What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera

prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""

Regardless of which.....

[xystren]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox still has major performance bugs affecting the display of Flash, memory consumption, and others. They don't get fixed because they aren't ego-boosters like other pet projects. Wish there was a commercial interest in charge of fixing bugs over there.

Opera?

[neoform]

How does opera keep getting in the headlines?
I know 1 person that uses it, seriously.

I check my weblogs all the time and never see anyone of my visitors using it..

Re:Whatever

[Comics]

Arguably, Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer and look at how that has worked out...

Re:Opera?

[calvin1981]

I check my weblogs all the time and never see anyone of my visitors using it..

That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer. See the Opera page [opera.com].

Re:Opera?

[Al Dimond]

I think Opera makes headlines not necessarily because lots of people use it but because people writing articles about web browsers care about web browsing and thus are quite likely to have tried Opera. Most people I know that have tried Opera are quite impressed by it, even if they don't use it every day. I use Firefox on the machine I'm posting from (a GNU/Linux box with a GB of RAM) but on machines without the RAM or processing power I almost always install Opera instead. There are a few things I prefer about the look'n'feel of FF, and how much it can be customized, but Opera's performance on otherwise slow computers is really impressive.

So I guess it's kind of like why many web sites discussing operating systems discuss desktop Unixes when for most people their OS decision is "XP Home or XP Pro?" More that the author is interested than the readers.

Re:Opera?

[Aranth Brainfire]

You obviously don't know the right sorts of people. I know a couple of people who use it, and I'm a user myself. It's more common on mobile devices I believe, but it's still a more mature browser than Firefox on desktops, in my opinion. A web browser is, to me, something that should "just work", not something that should be customized all to hell with extensions and stuff. Opera does that, and has most of the features of an extension-enriched Firefox. The main thing it's missing is the ideological "Open source is better than EVERYTHING" component, which means that (in my experience), you don't run into as many evangelical Opera users. I honestly don't give much of a damn who uses Opera, as long as the production team keeps making a good, responsive browser that I personally can use without problems. Firefox, however, by design encourages the spreading of itself, as it is in the user's best interest that more people get involved and contribute code or extensions.

Nice site graphics, by the way. Should be at least one record of Opera in your logs now, or they're doing it wrong :p

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

I would probably get flame for saying this.

IE is more stable than FireFox.

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.

I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.

Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.

*Burn karma burn baby*

PS. Image/flash processing mostly.

Re:Opera?

[Kelson]

Opera stays in the web browser headlines for the same reason that Apple stays in the PC headlines: They keep pushing the envelope. Opera's pioneered a lot of browser UI -- mouse gestures, MDI, integrated search boxes. Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other. There's probably a Firefox extension somewhere, but I can't think of another browser that does that. And while they weren't the first to implement CSS, the main author of the original spec, Håkon Wium Lie, has been an Opera exec for 5 or 6 years.

So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[cryptoz]

Merely because a product is used for a simple task does not make it any less important than anything else. The reason people care so much about the security features in their cars is, shockingly, because it's important. While moving from one place to another is simple, it's very important. Actually, by the nature of things, the more often a task is performed, the more important it is. Without very advanced browsers, one of the most common tasks of today's world for anyone - using websites - would become dangerous for nearly all computers.

Re:Whatever

[McCarrum]

I just looked at my Task Manager, and 42,538k .. I have (counts) 15 tabs open, a handful of addons loaded like adblock, fasterfox, tabprefs .. using a custom theme .. four of the tabs have rather active flash animations, one of the pages is littered with them.

This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!" ...

Re:Opera?

[Lisandro]

Because it's a heck of a browser. The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics, but i know quite a lot of people that use and love Opera, me included. Hands down, the best UI in any software i've used as of lately, never mind in browsers, and a sleek, lightweight, fast piece of software.

    Opera gets a lot of (undeserved) flak arround here because it's not open source. They gave away a free, ad supported, 100% functional version and it wasn't enough. Now they gave away registration keys, and i guess that's isn't enough either.

Re:Whatever

[Dachannien]

I almost never have to restart Firefox, except on rare occasions when some third-party plugin (Acrobat, WMP) hoses things up. Something else on your machine must be borken.

Re:Stupid mods

[Kelson]

I can see it being overrated, but a troll?

That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.

Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.

Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Crayon Kid]

"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser.

So true. That's true actually for any standard. Furthermore, it's incredible how many small spots are left uncovered by specifics, and result in browsers implementing their own interpretation. Quite often, you've guessed it, they turn out different behavior.

Take the HTTP header that specifies the name of the file to be downloaded. The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF, Explorer treats it as garbage, Mozilla et al. interprets it as UTF. That's one case. I urlencode it, Explorer decodes it and shows the UTF chars, Mozilla et al. presents it with the % codes still in place. Again, bummer.

