Just last week we compared four PC browsers and concluded that IE8 was the slowest, Safari the fastest and Firefox the most expandable - but we thought that Chrome was nipping at everyone else's heels.
A week is a long time on the Internet, though, and we now have two even newer browsers. Internet Explorer 8 has moved from release candidate to final release, and Chrome 2 is now available as a beta rather than a "might work, might not" developer release. Both browsers promise to be faster than before, but are they fast enough to unseat Safari - or useful enough to fight Firefox? There is, of course, only one way to find out.
Interface
Winner: Chrome
Full screen browsing makes Chrome nicer and more useful on netbooks - and leaves Safari as the only browser without a full screen mode - but like Safari it isn't skinnable: if you don't like the look, tough luck. We're still not sold on Safari's iTunes-style approach to favourite sites, bookmarks and browsing history, and we still don't like IE's interface. This is entirely personal preference, but we're going to give Chrome the gold star here - although while we love the clean design, we appreciate that many of you don't.
Features
Winner: Firefox
Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons gives it first place here: no other browser is as easily or as amazingly extensible. IE has a few extensions together with web slices and accelerators, but it isn't a patch on Firefox - although it's still much more expandable than Chrome or Safari.
Safari and Chrome are all about form following function, but the latest beta of Chrome boasts some useful improvements that make it a bit less bare bones than before. Page zoom is silky smooth and now increases or decreases everything, not just text, and you now get form auto-filling as well as the previous version's form field resizing. Chrome still doesn't do RSS, although that's on the to-do list, and extensions are still some way off.
Fighting evil
Winner: Everyone but Safari
All of the browsers offer pop-up blocking but not ad blocking: for that you'll need to install add-ons or ad-blocking proxies. They also offer variations on the Porn Mode theme so your movements aren't stored on your PC (although, of course, they don't do anything to stop The Man from spying on you), and they promise to protect you from phishing and other net nasties.
The private browsing is implemented in nifty but different ways in Firefox, IE8 and Chrome: when you switch to private browsing in Firefox, it offers to save your currently open tabs so you can return to them when you've finished browsing in secret. With Chrome and IE8 you can run one window (and associated tabs) in normal mode and another window with privacy enabled, but Safari's privacy is global.
The other evil to consider is crashing. IE8 and Chrome both use separate processes for each open tab, which means you can kill misbehaving sites or applications from Task Manager, and Chrome also gives you a tab manager (Shift + Esc) so you can see what process is handling which page or application. The other browsers are all single-process jobs, so if something crashes it takes the browser with it. Firefox's extensions more than compensate for that, though, so we're calling this one a tie between everything but Safari.
Your comments (11) Click to add a new comment
sharpdesigner
April 8th
11. Well well, fastest slowest are not the only things to see. There are many factors other than the things shown above to measure the richness of a browser. IE8 is the one that supports almost all the different flavors of JavaScript. The reason why it takes more memory is b/c each tab is a separate process, thus crash in one will not cause all to stop working. Chrome also has this partially [but not perfect] built in. However, FireFox is the worst in this regards.
I had been using FireFox for almost 3 years now, but now after the release of 3.0.7, i m getting disappointed. It has become less stable when you have multiple tabs open at the startup. I know this is not their fault but may be the fault of widely available untested plugins. But this is a warning point for FireFox, it should make it a little bit tighter now to allow plugins, otherwise, this flexibility will take this slick browser in to the Grave!
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kasino72
March 20th
10. Hi Jamjam. I'm sorry if you think it's biased - the verdict does say that if extensions etc don't matter then Chrome's the one to look at. For me, though, extendability and customisation matter more than sheer speed, and of course that's something that's going to vary from user to user. For what it's worth, on machines where speed isn't really a factor (fast PC, fast Mac) I'm on the firefox beta; on my knackered old laptop, where performance really does matter, I'm on Chrome.
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jamjam
March 19th
9. Is this not a bit biased, seen as Chrome won 2 and drew one, Firefox won one and drew one, so if you look at the facts Chrome's best. And in my view, the reason Firefox has so many add-on's is because it doesn't do stuff, and the reason it has so many skins is because it looks like a pigs bottom. I used to use IE8 (RC1), Chrome came along and I used that a bit, but now I just can't stop using Safari 4, in my view it's the best.
T3 is currently developing the 01 phone, so why doesn't Techradar develop a browser that takes abit of all of them, and then makes them better.
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kasino72
March 13th
8. Hi Meoknet. Posts like yours are why I love publishing on the internet - i'd never have thought to try browsers with Windowblinds in a million years.
I'm really not convinced by Apple's attempt to stick Cover Flow into everything. It's nice enough in iTunes (although I only ever use it on an iPhone, and even then rarely) but now it's in the Finder and in Safari. It's a very inefficient way to do something very simple, so for example the only time I ever find it useful is if I'm trying to preview a lot of saved screengrabs. Other than that it gets in the way.
I don't know. What does everyone think - is eye candy just browser bloat?
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meoknet
March 12th
7. Hi, jamjam. I too was blown away by Safari 4's presentation, but I'd like to point out a few things I noticed about it that are NOT cool.
1. I applaud Apple for trying to make Safari look more native on Windows, but the new Title Bar / Tab Bar only works with the standard Windows styles (Luna on Xp & Aero on Vista) I ran Safari 4 with WindowBlinds enabled, and the it couldn't handle the custom skins. The whole title bar was distorted. that's a problem.
2. The Top Sites, Bookmarks and History pages are excellent, but did you know that in order to use those features you need a 64MB DirectX 9.0c graphics adapter? I'm running an ATI HD3450 and the graphical display lags for me sometimes. I installed safari on a system with an onboard 8MB video adapter and NONE of those features were available. Though I don't have to worry about this, it caused me to wonder if it is a good thing for a browser to require a 3D accelerator, or is that classified as bloat?
Firefox and Chrome remain my top contenders.
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kasino72
March 12th
6. Hi JamJam. You should try Safari's Top Sites on a netbook. It's hilarious :)
Something I meant to say about the browsers in the piece but forgot: ultimately all these bright ideas are great news for us, because every single browser is getting better, almost by the day. If you're the kind of sad geek who finds browser wars exciting - and I am - then these are happy times.
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