Element Fusion

In part one of my "Browsers, browsers everywhere" series, I focused on the topic of mobile browsing. Here in part two, I'm going to discuss desktop browsers, comparing and contrasting them to a degree. Strap in for some fun because here we go.

IE6

Internet Explorer 6 is the old man of the group. It's prime passed long ago yet people continue to use it. It’s hard to believe that IE6 was released August 27th, 2001. That makes it around 75 years old in Internet years and in Chinese-Women’s-Olympic-Gymnastics years, it is even older. The funny thing is that it still has a 20.2% usage so you can’t totally ignore it. It is doing things no one intended it to do or created it to do. Ask any web developer you know and they will confirm that IE6 causes them many headaches because of all of the CSS/HTML hacks they use to get it to look similar to the other browsers.

I’m trying really hard but I can’t find any positive things to say about it. Many large companies such as 37 Signals and Apple's MobileMe service have dropped IE6 support altogether. They argue that by supporting IE6 it is hindering progress because they create new features and have to spend time fixing them for IE6 rather than moving forward with more features for the browsers that work well. IE Death March is a site proposing that everyone ceases support for the old browser in March of 2009. If you have a friend or family member still using IE6, please let them know about all the other wonderful, newer browsers out there. Like Obama says, “It’s time for a change.”

IE7

It’s hard to believe that IE7 is two years old now. When released, it ushered in a whole new era for Microsoft and they way they think about how web browser development should work. Some might say it was rushed because of the popularity of Firefox, yet it has turned into a viable browser option. On the positive side, non-computer people find it to be an easy update on the computer and there are many new options and plug-ins for it. Along with a new, cleaner layout, IE7 brought in those tabs made ever-popular by other browsers. IE7 for the most part has been a good browser. Developers still have to use some hacks and other tricks in the CSS/HTML to work with it, but it is greatly improved over IE6. IE7 seems like the middle child now that we know IE8 is right around the corner. However, it has served its time well.

Safari

Safari has grown up from a Mac-only browser to now supporting PC. One of the best things about Safari is that it is built upon the WebKit Open Source Project web browser engine which offers many benefits. The javascript engine that it uses makes Safari one of the fastest browsers available. Safari also is the most standards-compliant browser available. One nice feature is its tabbed browsing that allows you to click and drag a tab, have it open up as its own window, and then bring it back in if needed.

One of the best features of Safari for web people is the built-in web inspector. This allows you to look at the CSS/HTML of a site on a code level and see why something does or does not work. This is very similar to the Firebug plugin in Firefox, but it is built into the browser structure which makes it even better. Although they have a Windows version of Safari, I find myself only using it for testing purposes and not for actual browsing.

Firefox

Currently Firefox 3 is the king of browsers pulling in an impressive 44% usage as of October 2008. Firefox, also a free and open source browser, first came to the browser war November 9, 2004. The beauty of Firefox is the plethora of plug-ins and add-ons available for it. Such plug-ins as the web developer toolbar and Firebug have made web development and troubleshooting easier. There are tons of other plug-ins that are not web developer related and that allow the typical user to have a personalized browsing experience. The downside to this is speed and memory consumption. The Mozilla foundation has made great progress with Firefox 3 to reduce the memory leaks and crashes that occurred in earlier versions.

Because Firefox is open source, bugs and issues are tackled by users and the community and not just a company by itself. This has enabled them to be on top of security issues and tackle them faster than other browsers. This is one reason that I recommend Firefox to many IE6 users.

Firefox will celebrate its fourth birthday in a couple of days. An update to Firefox is on its way that promises to dramatically speed it up and improve other features as well.

Chrome

Rumors about a Google-created browser have been circulating the Internet for a long time. These rumors were fulfilled this year. Chrome is a newcomer to the browser wars, but it came with a mission and its first jump was a good one. Currently, it is at 3.0% browser market share, but that is sure to increase as more people become familiar with it. To put things in perspective, Safari is only at a 2.8% market share after many years. So, for being only a few months old, Chrome is doing great at 3%.

Chrome, like Safari, is built upon the WebKit Open Source rendering engine. That is where the similarities with Safari end. Because websites can have code that is not working properly and buggy, Chrome built-in a task manager, similar to your computer’s task manager, that allows you to close or try to refresh the tab that has an issue. This helps because with other browsers if one tab crashes your whole browser crashes as well. The second big selling point is speed. Google brought in a team from Denmark to write a new JavaScript Virtual Machine from the ground up. What they came up with is V8, the name of the new, faster VM. This enables the rich user experience that many new applications such as Google Docs and Apple’s MobileMe provide to be provided in the speediest way possible.

Who is the browser winner?

The real winner here is the consumer. With Firefox’s release 4 years ago, a new browser war was started. It helps that Google has stepped into the game as well. Of course, the winner here is not the web developer, because more browsers also means more headaches for web developers as they struggle to support another browser. But, the trade off is that the newer browsers are allowing web developers to do things that were not possible just a few years ago. With IE8 just around the corner and new updates coming out for all browsers, the future is looking great for a speedy and rich user experience.