eat up your RAM more and more until it just crashes out, and often when it crashes you cannot restore your tabs. While not a major concern for most people who just browse the internet for a few minutes at a time, people that leave their browsers on almost all the time, and often have 10+ tabs open will find it very frustrating. If you are one of these people I highly recommend Opera instead.
Web Browsers: Part 4: Apple Safari 4
Generally Windows ports of Apple products take up a lot of system resources, are slow, crash often, and do not even work right. Without even using the Apple versions of these products, this much can be discerned.
From what I have noticed Safari is exactly what it advertises to be. A web browser, with an RSS reader. This is both good and bad. On the one hand this means that the developers can focus on making that one thing work very very well. On the down side, this means that you don’t have a very nice all-in-one program for handling practically anything the web could throw at you.
The new safari has some really nice features, and has very good integration with Windows 7, which is surprising considering that when Windows Vista came out Apple refused to support it for as long as they could.
The Look
I have never been a particular fan of Safari. I tried Safari 3 for Windows a few years ago and hated the way it looked. While not a major improvement, a few minor tweaks altered the look enough that it is now very visually appealing. The grayish-silver style Safari uses is very easy on the eyes, it does not strain them like Black on White does. Everything is right where you expect it to the preferences are very easy to find.
I particularly enjoyed the download manager that Safari has. Alternating colors of off-white and sky-blue separate each individual download from one another. The status bar used is very visually appealing. It is solid blue with white “pulses” streaming down it at regular intervals. It looks pretty.
The “Top Sites,” what is shown when you open a new tab, also looks very good. It is similar to Opera’s Quick Dial, and Google Chrome’s Favourite Sites, and many addons for FireFox including quick dial, and fast dial. It discovers what your most frequently visited sites are and places them on a large grid of the sites that you visit the most. After first instillation there are many popular sites as placeholders. You can edit this at any time, removing sites, pinning the ones you want to keep on the page, and adding sites that you want displayed.
Speed and Resource Usage
Safari is much faster than it used to be on Windows. Loading web pages almost immediately (assuming you have a fast connection). It no longer balks at flash, or javascript, nor really any of the things that it used to have trouble with. The problem however, is that it is currently using 184MiB of RAM, and 2-7% of my CPU. While they seem to have fixed the speed problem, it seems to be using more memory than ever. (Comparatively FireFox is only using 80MiB of RAM, but nearly 15% of my CPU).
Security
I never really tried to access in shady sites in Safari. I am not confident in it’s security. Unfortunately there do not seem to be in customizeable Javascript controls, decent adblock, or any other serious security measures. I’m sure the developers have coded in security measures of some sort (though they don’t really need to for it’s intended operating system), but I am not confident in that fact.
Other
Safari is much more open in it’s interpretation of Code than Opera is. This means that your website does not have to strictly conform to the .html standards for Safari to properly display it. As far as I could tell, Safari nearly fully supports CSS and Javascript, and pretty much everything else the web can throw at it.
While not only interpreting html in it’s strict format is nice for the end user, it promotes laziness in web-developers, as does FireFox, which is a little annoying, but at least it displays nearly everything well.
Up Next: Mozilla Firefox (with and without addons)
Web Browsers: Part 3: Opera 10
As stated in Browsers: Part 1: Opera 9; I have been testing Opera 10 for the last few weeks.
As with Opera 9, I like it. They have vastly upgraded the interface, and now it is much more pretty. However, they seem to have taken something from Microsoft’s books, making it look very pretty but totally non-functional. It is rather difficult to find many things which I found so easily in Opera 9.
As far as features go, from what I could tell everything that was in Opera 9 is still present. Quickdial is still there, and that was always a welcome feature. I didn’t really get a chance to mess around with the e-mail system in Opera 10, mostly because I didn’t want to screw up my IMAP synchronization. Nor did I get a chance to play with the IRC, Bittorrent, or many other features, but I expect they are much the same as they were in Opera 9, not the best, but at least functional.
