| Home > Internet > Net software > Big Five browsers |
| Browser | Sponsor | Layout engine | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firefox | Mozilla | Gecko | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Chrome | WebKit | Windows, Mac, Linux | |
| Safari | Apple | Mac & Windows | |
| Internet Explorer |
Microsoft | Trident | Windows only |
| Opera | Presto | Windows, Mac, Linux | |
I've been recommending Mozilla Firefox for years. Now I'd suggest you install both Firefox and Chrome, and just see which you like better.¹ You may want to just keep both browsers and use one or the other according to your mood, or what you want to do on the Web at the moment. There are things you can do in each that you can't do in the other.
If you don't want to bother with two browsers, just get Firefox.
It's easiest to leave Internet Explorer (IE) installed on Windows, even though you primarily use another browser or browsers. You may find that you sometimes need it for certain content, including certain Microsoft Knowledge Base articles. I know of a time-entry Web interface for a temp agency that only seems to work in IE. Considering IE's extensive history of security problems, except for such cases, you may want to mostly avoid using IE on the Internet.
We now have five independent groups of developers competing on innovation in browsers for Windows, competition that can only benefit Web users. This is a big improvement over the five years or so when many people were stuck with IE6, a situation some described as "the Microsoft monoculture."
There are dozens of other browsers available: see the Wikipedia articles linked at the right, and the last section of this page. Browsers I cover here have had significant usage share, or at least a shot at it, except for Mosaic.² OldVersion.com ("because newer is not always better") has past versions of Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, SeaMonkey, and Netscape, plus old versions of 60+ other applications.
If you've never used anything but Internet Explorer, and you're wondering why I'm even writing about other browsers, try my Browser Wars page in this section. You'll find discussion of a famous market-share confrontation between Netscape Communications and Microsoft (which led to the 1998 antitrust suit United States v. Microsoft) a history of browsers timeline, a little discussion of interface theory, and, I hope, demystification of the Mozilla and Netscape names.
Firefox is an open-source freeware Web browser with superior features and functionality. Firefox is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, in versions for dozens of languages. There's also Firefox Portable, a version modified to run politely from a USB flash drive, part of a system of portable applications and two menu/launcher choices; for more see my mobile computing pages.
I suggest dumping Microsoft's
Internet Explorer Web browser,
which has a history of security
breaches. I recommend instead
Mozilla Firefox. (Walt Mossberg,
Wall Street Journal, Sep 2004)
Internet Explorer has been losing market share steadily since the 2004 Firefox 1.0 release; Firefox is up to a 20-25% usage share and climbing. In this site's traffic it usually runs 30-40%, and lately edging into first place ahead of IE. The Firefox site at different times has listed recommendations or awards from Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Associated Press, the Washington Post, PC Magazine, CNET, and Wired.
Firefox 3.6 was released 21 January 2010. New stuff:
Firefox features also include:
If you're going to use Firefox, and you also want to use old-school client/server POP mail for your Internet email (rather than browser-based Web-mail) Mozilla also offers the user-friendly free POP-mail client Thunderbird. For more about Thunderbird, see my Email clients page in this section.
Firefox was designed from the beginning to be extensible, and there are a few hundred available add-ons. Firefox even checks for available updates for your installed add-ons, and when Firefox updates itself, it checks to see if your installed add-ons are compatible with its new version, and disables them and notifies you if not. Often there's already an update for the add-on to fix it.
Firefox add-ons I use:
Google Chrome is a free open-source Web browser with a completely redesigned user interface and architecture. It's an original and interesting rethinking of what a Web browser should be. Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X was released 8 June 2010. Since first quarter 2010 Chrome has been third in usage share, after Internet Explorer and Firefox, having passed Safari which had formerly been in third place. Chrome may see another surge in usage share now that Chrome 5 for Linux and Mac is out of beta.
