Next Generation Browsers

I’ve been using the Internet for a fairly long time now, so long in fact - I remember awaiting the release of IE4 and then deciding that Netscape Navigator was still miles better.

Now, more than a decade on Netscape is pretty much dead, replaced with it’s own open source evolution - Firefox. Internet Explorer still exists and is now approaching version eight, Opera is on its ninth version and they’ve been joined by Safari from Apple.

Instead of having the big two browsers - we now have a much more useful and democratic situation of two big browsers and two challengers - Opera, although one of the better browsers has always been fringe software.

At the weekend I installed the new beta releases of Internet Explorer (8) and Firefox (3). So I think this is probably a good time to knock a quick post that looks at each of the main four browsers (as used on Windows XP).

Mozilla Firefox 3 (beta)

I’m starting with Firefox as this is my browser of choice. I prefer Opera in a lot of ways and it has some pretty useful features but for general all round, every day browser usage - Firefox wins hand down.

So lets move forward with a few screen shots - all from the BBC - two from the iPlayer and one from the new BBC Homepage. The main reason for these choices is because they’re the more complex of the BBC pages.

Both have heavy use of CSS and Javascript and fairly complex layouts so make for a good benchmark to compare the different browsers and the way they handle layouts.

There are more things to a browser than the way it displays a web page - after all most are pretty much the same as they all start to nod towards standards compliance - but for now we’ll look at layout.

First the BBC Homepage

As you can see from the image above - Firefox handles the movable boxes with ease and comfortably handles the customisation pullout - it also changes colours on the page when clicking on buttons (if you have it set for that).

All the text displays at a nice readable size that can be scanned with comfort. The CSS displays well and boxes fall into place nicely. So lets move on and have a look at the iPlayer - two images this time.

First the iPlayer homepage.

The reason for using the iPlayer homepage as an example is much the same reason I used the BBC Homepage - it has drop downs and pullouts, it has rollovers and pop-ups - it’s a nice comparison and when I look at other browsers over the next few days you’ll see why.

For example - in Internet Explorer, although the pull out works - the text is not properly aligned and in Safari the text is so small you can barely read it.





The iPlayer episode window is only here because it’s a useful partner to the homepage displayed above - also to show that you can watch videos in every browser as long as you don’t mind streaming.

Basically Firefox seems to be able to comfortably display pretty much any website as the designer intended - gets tables and css layouts spot on (99% of the time), handles even the most complex JavaScript and works with all add-ons.

By add-ons I’m really talking about plugins - things like Flash, DivX and Realplayer. However the actual Firefox Add-ons are, in my opinion, the most impressive of all the major browsers.

Firefox, mainly due to its open source nature - has the widest range of add-ons that let you do everything from read the weather in the status bar to turning the whole thing in to one big RSS reader.

Firefox has replaced Internet Explorer as the work horse of the net - don’t get me wrong I know IE is still by FAR the most used web browser but it is NOT the best all round web browser and hasn’t been for a long time.

IE 7 was a good start but it was and is too resource heavy and the interface was too far removed from what people are used to - there is a standard interface  you have to work to - adapt slightly per release - but work too all the same.

Anyway - back to Firefox. According to Wikipedia As of Q1 2008 IE was used by around 75% of all web users, Firefox by 17%, Safari by 5.7% and Opera by just over half of a percent.

However my own stats show a closer race between IE and Firefox with IE users making up about 50% of all visitors and Firefox making up around 40%. Safari makes up about 5.6% and Opera about 2% - some of those are me testing the site.

While on the, slightly off-topic, subject of stats - 94% of all my vistors over the last three months have had a screen resolution that is 1024×768 or higher. This justifies my decision to use a wider blog template.

Next time I’m going to look at Internet Explorer 8.

Share/Save