Personal Bytes

Introduction

The browser market haven’t had much activity until Firefox emerged
– about 1 year ago. We had Internet Explorer 6 installed on every single Windows platform (actually, you don’t have any choice left if you’re using Windows) and only few people knew Opera or had the Mozilla suite installed.

Since Firefox was released a lot has changed. Opera became freeware (there are no ads anymore) and Microsoft realized that they were being left behind — their browser was completely outdated and prone to worms/virus due to unfixed security holes. But it was Firefox who received the graces and blesses.

Firefox came from nowhere (well, sort of, since it uses the Gecko engine that has some years now) and earned 10% of the browser market. I do not believe my statistics are relevant since my blog is directed for tech savvy people who know something beyond Internet Explorer but most of my visitors (~85%) use Firefox or a Mozilla derivate. 5% use Safari/Opera
and what’s left, 10%, use Internet Explorer 6.

Also, Firefox raised another important matter that was being kind of ignored — web standards. No one cared if the website worked on the other browsers as long as it worked correctly in Internet Explorer. But Internet Explorer has a long path to walk until it is truly standard compliant (as in W3C standards, not their de facto standards) this represents a problem. One company controlling the role of the web.

And so we are, after one year since Firefox was released and the browser market is getting hot again. But this time I really don’t think that the end will be like it was back in 1995 — I would be careful if I were Microsoft.

The Players

We have 3 major players. There’s Opera, a browser built by a Norway company; Internet Explorer, the browser from Redmond and finally but definitely not least, Mozilla Firefox. We’re here to compare Opera 9 Technology Preview 1 against Internet Explorer 7 Beta1 and Firefox 1.5.

These are the latest versions available — some experimental others in beta phase and one has been recently released — of these three browsers.

The Tests

I’ll try to cover the usual stuff, like tabbed browsing (for IE it is a brand new thing though), RSS feeds, plugins/extensions, etc.. Besides, these are the tests I’ll be doing regarding :

• Load time: How much time does the browser need to start up from a fresh boot;
• Rendering time: How much time does the browser take in order to render a webpage;
• ACID Tests: How well does the browser perform the ACID Tests;
• Alpha PNG Transparency: How well the browser renders the 24bit transparency channel of PNG images;
• Reported Vulnerabilities: How many vulnerabilities have been reported yet;
• Availability/Interoperability: Which are available for as much platforms as possible;
• Free Software: It matters to me and to many people. Which one are Free Software — as in freedom, since all are free as in beer.

Testing Machine

These are the relevant specifications of the machine where the tests were held:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
- DFI nF4 Ultra-D
- 1GB Kingston CAS2.5 DDR400
- ATi X800GTO@X850XT

Fight!

Installation

The installation of the browsers was pretty straightforward. No problems arose and everything went fine. Internet Explorer 7 replaced 6 without asking or notifying me. That’s bad since I use IE6 for testing the layout of my websites.

First Impressions

Firefox looks exacly the same as version 1.0 so that is a good thing since I’m quite used to it — as everyone else. As for Opera, the GUI hasn’t changed much and is similiar to Firefox. The biggest changes came from Internet Explorer 7. The top level bar is now the search bar, breaking the usual Windows interface paradigm (shared with most GNU/Linux DE, like KDE or Gnome) of having the menu bar as the first one. In my opinion this is not very useful since I barely remember of using such menu on the browser. Most people will get confused, IMHO, and will demand the traditional workspace.

Also, the “Go” button is missing forcing you to press the ‘Enter’ key. This is not an issue except if the keyboard is not placed near by.. which is the case on my test machine ;-)

Opera has two good features by default: a close button for each tab and it saves the tabs you have currently open when you close the browser. Firefox also has tons of extensions to provide a close button for each tab but for saving the user space I don’t have a clue. Tell me if so. On the other hand, I didn’t like the fact of Opera, and IE, not highlighting the source
code of a webpage. It’s really important when you’re coding a webpage (or just looking around…).

Another important thing is that in IE 7 all the ActiveX controls are disabled. This means that some websites might not work correctly. This default behaviour should be changed by the user according to its preferences but it is a good decision, preventing the universe of problemas ActiveX has brought.

Not so relevant but still worth mentioning is the fact that Opera and Firefox now allow tab reordering by drag and drop. IE does not support this feature.

The Comparison

Notes: The rendering time was measured by trying to open http://www.linuxtoday.com and until it displayed “Done” or whatever message on the status bar. The connection has a 4Mbps download ratio. I did three tests (clearing the cache each time and reopening the browser) and picked the lower one. ACID2 tests were done on this website (http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html). To count the vulnerabilities I took a reference on Secunia. There were advisories for Firefox but they were for 1.5 Beta 2, prior to 1.5. The availability only counts where true, native support from the fabricant is provided. Otherwise IE would work on GNU/Linux through Wine.

Conclusion

I’ll drive my own conclusion based on my opinion (it’s my review and my blog right? :-). Technically speaking, Opera may be a bit ahead of Firefox and IE. Nevertheless, Opera does not have as many cool plugins and extensions (like WebDeveloper, TidyValidator, Foxylicious, etc…) as Firefox does. Plus, it is not Free Software which counts a lot to me (I avoid using proprietary software — it’s my decision, don’t question it).

IE has nothing new compared to what was available. Obviously that it has matured a lot since IE6 and tabs/RSS was a must but that’s not enough to convince me. There is still a lot of work to do before it correctly follows the standards (CSS2 being the biggest fault) and as we’ve seen from the past, faults on the browser may compromise the whole system.
Since Firefox and Opera are not so tighed up in the system the number of critical vulnerabilities tends to be less.

To end my review, I must say that Firefox is still — for me and under my criteria — the winner. It renders fast, it has a lot of useful extensions/plugins and it is Free Software. It’s the cherry on the top of the cake.

Screenshots

Firefox 1.5

Opera 9TP1

Internet Explorer 7 Beta1