Browser Wars

The world of web-browsers keeps changing...new things come up and if you’re not in...then you are definitely out. Let’s see all that’s new with the 3 main browsers used today.

Firefox 3 – “The Best Firefox yet” Hmm..Isn’t that a statement?

 One cannot be but impressed by the extraordinary panache and style with which Firefox is cornering the market. Extraordinary number of add-ons, amazing themes and so many other tit-bits, there is a reason why Firefox is today, the popular choice amongst informed users! It is frankly the best balanced browser there is. Take a look at these, (and this is just 2008, if I added all the awards, I would be exceeding my word count)

·  InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Awards, August 2008

·  PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, June 2008

·  CNET Editors’ Choice, June 2008


·  American Business Awards Most Innovative Company, June 2008

·  Linux Journal Readers' Choice 2008 - Favorite Web Browser, May 2008

But, let us take an unbiased look at Firefox 3...what’s new and what’s not...

The Firefox team claims that Firefox 3 has 14000 changes from Firefox 2. That sounds impressive in any case. But the claim that Firefox 3 is 2-3 times faster than Firefox 2 seems to be a tall claim. But what I will vouch for is that Firefox 3 is definitely faster, and that cannot be bad.

Among its new features, zooming into the web pages and of course the ‘Awesome Bar’ (their humble name for the address bar) are amongst the ones most noticeable. Surfing had never been so cool....

UNTIL WebKit Open Source Project caught my eye....When Apple chose the KHTML engine for its Safari Browser in 2003 over the more popular Gecko engine that powers Firefox, a lot of people were surprised. Firefox was way more popular than the Konquerer browser and had a lot more open source developers online.

Since then, Apple has really run with the KHTML engine, forking it off, renaming its development version "WebKit" and making it faster and leaner than Firefox on the Mac and both Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC. While it doesn't have a lot of the functionality of Firefox plug-ins and the ActiveX controls of IE, more and more support has been built around the Webkit engine as it gains in popularity.

There is no other way to say it. Holy cow is this thing fast! I currently tested Webkit build r30090 (more recent versions are now there) against standard Leopard Safari 3.04. This unoptimized WebKit build version is running circles around the standard Safari browser. It isn't even close.

I was on a Rev 2, 2 GHz MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM on 100 Mb/s Fiber. I ran the two browsers next to each other on a 30 inch display. Webkit feels like I am on a maxed out Mac Pro tower - it really does. Try it if you don't believe me.

If anyone is interested, anyone can join and develop, the nightly projects etc. www.webkit.org . There is simply too much to say about this project and not enough space. But I would like to say this, watch out Firefox!!! Safari is now playing hardball...

OH YEAH...Internet Explorer “Ye olde workhorse”

It has always been the case, that people like to think of Microsoft as a fledgling company with bad products...but fact is Bill Gates is not getting any poorer and IE is not out of this race yet. Check out the IE 8 beta. It’s not half bad ... if you manage to be unbiased.

It’s got this really cool feature called Accelerators (quite intuitive of a company largely accused of being just the opposite). Apart from that enhanced performance, navigation and history management are the latest additions/improvements.

But realistically speaking, slowly Safari and Firefox are moving out of IE’s range. Either Microsoft goes really radical or soon the Age of IE will be no more...

So what do you think, is Firefox still your favourite or does WebKit seem more alluring...or are you still in love with IE (stranger things have happened!!!). Only time will tell who comes out on top...till then keep your eye out for more news on IT Bytes.