Chrome is fast. That had always been a big advantage. It made better use of screen real estate, particularly in how the way tabs are rendered in the UI. (Safari did it the Chrome way during one of its beta phases, but the final release versions reverted to the traditional tabbed interface.)

But I’ve always been a stickler for standards compliance and interoperability. I loved Safari because it aced the Acid3 tests with a perfect score. No other web browser managed that. Not including Chrome, even though it was also based on WebKit like Safari is.

Chrome has made great strides. It now also gets a perfect score on the Acid3 tests. On top of that, on the HTML5 compliance tests, Chrome actually edged out over Safari (although by a small margin). It’s a little surprising, because I had the impression that Safari would have made HTML5 support a priority. At least that’s what Apple seems to want to support. Or perhaps it was just marketing strategy, because Steve Jobs did not want to support Adobe Flash. Well, Chrome wins HTML5 compliance right now.

Chrome on Mac OS X also integrates properly into the Mac way of doing things. For example, the idea that passwords are centrally managed in Keychain.

So now… is it the right time to switch?

Update: My own benchmarks seem to show (by visual impression) that Safari actually loads up faster than Chrome, on a MacBook Pro. The difference is very marginal, but it is noticeable. I’m quite surprised. But in terms of memory usage (observed from Activity Monitor), Chrome is very significantly more memory efficient than Safari.

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But I suspect Internet Explorer’s setback may just be temporary. Once IE9 becomes available, it may be able to attract back some users. Some early information being shared about IE9 reveals that the new browser will tap on hardware to accelerate its performance. This includes hardware accelerated rendering of graphics and text. Of course, we gotta see the numbers when the time comes, otherwise this is just marketing hype. They also claim to be working hard on web standards compliance although they still seem to fall far short at the moment.

My personal favourite is Safari, but it is getting a little old. Its once superb Javascript performance has since been overshadowed by Chrome. Safari still trumps Chrome in Javascript conformance though, at least according to Google’s own Javascript conformance test.

One of the most important things about web browsers to me is web standards compliance. Safari was the first to achieve a perfect 100% score and until recently held the title exclusively. It seems that Chrome has now also joined the party. Yes it sounds like lesser reasons to stick with Safari.

Personally, I think Firefox is going to loose. IE is backed by the Microsoft heavyweight. Safari has the support of its Mac fans. Chrome will appeal to the open source crowd. Where does that leave Firefox? Yes, open source folks will like it too, but I think the open source battleground is in Chrome’s favour.

What is your choice of web browser?

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But according to the Web Application Security Trend Report (Q1-Q2 2009) by Cenzic, the numbers do show Firefox taking the lead with vulnerability to 44% of 3100 exploits tracked. Microsoft Internet Explorer came in at 15%. Safari scored surprisingly badly too at 35%, but this was explained by the new inclusion of iPhone and iPod Touch web browsers under the category of Safari in this report. (In the previous report for Q3-Q4 2008, Safari came in at 8%, Firefox at 39% and Microsoft Internet Explorer at 43%).)

Now, I’d be thinking twice when Firefox says it’s the safest way to surf the web. I don’t know where Safari stands when the numbers for iPhones and iPod Touches are omitted, but it does seem ironical to be telling users now that Microsoft Internet Explorer is probably the way to go if you care about your security.

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What’s happening is that Windows PC users in Europe may soon get a choice of what web browser to install with their new PCs. The European Commission is forcing Microsoft to give users a choice over the web browser to install. Microsoft’s proposal is to come up with a screen featuring five prominent web browsers, and ask users to choose.

The descriptions given for these five web browsers seem not very neutral. So let’s just run a test ballot to see what kind of brand people will choose. I’ve removed the brand names from the descriptions below. Make your choice.

[poll id="2"]

Then, you can read my previous post to find out which brands the above descriptions apply to.

I have an idea which brand will get the most vote. What do you think?

