James Burgess

It seems like it’s that time of the year again - every man and his uncle are coming out with a new ‘best ever’ version of their browser and, once again, our loyalties to our most used Internet tools are tested (okay, so I’m being a bit melodramatic here…).

The question that arises time and time again is “Which browser is the best, and why?” (well, I suppose that’s two questions) - and there’s always feuding, always fighting, and always some form of controversy. And with the choice of viable browsers growing ever larger, this decision gets more and more difficult.

In the past few weeks and months, we’ve seen releases of Firefox 3 (admittedly I’m pre-empting tomorrow’s release), Opera 9.5, Safari 3, IE8 beta, Flock 2.0 beta and a variety of other smaller offerings. Some of you may know of my battle to choose between Fx and Safari, and this makes it no easier.

For some reason, I’ve never really got on with Opera, and 9.5 hasn’t really changed anything for me - the lack of extensions/add-ons has been a stumbling block, coupled with the apparent attempt to make you go ‘ooh shiny’ doesn’t really make me jump up and down with glee. And, according to some ’speed’ metrics, it’s actually no longer winning the speed-war (that honour goes to Safari), or the memory war (Fx 3 leads the way). Tack onto the end of this a very weird implementation of CSS (in certain, important, areas) and Opera is pretty much a lost cause.

Safari for Windows has always intrigued me - largely due to how much I love using it on OS X. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have reliability working in it’s favour - even Safari 3 is incredibly crash-prone. Aside from this, the lack of a native Windows look-and-feel and overly-smoothed font rendering, really puts me off. I want to love Safari, but it’s just an uncomfortable environment to work in for me, personally, on Windows.

Microsoft continually miss the boat when it comes to browsers, these days… IE8 beta is just another one ‘hot off the press’ from Redmond, that neither performs well, nor interprets standards-compliant HTML/CSS correctly. In addition, the ‘new’ features that are flogged to death by the marketing-types are simply poor regurgitations of features previously pioneered by Opera/Fx/Safari. But, IE will continue to lead the browser war… you can wipe the floor with the competition when your product comes packaged with pretty much all new PCs.

And now to my current browser, Firefox. I have both Fx2 and Fx3 running at the moment - and the only thing holding me back from a complete move to Fx3 is that some of my favourite add-ons haven’t been fully ported to the new product. I’m not going to go into details of what I like and dislike about Fx, as I’ve done that not too long ago. For me, though, Firefox is still pushing out the boat in terms of browsers - purely optional extension of the program; now-quick warm-load time (cold-load isn’t so hot… har har); and patched memory leaks, resulting in pretty low memory usage when compared to the competition.

Flock I consider to be pretty much a non-starter. I’ve heard many people say that if you use a lot of social tools and websites, Flock will streamline your web existence - but I’m yet to find this grail of which they speak. From my point of view, it’s bloated, slow, and is far too cluttered by default. Granted, the appearance and the clutter can be changed and reduced, but then Flock loses it’s purpose - and you may as well be using Fx2.

All-in-all, I can’t see past Firefox 3’s supremecy. Fx 2 was, and still is, disappointing in so many areas - but all the important areas have been fixed. Fx3 is as fast as Safari, and as sleek as Opera - whilst retaining the extensibility and flexibility of it’s predecessor.

Of course, there will be continued debate, and many will disagree with my reasoning - but at the end of the day, if you’re happy with your browser, get out there and enjoy the web!