http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/technology/personaltech/26basics.html?scp=1&sq=browser&st=cse
March 26, 2009
Basics
As Browsers Battle, Consumers Stand to Win
By FARHAD MANJOO
IF you're looking for a good old-fashioned product war, you're in luck: The browser wars are back on. Last week, Microsoft released the long-awaited update to its Internet Explorer browser. Apple, Mozilla and Google, meanwhile, have lately issued prerelease versions of their coming applications.
I recently loaded up all four browsers and put them through my rigorous daily Web grind. The good news is they're all pretty wonderful; if you're suffering through a buggy old browser, download one of these now.
But which one? Here, in order from least-great to best, is my assessment:
INTERNET EXPLORER 8 After years of lagging behind other innovators, Microsoft has finally released a browser that's a pleasure to use. Previous versions of I.E. were slow, prone to crashing, pockmarked with security holes, and lacked many useful features found in other leading browsers.
As you grappled with it, you couldn't help feeling that Microsoft was counting on your ignorance - hoping you wouldn't discover that life could be more pleasant once you moved beyond the Windows built-in browser.
But the new version should prompt everyone who has abandoned I.E. over the years to give it another look. It's speedy, it seems inured to crashes, and not only does it match its rivals' features - in some cases, I.E. beats them.
Its tab bar - the menu at the top of the screen that catalogs your open Web pages - excels at organizing a clutter of open tabs. Say you open one tab to Google and one tab to Amazon, and then you load several new tabs from links on each of those sites. I.E. is smart enough to know which tabs you launched from Google and which you launched from Amazon, and it will display the different groups in separate colors in the tab bar. This allowed me to scan my open pages and find the one I needed more quickly than I could in other browsers.
But I.E. isn't perfect: It gets quite sluggish once you open a dozen or more tabs, and it's also not nearly as zippy as its rivals at loading complex Web 2.0 pages -like Gmail or Google Maps. Finally, I.E. is available only on Windows.
SAFARI 4 BETA Unsurprisingly, Apple's latest browser sets a high bar for style. Among its many visual flourishes, I liked the way it displays your Web history - as a series of screen shots that you can fly through using Cover Flow, the same feature you use to view album covers on your iPod.
Safari's best feature is its speed. It vies with Chrome for the title of Fastest Windows Browser, and it's certainly the zippiest on the Mac. But several user-interface lapses kept tripping me up.
Like Chrome, Safari does away with the tab bar. Instead, it collects your open tabs in the menu bar, the outermost pane of the browser window (most other browsers use this space to display the title of your current Web page). This leaves more screen space for your documents, but it makes Safari's tabs trickier to move and organize.
Safari's address bar - the place where you type in a URL - also lags behind that of its rivals. Other browsers let you use this space as a quick search engine; type in a phrase, hit enter, and you're taken to a results page. Annoyingly, Safari returns an error when you do this.
CHROME 2.0 BETA When it made its debut last fall, I was floored by Google's browser. Since then, it's only gotten better. What I like best is its design philosophy. The program seems to have been built for a specific kind of user - power users, people who spend all day on the Web and keep open a terrific number of tabs running various complex sites.
Unlike some other browsers, it doesn't slow to a crawl when you overload it. If you've got dozens of tabs open and try to load a funny YouTube video, it will play flawlessly; in Firefox 3.0, the same situation would cause your movie to stop and start, which isn't funny at all.
Chrome is also very secure. At a recent security conference in Canada, hackers were invited to take down all major browsers. They were able to compromise Firefox, Safari and I.E., but couldn't make a dent in Chrome.
My favorite Chrome feature is its input bar, a combination of the search bar and address bar found at the top of most browsers. In Chrome's rivals, typing a phrase into the address bar searches through your Web history. Type in "new york times" and the browser will give you a list of the Times pages you've visited. Other browsers also suggest Google searches. Type in "new york times" in the search box and you'll be prompted to search for "new york times crossword."
Chrome does all this, but goes one further: It lists actual results from Google. Type in "thomas jefferson" and Chrome will show you the URL for the top Google result for that search. You can go straight to the Wikipedia entry on Jefferson without even stopping at Google.
There are a couple of downsides to Chrome. First, it's Windows only for now. Second, it lacks a system of add-on programs, which allow third-party developers to give a browser more functions. Fortunately, Google has just outlined a way for coders to create such plug-ins. If programmers start pumping out add-ons, Chrome could be unbeatable.
FIREFOX 3.1 BETA Several years ago, I began using Firefox as my main browser. It was faster, more stable and offered more innovations than its rivals. Over time, though, many of its advantages have slipped away.
The beta version fixes a few problems that had become nearly intolerable in Firefox - its propensity to consume your computer's memory and to become intolerably slow as you kept it open throughout the day. I found the beta much faster and more stable than previous versions.
But the main reason I stick with Firefox is its large library of add-ons. These allow me to customize the browser exactly to my specifications, a feat that no other browser can yet match. My favorite plug-in is Tab Mix Plus, which gives me powerful tools to save the many open tabs I collect during a hard day at the Web.
If I've opened up a dozen Web pages related to my latest plan for world domination, for instance, I can group them all together and save them under a single file name in Tab Mix Plus. When I return to my evil scheme, I can open up that browsing session all at once.
I use Tab Mix Plus in conjunction with Foxmarks, which allows me to share Firefox bookmarks across computers. I can bookmark something on my laptop and open it up on my desktop. I also couldn't do without Mouse Gestures, a plug-in that lets me navigate the Web just by flicking my wrist. If I quickly slide the mouse to the left, for instance, the browser goes back to the last page. It's a wonderfully lazy way to read stuff online.
Both Safari and Chrome allow for add-ons, so it's certainly possible that Firefox will lose this edge. But that, of course, is the joy of the browser war. As these rivals duke it out for market share, they'll keep adding better features to each new version. Whichever wins, we'll get all the benefits.