Google Chrome uses more screen for Web content than other browsers, unless you start turning off stuff you need in the other browsers. The interface is pared down to the bare essentials: thin window borders and a scrollbar, one toolbar, a combination tab and title bar, and that's it. It's a very different look. They even did away with the menu bar, which is a bit disconcerting at first. Most such functions are in two menus that open from buttons on the right-hand end of the toolbar. One has a Page icon, tooltip-labeled "Control the current page"; the other has a Wrench icon, tooltip label "Customize and control Google Chrome." You'll find other controls by right-clicking things like tabs, links, or the displayed page.
When you want to go to a new URL, you're meant to open a new tab, with the familiar Control-T keystroke, or by clicking a little plus icon next to your last tab. That's where all the handy gadgets for opening pages are in Google Chrome, including an undocked Bookmarks toolbar across the top (the contents of which you fully control) nine automatic thumbnails of pages you go to most often, and a search box, recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs down the right side. You can change a setting and dock the Bookmarks toolbar if you want, so it appears in every tab, but you may find it more efficient to leave it undocked and just let it live on that New Tab page.
A Home button doesn't appear in the toolbar by default, but Chrome does have one you can turn on. Go to the Wrench button, Options, Basic tab, and there's a Show Home button on the toolbar check box. Try the option, on that same Options tab, to use the New Tab page as the home page; then when you want to open a new page in place of the current page (rather than in addition to it) you can just click the Home button.
Other interesting stuff:
Some good stuff Chrome doesn't have yet: RSS/Atom feeds, page zooming, mouse gestures (I hate 'em anyway) Gopher, BitTorrent, and SVG support. I'm sure they'll get around to all that.
So far, Chrome is officially available only as an online install, similar to Microsoft Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader, rather than an EXE file which can be downloaded and later installed without being connected to the Internet, as with Firefox and the other browsers. I've found downloadable install files on CNET, though.
There's some controversy because Chrome has an easily misinterpreted install option to "automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google," and creates a unique user ID as part of every install to facilitate this. This unique user ID gets created whether you enable usage statistics during install or not. (If you enabled sending of usage statistics and want to turn it off, there's a check box for that, at Wrench menu, Options, Under the Hood tab.)
This reminds me a lot of the fuss over Google's Gmail in 2004; people were upset because Gmail scans your email text to focus ads, and because they keep all your email stored on their servers forever. If the unique user ID thing in Chrome bothers you, you can get UnChrome, a free utility that overwrites your Chrome user ID with null information.
It seems like the Google folks keep doing this to themselves. It's almost like they naively think "nobody will mind this because we're the good guys." Maybe their famous motto don't be evil needs an addendum: don't be creepy, either.
The layout engine is the core code of a Web browser, the engine that takes the incoming HTML and CSS code and figures out how to plot it in the display area, as rapidly as possible. This is a pretty straightforward task for sites like this one, that use legal, well-formed code; validated code will be rendered almost exactly the same way in all modern browsers except Internet Explorer, especially IE6. Unfortunately, lots of Web coders consider validation unimportant. Badly-formed code with errors presents a bigger challenge for a layout engine; it has to analyze the code in a rather sophisticated way, and produce a best guess at what the page author intended.¹
Internet Explorer and Opera have always had their own layout engines, mostly not used by other browsers, called Trident and Presto, respectively. The resemblence ends there, however. Opera with Presto has always been a leader in standards compliance, especially CSS. Standards seem to have been and remain very much a secondary concern for Internet Explorer developers.
Development of the open-source Gecko layout engine began at Netscape Communications in 1997, and Gecko was used in version 6.0 and later of Netscape Navigator. In 2003 Gecko development was handed off to the Mozilla Foundation, and Gecko has been the core code of the Mozilla browsers, including Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firebird, and starting in late 2004, Mozilla Firefox 1.0+. Other Web browsers that use Gecko include Camino for Mac, Flock, SeaMonkey, Lunascape, K-Meleon, and Galeon.²
The KDE desktop environment for Linux includes the open-source Konqueror Web browser, first released in 1996. Konqueror has its own layout and JavaScript engines called KHTML and KJS respectively. Apple created the open-source WebKit layout engine in 2002 based on a software fork of KHTML and KJS, for use in its Safari browser. Other WebKit browsers include Google Chrome, iCab 4+ for Mac, Epiphany 2.28+, Arora, and Midori. Google's Android smartphone OS also uses WebKit.²
Safari is a Web browser from Apple, originally for Mac OS X only. In terms of features and CSS compliance it seems very comparable to Mozilla Firefox or Opera. Safari has been shipping as the default browser on new Macs with OS X since 2003, and was the third biggest usage share after IE and Mozilla Firefox for some years. As of first quarter 2010 Safari has been bumped to fourth by Google Chrome.