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These five browsers will be more prominently features because they are “more popular”, although additional browsers will also be available for selection. Which are these five “more popular” browsers?

1. Apple’s Safari
2. Google’s Chrome
3. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
4. Mozilla’s Firefox
5. Opera

Microsoft has proposed a selection screen featuring the above list in that order. The list is apparently ordered alphabetically by vendor name. You can read more about it in this MacNN post. Whichever way you choose to order the list, someone’s going to have some complaints though. So it is not unexpected that there are suggestions to improve the selection process, such as several listed in Firefox’s designer Jenny Boriss blog post.

Personally, I find it interesting the way descriptions are attached to the browsers. These are:

1. Safari: Introducing Apple Safari 4.0. See the web in a whole new way.
2. Chrome: A new web browser for Windows.
3. Internet Explorer: Making your web even better… Faster, Safer, Easier.
4. Firefox: Can a browser make the Web better? Try Mozilla Firefox and see for yourself.
5. Opera:  Opera browser 10 is Internet browser innovation.

What’s the problem? Safari and Chrome as simply new. Firefox sounds fishy, or at best, questionable. Opera is cloudy.

Why is it that Internet Explorer’s description sounds the most positively concrete in how it is “better”? Suppose you are clueless about which browser to choose. Suppose you had never heard of any of these browsers. Which are are you going to choose? We should try doing a poll. Black out the browser name in the descriptions. Ask users to choose.

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This is not Google’s first foray into the operating systems space. They already have their Android operating system, which is targeted at phones and other small device platforms. The new Chrome OS, however, is designed for regular PCs, notebooks and netbooks too. It will only be available to consumers in the 2nd half of 2010, so it will still be some time to wait.

Many things live on the web nowadays, and it is not surprising that the web browser is fast becoming the computing platform. Although there are some limitations of what web browsers can do, many there are many new on-going developments to push the limits of what the web can do. HTML 5, for example, promises many new capabilities. Although it remains to be seen just exactly what applications can accomplish, one thing that is clear is that they are just going to get better.

The Chrome OS doesn’t have a lot to do, actually. They just sit run in a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. It’s something that is just about ready to go, rightaway, right now. The big thing to be done is still in the web browser: architectural and technological developments that will enable the next generation of applications.

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Safari 4 is an important upgrade because of several key improvements. I’m quite picky about standards compliance, and it being the only mainstream web browser to fully pass the W3 ACID3 tests with a 100/100 score is very significant to me. I think any serious web developer would appreciate working with a web browser that is standards compliant.

In terms of performance, Safari 4 is reputed to be the leader of the pack in Javascript execution speed with its new Nitro Javascript engine. That’s also something very important considering that the web is now quite dependent on plenty of client side processing capabilities.

A slightly disappointing development to me is that the browser tabs, which used to appear in the title bar like in Google’s Chrome browser, has been removed and the tabs are now in their more conventional location inside the browser window. I like the tabs in the title bar. It saves screen real estate and doesn’t change the internal browser window size when I add tabs to an existing single-tab window.

Funnily, a quick Google search revealed that many people are trying to get back the conventional behaviour in their Safari 4 beta browser.

Help, I want the tabs in my title bar! The hidden preferences to disable it Safari 4 beta doesn’t seem to work to enable it in the final Safari 4 release.

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The new Safari 4 Beta is beautiful, although some of its ideas are borrowed from competitors. The browser tabs are not in the title bar, similar to Google’s Chrome, so it doesn’t take up screen space. It has Cover Flow, which pages through bookmarks and browsing history with screen previews much like album art in iTunes. Top Sites displays frequently visited sites with a beautiful wall of screen previews too. Sites that have since been updated are marked in the Top Sites wall. Safari 4 Beta feels snappier, probably because of its speedier JavaScript engine.

Safari 4 Beta boasts support for CSS animation and HTML5. It also scores full marks on the Acid3 Test, which tests a web browser’s compliance to web standards. Not many browsers score full marks.