The visual aspect of Opera 10, as I previously mentioned, is fantastic. At the top of the screen for tabs, you can pull the section down, and the tabs become a small preview of the page inside of that tab. It isn’t big enough to actually read anything, but at the very least it gives you an idea of what is inside of that tab. Alternitively you can also hover over the tab and it also gives you a preview. Something I discovered quite by accident is that when you have the permanent tab-preview open, if you hover on it, another preview is shown just below your mouse, as it would as if it was another tab. Redundancies of this type are rather annoying.
As with Opera 9, Opera 10 still suffers formatting certain webpages, a problem I have never run into in Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox.
Overall Opera 10 is a decent webbrowser. It isn’t lightning fast, but it does it’s many jobs well.
Up next: Apple Safari 4.
Web Browsers: Part 2: Google Chrome
Google Chrome came out about… a year ago now I believe, in a beta stage. Now it has been released on Windows (XP+ officially, it may work on older systems) as a fully stable browser, which is somewhat true.
I have used Google Chrome off and on ever since then. It has always been relatively stable, though I have had some problems. It seems to be fully compatible with every website that I have gone to, no problems with CSS or Javascript, or flash, or anything that I have encountered.
The visual style is, to me, appealing. It is minimalistic. Everything just makes sense. I love the way that every tab almost looks seems like its own window. Being able to pull the tabs out of the current window, to create a new one, is very seamless. Reordering the tabs is visually appealing as well, to me the visual aspect was definitely thought through.
Unfortunately Google has not officially opened up Firefox-esque addons as was promised. They are available in the “developer” version of the browser (appending -dev into the executable path in a shortcut). I definitely miss my AdBlock+ and NoScript extensions, as well as a few others that are more just personal preference than a practically globally used addon.
One of the biggest things that Google advertised as, pretty much, the main selling point of Chrome, was that each individual tab had it’s own process in Chrome’s own Task Manager. This is excellent, if it worked. I have done a few tests on it, both intentional and unintentional. When browsing with several tabs open I happened upon a website that crashed Chrome. I attempted to access the Chrome Task Manager to no avail, and had to restart the browser completely. This happened each time I ran into a crash-causing website.
Overall I have to rate Google Chrome very high. It is extremely user-friendly, visually appealing, fast, and stable.
The minuses are that it doesn’t have any add-on customization; the ToS was a little weird at first, but they quickly changed that; and also the “each tab has it’s own separate process” draw doesn’t work as intended.
EDIT:
I finally ran into a browser tab actually killing itself and not the entire browser. That was really nice, because I had some kind-of important stuff open!
Also, the browser is now working in Linux! I am using the latest version of Arch Linux using KDE 4.3. I installed Google Chrome through the Arch Users Repository. There are a couple of problems with it, firstly that I have to run it as a super user to be able change any settings. This of course makes it hard to download anything, since anything I do download will be owned by my root account, and I won’t be able to edit it, open it for anything, BUT! At least Google Chrome is out for Linux, and that’s all that matters to me right now.
Web Browsers Part 1: Opera 9
Over the next month or so I will be posting some personal reviews of the most popular browsers: Opera 9, Opera 10, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, KDE Konqueror.
I like Opera. I really do.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was an adamant user of Opera 9. I was pretty excited for Opera 10, though not completely thrilled; I thought the whole facial gestures thing was, well to be frank, retarded. Mouse gestures are bad enough, why would I want to make faces at the computer screen??
So back on topic, I used Opera 9 for, oh lets say six months (that sounds right to me). I like it a lot. It was really nice to have my mail, my RSS feeds, and my web-browser all in one application. Opera link is also pretty cool, you can sync bookmarks, and notes, but not e-mails (I guess that is what IMAP is for, right?). That is really frustrating. I like IMAP, but I want to see the exact same thing in each browser, that wasn’t going to happen. Oh well, it’s still an awesome browser.
I will mention the apps were really bad in Opera 9.
Opera has always been slower than FireFox. That’s just the way it is. It really isn’t too noticeable, until you use it constantly, and you really notice it gets sluggish, especially when loading images, or long pages.
Ultimately that is what made me switch away from Opera 9 back to Firefox. I just love the Fox.
Currently I am trying out Opera 10. After a few weeks usage I will report back on how that works.