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This review, or should I say preview, of the leading browser on the market was hard to make. I can’t say I have all the tools for a professional nor an in depth analysis of loading times or anything of this sort. But are statistics the only thing worth analyzing? I believe not, and as an amateur web designer that has been making websites since 1998 everyone should see what’s really behind this often named “Browser War”. Recent stats from March 2006 place Firefox with a benchmark of 10% of the market share, and yearly statistics from 2004 to 2006 show a drop in Internet Explorer lead. It’s easy to understand that Internet Explorer (IE) decided to make major improvement to their next version.

Let’s first make a quick overview of the key features you get with those browsers:
You might be confused about the screenshots because I used each browser to visit it’s competitor’s website.

Internet Explorer 7:

• RSS feeds support
• Tabbed browsing
• Anti-physing build-in security
• Toolbar search box
• New rendering engine
• Pop-up blocker
• Quick Tabs

Opera 9:

• Tabbed browsing
• Widgets
• Email integration
• RSS & IRC support
• BitTorrent downloads
• Toolbar search box
• Skins & customization of the layout
• Pop-up & Content blocker

Firefox 2:

• Tabbed browsing
• RSS Feed support
• Integrated search
• Skins customization
• Extensions support
• Pop-up blocker
• Open source

Now, I’m sure you all noticed how some features are just repeating themselves… You’re right of course but those features are in high demand and made the popularity of browsers like Opera and Firefox famous. I will not hide it, I have a bias towards Opera since I’ve been using it and promoting it since version 5 but I’ll do my best to remain as objective as humanly possible (is it even possible for humans?). I’ll spit out my criticism right away so it doesn’t get in the way of further reviewing. I believe that Internet Explorer is playing catch-up and is barely bringing to it’s browser some features that made alternate browsers interesting.

I’d like all of you to forget about the repetitive argument of security, it is very real and a serious issue but it come with popularity. Given Opera owned 85% of the market it’s code would be scrutinized to find every possible flaw and security alerts would be much more frequent, same goes for Firefox. But what has to be considered is that both Firefox and Opera release their patches/updates way faster then Internet Explorer seems capable of. The recent IE flaw is being patched by third party software, that’s real sad…

Enought with criticism, on to the review! I’ve tested all three browsers on a Windows XP SP2 system, 2.4 Ghz Intel Pentium IV, 768 MB of RAM, with an ATI 9550 256MB video card.

At the beginning of my post I mentioned I’ve been designing websites for years, but I’m still a heavy Internet user and I’m always looking for the best surfing experience there is. I’ll start up with scrolling down a page: You may find this stupid but it’s not, when reading a page or looking for something in particular (besides using in-page search) scrolling should be fluid and not visually aggressive! I found Firefox 2 to give me the “bulkiest” scrolling but since everyone is still in Preview/Beta/Alpha massive changes will hopefully still occur. When talking about what meets the eye all those browser look the same. You get tabs line-up, small X to close then and you can move then around to organize the websites you visit (except IE where they are stuck in the order of creation). What’s new and really stunned me was the way IE7 rendered the pages. I’ve came to call it “super-smooth” fonts, they’re good looking and I’m sure eating up more memory. I believe this will be eventually standard across all browsers on all platforms and this font feature is for Windows users only. The rendering of Firefox and Opera seem virtually to be the same, still at least those browsers are supported on both Mac OS and Linux witch is not the case with Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 7	Opera 9

From Gateworld.net

Most thing considered when the next version of Internet Explorer is released most people still won’t see the reason why they should switch browsers, the saddest is that some people will love and discover those features not knowing that they’ve been around for YEARS! As a web developer you must stay conscious that most users will remain with their OS default browser (check the stats of this blog).

I’ll close my longest post to date with a few thoughts:
While working under Linux I had made some modifications to the layout of this blog. But it took days for me to realize that the layout did not show up properly under Internet Explorer! Now who is right? The browser that makes custom modifications of web standards or the ones that are looking for web standards…

Under Windows, Internet Explorer is obviously the browser compatible with the most websites and plugins, but it is a shame to notice that some websites today are still design for Internet Explorer only and that they block access to them from other browsers (Thanks to Opera 9 you can bypass that and mask the browser as an other browser).

I guess the point of that post was to make sure people knew that having only one browser might not be the best idea. Seeking for replacements is a good thing but the idea of using alternate browsers as complements is quite ingenious. Call me crazy all right, because people are looking for something easy and don’t want to be caught up using three browsers all the time but that is an arguable position. When a website doesn’t work properly on my favorite browser, I try it on Firefox and ultimately on IE. My only ending words will be: try alternatives, commit yourself, stop doing what you’re told or imposed, make your own selection of browser what ever is your operating system.