Both cases, one of them did something wrong and the other something good. Actually, it's not even a case of absolute "good or bad", it's more about taking the liberty to expand upon the specs. What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?

Shouldn't be that complicated

[Blue Mushroom]

I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator. If any possible compliant page does not correctly display in the browser, the browser is not 100% compliant. Any broswer that can't correctly display any possible compliant page should only be called partially compliant. Why should it be more complicated than that?

That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.

As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.

Anybody see standards as having a different purpose?
Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages?
Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?

Re:Stupid mods

[Lisandro]

Come on man, you're willing to miss a great piece of software just because it's not OSS? The Opera developers are now focusing on mobile devices, and they're (effectively) giving it away for free for desktop users. No ads, no strings attached.

    I really like Firefox, but i find Opera to be a much more polished browser (like i said earlier, specially in the UI department). Their Linux support is excellent aswell. It's cool, and it's free. No OSS, but *free*. What's to hate here? And this is from an OSS advocate...

Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first."

I disagree.

Opera has done well by selling browsers. It's a company, after all, so they have to make money and can't rely on donations from others.

Today the company is growing at an incredible pace, and rather than losing that momentum on the desktop because they could have been huge and losing users, they are now tiny instead, and are gaining users. Firefox was there at the right time and people started switching. All Opera has to do now is to offer a free alternative, which it does, and market it properly.

Opera has been around for ten years and has always experienced growth. I would hardly call that "messed itself up".

Re:Whatever

[DigitumDei]

I'd say that arguably, after netscape died, they had no commercial interest in IE. It was the only browser, they could do what they wanted (or in this case do nothing).

It is only recently that the renewed competition, and the addition of more complex web apps, that has brought IE back into the MS managers sights, and thus back as a commercial interest. I think we will see over the next year, just how much commercial interest in IE will speed up it's development.

Firefox 1.5 comes out today.

[DroopyStonx]

Guess we'll find out soon enough!

A more useful extension: Ghostzilla?

[Atario]

I'd like to know is why no one has written a Ghostzilla extension for Firefox. That is, something that makes Firefox do what Ghostzilla [ghostzilla.com] does, except without the bugs and old rendering engine and separate installation and stuff.

Please? Someone?

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're sort of right. I was only meaning to be funny, and the comparison is only in the most basic sense. Microsoft sabotages all software that runs on it. Anything other than a clean install with all the latest sp's and insanely firewalled... it's just asking for trouble. You want to install Office? Sure thing. Autocad? Great. Dreamweaver... uh oh, you just exceeded the magical third-party software limit, where things start sucking ass...

Re:Whatever

[TheoGB]

But I think this comment:

Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person. And you think why people still stay away from FF.

Is the key one. "Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use. Personally I don't even know if the software I have on Windows exists on (say) Macs - I've so far known two Mac fanboys who can't do the things with music that I can do with Cool Edit Pro.

But I digress,

If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.

But don't you get kind of bored of assuming Microsoft are the reason? I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability. Yes, it's possible they are trying to undermine Firefox but why would they bother? IE isn't making them money in the way MS-DOS was when they sabotaged DR-DOS for Windows. And I still need to use IE to access my work's online MS Exchange email, for example.

I would say it's more logical to blame Firefox for the problems or possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it, which I consider pretty stupid.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[killjoe]

It seems odd that no european has ever submitted a bug fix for this don't you think?

Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[hunterx11]

There's a difference between pushing the envelope, and purposely making it a different size so only your letters will fit, which is more like what Microsoft is doing with things like ActiveX.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that the W3C is a standards body and Microsoft, as much as they like to think they are, isn't.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"Opera has never made much profit"

What is "much profit", and what does this have to do with your initial claims that "Opera has messed up" and that they have never made money on the desktop? They've been expanding a lot the last few years to keep up with demand, and that costs money of course. That doesn't mean that the income has been going up too.

Opera has made plenty enough profit to survive and experience constant growth for many years.

"Internet devices are their niche, and that's what brings in the larger percentage of revenue. And that percentage is increasing. (over 80% now)"

Now, yes, because they just eleased the desktop version for free without ads. I've already told you about that. Please pay attention.

"And how would that work?"

You get lots of users searching through Google (a huge part of the desktop revenues in the past), even more now that Opera is free without ads, and combined with a better search deal with Google, you have the potential of a lot of money flowing in [opera.com].

"What they are doing is basically recognizing that they are not going to make money from the desktop browser (while the biggest competitors give it away for free). So they release it for free and get a lot of good PR. And leverage that PR for the internet device markets."

You are wrong, as I have already told you. They expect to make a lot more money on the desktop side now. They get better PR and they make more money.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[StarkRG]

60% of what?

The idea is that the layout changes to suit the viewer. If I view a page on a 200 inch screen at a resolution of 102400x76800 I expect that it's not going to look the same as when I view it on a 6 inch screen at 400x400. The point is not to write the page so that it forces the client to show it in one particular way, it's to design a layout that can stand to be streched and skewed and still be readable.