Safari 3 beta for Windows was made available in 2007, and in March 2008 Safari 3.1 for Windows XP and Vista was released. Faster page loading is claimed relative to other PC browsers, and it does seem to be pretty fast. There are also supposed to be significant user interface innovations, including bookmarks management and an improvement to the Back-button function called SnapBack. Safari 5.0 was released 7 June 2010 with faster performance and a new Reader tool; new Extensions support is due by late summer.
Safari has had some security-breach problems. At least in the case of version 3.2.1, the Safari installer also installs the QuickTime movie player and picture viewer, and doesn't offer you any choice about it. Based on the usage stats for my site, it would appear that very few people with Macs run Firefox, and very few people with Windows PCs run Safari.
You can also stick with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) for your Web browsing, if you so desire, or perhaps are being required to as a condition of employment. On a new Windows PC you'll already have IE available, along with Outlook Express, native Internet connection support, and character-mode (DOS-window) ftp and telnet utilities.
Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006, about a week before the release of Firefox 2.0. IE7 came with Windows Vista, and is available for download for WinXP SP2+. Fedex Kinko's rental computers and the local libraries' public computers all seem to have IE7 now. Version 7 finally brought tabbed browsing to IE, five years after Opera and four years after Mozilla and Firefox.
IE7 is somewhat better than IE6 at CSS standards compliance, although it fails Acid3 14/100. IE7 at least handles the CSS-based hovered-link highlighting used on this site correctly, unlike IE6. IE7 still doesn't handle table header and column group formats as well as Firefox and Chrome.
Internet Explorer 8 was released in March 2009; minimum OS is still WinXP SP2. IE8 is supposed to fully support CSS 2.1, and in standards mode passes the Acid2 CSS compliance test, as Firefox 3 has since June 2008 and Google Chrome since its first beta in September 2008. IE8 does better with table formats than IE7, but still fails Acid3 20/100.
IE, Outlook, and Windows have a long history of Internet security problems, the official fixes for which may work out better on an all-Microsoft PC system than otherwise. IE6 came to be universally reviled by Web designers for supporting CSS just well enough to cause major headaches, compared to Opera and Firefox.
IE's global usage share has probably been above 80% since 2000, appears to have peaked around 95% in 2002/03, and has been declining since the release of the Mozilla/Firefox browsers, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome.
| Browser | Date | Acid2 | Acid3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE6 | 10/01 | Fail | 4 |
| Firefox 2 | 10/06 | Fail | 52 |
| Opera 8.54 | 2006? | Fail | 3 |
| IE7 | 10/06 | Fail | 14 |
| Opera 9.6 | 2008? | Pass | 85 |
| Firefox 3 | 6/08 | Pass | 71 |
| Safari 3.2 | 11/08 | Pass | 75 |
| Chrome 1.0 | 12/08 | Pass | 75 |
| Firefox 3.6 alpha | 12/08 | Pass | 94 |
| Chrome 2 | 6/09 | Pass | 100 |
| Safari 4 | 6/09 | Pass | 100 |
| IE8 | 3/09 | Pass | 20 |
Why has IE had such an imposing market share if it has problems?
Internet Explorer typically installs from the Windows CD along with Windows, of course. Software that requires a certain IE build often includes it on the distribution CD. If you ever do an Internet-based install or upgrade of IE, be aware that what you initially download is just an installer, and it then downloads the main part of IE online during the "install" process, which for IE6 can be 75MB. I gather IE7 and IE8 are bigger.