So far I’m liking Safari 4 Beta very much, except for this one bug I’ve run into. In the WordPress web application, the editor’s “insert link” dialog box gets stuck, and you can’t enter text or click any links. Well, I hope someone gets around to fixing it soon, either the WordPress (or perhaps from the TinyMCE editor) or Safari folks. I can’t use Safari 4 Beta to write my blog posts if I have to insert or edit any links.

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Indeed, Stainless sports features similar to those of Chrome: dragging tabs between windows, private browsing, and a combined location and search bar. Where Stainless differs, and also stands out from other existing browsers, is that it features multi-process browsing in which each tab or page runs a process separately. This means each tab can run unhampered by other tabs that might be slow to load. Also, other tabs remain unaffected when one of the tabs crash or becomes unresponsive. Cool.

At this time, Mesa Dynamics says that Stainless is primarily a technology demonstration. It is clearly so, because while it does load web pages nicely, there are many other user interface details that are not quite there yet. For example, there is almost nothing to configure. (Of course, maybe some people think that is a good thing.)

Stainless uses WebKit to render its pages. WebKit is the same rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari browser.

Those of us who have been around long enough on the Internet might have remembered names like Mosaic and Netscape. Mosaic brought us the web. Microsoft soon overran the world with their Internet Explorer, which was decidedly hugely successful because it was included in each copy of Windows. In recent years, we have browsers like Firefox, which descended from the Netscape and Mozilla heritage, offering users choices in their browsing environment.

Actually while there are many browsers out there, there are only a small handful of web rendering engines. The web rendering engine is the “core” that paints the web pages on the screen. The most common web rendering engines are:

• Trident — Used originally in Microsoft Internet Explorer since version 4, but now also in other other 3rd party browsers like Avant.
• Gecko — Developed by Mozilla for use in Firefox. Now also used in Camino (on Mac OS X), Epiphany (on Linux).
• WebKit — Apple’s fork of KDE’s KHTML, used in the Safari browser (including in the iPhone). It is also used in Google’s Chrome.

The browser competition is good for users. Not only do we get choices, but it improves the quality of the browsers as well. Lots of attention is given to standards compliance, interoperability, security and performance nowadays. This is important, because the web is now the platform to deliver many applications and services. The computer isn’t so important. The operating system isn’t so important. Users are interacting a lot with their browsers.

What browser are you using today?

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Installation was fuss-free. Well, except for a minor oddity that the installation on Mac OS X required to restart the computer. Surprisingly the installation on Windows XP did not require a reboot. How strange for Apple’s own browser on Apple’s own operating system to behave this way. Small matter anyway.

Whether it’s on the Mac OS X or Windows, Safari spots the same user interface style that is taken from Mac OS X. It is a refreshing change if you’ve been too used to the standard Windows look. The Safari browser is clean, simple and uncluttered.

Apple says Safari is the fastest in both HTML performance and Javascript performance when compared with Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9. I only regularly use Firefox. Safari does feel a little snappier, although I did not carry out any objective measurement. It could all well be due to the fact that Safari is not burdened with cruft from my browsing history, browser extensions, etc.

There is no status bar at the bottom of the Safari window. In Firefox, if you hover your mouse cursor over a hyperlink, you get to see the URL in the status bar. It is a habbit of mine to check where I’m going to be headed off to before I click on a hyperlink. With Safari, I now feel a bit lost. Perhaps it is a configurable setting I can fix somewhere. Does anyone have any ideas?

What else do I miss with Safari? Well, a couple of Firefox plugins: Firebug and Web Developer. I find these extensions invaluable to my work. If I may add on, I would also love to have Html Validator and Live HTTP Headers.

Safari does have plugins too, although the selection is quite limited. You can check out PimpMySafari. Another unusual thing for Apple’s famed user interface friendliness… installing Safari plugins is shockingly clumpsy.

I think, for now, I’ll just stick with Firefox.

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