Browser Wars, part Dos

In my ongoing love of competition I noticed a few posts about browsers today. I feel like that for the first time since IE took on Netscape back in the day, the browsers wars are really heated again! I think that the entrace of Safari 3 as a real browser contender (and the iPhone using WebKit didn’t hurt either) has shaken things up.

First up is that the second beta of Firefox 3 has hit the scenes. Fortunately ZDNet went and put up a review of this bad boy. It’s a nice user level overview of the browser. He says that it feels snappier and far more responsive than the previous beta and more importantly FF2. For me though, what was music to my eyes was this:

After having Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 running for several hours now without a restart, memory usage is at a little over 18MB with one tab loaded - nice. By comparison, Firefox 2.0.0.11 sitting on another machine is hovering at over 41MB despite having only one tab open, having been used less and having no additional extensions installed.

I wish he’d done another test with many browsers open with many tabs in them. But it is really good to see that Firefox isn’t just concerned with adding more features (i.e. bloat) and is getting back to tuning their baby into a lean, mean browsing machine. Too often competition can focus on the wrong thing, whether it’s the megapixel wars of cameras or the GHz of cpu’s, happily the browser wars seem to be getting down to real useability improvements.

Take the oh so secretive IE8 as another example. Internet Explore has been the bane, the bane I say, of web developers existences for years, what with their non-standard html rendering and all sort of other craziness. With Firefox creeping up the browser totem pole and IE slowly falling it looks like Microsoft is trying to do something about it and has posted that IE8 just passed the Acid2 browser test (Acid2 is an informal test to show web standards compliance). That’s great news for the world - I mean, I will believe that IE8 doesn’t intentionally embrace and extend web standards when I’m not coding IE specific hacks, but anything is better than the horrors MS has inflicted on the world so far.

The HORRORS.

I also came across this post measuring the javascript performance of the various browsers. Here you can see that the smallest browsers (by market share) Opera and Safari have optimized the hell out of the javascript engines and IE7 and a slow as hell FF2 bring up the rear. I hope that FF3 and IE8 both take up Opera and Safari’s challenge - in a world of AJAX everywhere javascript performance is going to be, I suspect, the lifeblood of browsers. As more and heavier apps get written, an increase of browser performance is going to juice application useability the same way getting a faster computer would.

I’m looking forward to this next generation of browsers. I’m looking forward to not crashing or force quitting my browser every day or three. Oh be still my beating heart.

Dec 20th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: browsers