Please upgrade from IE6, if you're still using it as your regular browser. Even Microsoft wants people to dump IE6 now. To find out what IE version you have, go to Help, About Internet Explorer.
Why? Short answer: it really sucks at CSS compliance. IE6, released in 2001, seems to have been the last IE version before Microsoft accepted that they were going to have to do at least a little better at handling CSS formats, if they wanted to stay in the game. IE7 and IE8 still aren't great at CSS, but IE6 is awful. When they built IE6 ten years ago, it seems like Microsoft was still thinking they could maybe torpedo and sink the World Wide Web Consortium and open standards, co-opt the Web, get proprietary-style control, and force everybody to do Web stuff their way.
The graphic* obviously suggests Firefox, but individuals who don't want to go to Firefox don't need to. Anybody running Windows XP should be able to upgrade to IE7 with no trouble.
There are still companies and other organizations forcing users to stay on IE6. Sometimes it's just because there's some intranet widget written sometime in 2001-2005 with IE6-specific code, and someone doesn't want to update it. I think any organization still making people use IE6, for any reason, might as well pass out tee-shirts that say "yes, we're pathetic."
Still having to cater to the wierdness of IE6 at this late date causes massive headaches for Webmasters, designers, and coders. As time marches on, more and more of them will be getting fed up and throwing all IE6 users off the back of the sleigh. That means if you get stubborn and stick with IE6, more and more of the Web is going to start to look terrible. If you move to at least IE7, you can get out of that, and also reduce aspirin consumption, increase productivity, and maybe extend the lives of thousands of smart people.
Opera 10.0 was released 1 September 2009. Opera has been a readily available alternative since the late 1990s.
Opera's developers have consistently pursued two values to which other browser developers have paid less attention at times. One is Web standards compliance; the other is keeping the browser small and efficient, both with your system resources and with download time. Opera has been the leader in CSS compliance since it was introduced, although even IE8 is supposedly on the CSS bandwagon now. Opera 10.0's download file is only 5.7MB (look for the "classic installer" download). Because Opera is relatively fast and small it can be a good choice for older slower hardware.
Opera is highly customizable including skins, and has tabbed browsing, automatic popup blocking, good CSS support, and support for alternate styles. Opera since version 7 has had a handy toolbar feature for turning off image loading for faster browsing on dialup. Opera has search in the toolbar, and you can add search engines, similar to Firefox. Opera 9, among other new features, introduced widgets, small Web applications on your Desktop, such as games and newsfeeds.
In spite of its many fine qualities Opera appears never to have had a global usage share greater than 2%. This may actually be in part a consequence of its user interface innovations, and perhaps a perceived dark horse status. Lack of usage share is no reason not to use Opera if you like it, however, and Opera has some very loyal fans. It's worth noting that the Opera code base and Presto layout engine have always been independent of those of Internet Explorer, the Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox family, and WebKit-based Safari and Google Chrome. So if you're writing Web code, it might be worthwhile looking at your pages in Opera occasionally, in spite of the low usage share.
Opera 9 includes its own native source code viewer/editor with syntax highlighting, which by default comes up as a browser tab. You can also specify any editor you want (Tools, Preferences, Advanced tab, Programs, Choose application for viewing source) which is nice for Web development. To open a page for editing, you can just display it in Opera and do View, Source (or press Control-F3).
Opera since version 5.10 by default supports mouse gestures, specific mouse movements and clicks which it recognizes as commands. I have no use for mouse gesture support and find it annoying. If you feel the same, you can turn them off: go to Tools, Preferences, Advanced, Shortcuts, and uncheck the Enable mouse gestures check box.
Opera always comes with POP-mail capability, but a new database-driven mail client called M2 was introduced with Opera version 7, and I've heard complaints about it. Your mileage may vary. Opera plus Thunderbird, or Opera plus the free Web-mail service of your choice would be reasonable alternatives for Opera fans.
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