There is no right way to view a standards compliant web page, however viewing it in a non-standards compliant browser is a wrong way to do it.

How is a browser supposed to know what size you want to scale images to if you resize the window? 60% of what? 60% of your screen size? 60% of the size the window was when you first loaded the page? 60% of 800x600? 60% of the smallest screen that's phisically possible? 60% of the largest screen? what if I projected a web page onto the moon? how big should the images scale to then?

Re:Whatever

[RoLi]

Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer

Actually, Microsoft has a lot of commercial interest in the Win32-platform (Windows-licenses, MSDN-subscriptions, courses, etc.) which is of course endangered by the Web.

That is why they wanted to establish their own network (MSN) with their own proprietary protocols and their own proprietary formats. They failed miserably and now MSN is just a normal ISP and uses Unix protocols and formats like anybody else. Microsoft did not "win" the Browser war, the whole Internet Explorer thing was damage control. After Netscape was dead, Microsoft was stuck with something they didn't really want. (An IE that was dominating but was running with open protocols and formats.) The better IE is, the more attractive the web becomes in comparison to Win32. So of course they let it rot, making IE better would have been counterproductive.

After Firefox started to destroy domination by becoming so big that it can no longer be ignored (over 10% and rising is too much to ignore, even if it's still a minority) therefore Microsoft fell back to damage control mode.

However, there are several reasons why IE will NEVER regain total domination:

• IE is de-facto dead (or dying) on the Mac
• While the IE to Firefox transition is quite easy (bookmarks get copied, etc.) the reverse is actually quite troublesome as Microsoft is quite arrogant and probably won't import FF bookmarks. Also of course FF-extensions don't run on IE, therefore IE7 might be able to slow further losses to FF, but it most likely won't be able to get back many users already lost.
• Smartphones and other wireless devices are slowly getting more important and most of them don't run IE and never will. Even those few windows mobile users will run some browser that might be called IE but will not have much in common with the PC-version.
• Embedded devices will become more important in browsing, especially the PS3.
• Also, Linux adoption on the desktop is progressing. Many governments all around the world are adopting Linux, especially in South America and Europe.
• IE has already lost domination and IE-only websites are becoming rarer already. Just one or 2 years ago, many people tried out Mozilla or Firefox, but were put off with IE-only websites. Quite a lot of those will try 1.5 and later 2.0 and even though the product is pretty much the same, there are much fewer IE-only sites around and therefore they are much more likely to stay with FF. Also, once a webmaster has established a standard-compliant website, it's unlikely that he reprograms it to be IE-only again, that just doesn't make any sense.

All these factors combined will prevent IE from regaining significant marketshare and will cause further decline for IE in the long term that might be slowed but not stopped by Microsoft.

A plea to Firefox developers...

[PhilHibbs]

Don't overload the Reload and Stop buttons! I read about MS doing that in IE7, and it's one of the most stupid ideas I've heard. Then I tried Opera, and saw that they've done it too! The tabs being ABOVE the toolbar (ugly ugly ugly) is the main reason I don't use Opera, but the combined Stop/Reload button is another reason.

Re:Shut FF down once a day

[The One KEA]

You can use the Session Saver extension to restore your current browser state (i.e. the open tabs).

The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.

The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of web sites do things like present a list of things, and when you select one of the items you go to a new page that doesn't have the list, but just a back button. With Opera Window Linking, I keep the list up, and can quickly click through the list, with each new item coming up in the linked window. Very fast, no new window opening/closing, etc. It stays where I put it.

It is more awkward to do that sort of thing with other browsers.

Re:Wrong Methods

[typicallyterrific]

You first make something simple that works, and then you can add features to it (preferably in a modular way, so that people who don't want the features can choose not to have them). What they did was first add all the features, and then try to make it simple. That doesn't work. I was saying this in the early days, and I'm still saying it now.

Ah yes. Do you program at all? From my limited experience, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE for that NOT to happen somewhere down the line in your project. Upon which you have to spend a lot of time fixing your current code base. The mozilla project inherited this massive, broken project that had been rewritten from scratch recently and that almost no one else would be touching (Netscape). Nothing is more frustrating than reading someone else's code when you could be writing your own.

All things considered, Firefox is probably the single most popular piece of open source software today - which is absolutely incredible. And I think you might be doing something odd for it to be the slowest, most memory hungry and crashy browser: it's main feature is the fact that it sucks less than IE. It has so, in my mind, ever since version 0.5, which is when I began to use it as my main browser :P.

Re:is there an extension....

[Yer Mom]

...or the message text would get added to the company's spam filters in fairly short order once somebody receives 50 identical messages from different addresses.

Granted, that shows lack of clue, but we already know they're somewhat low on that particular resource...

Re:Whatever

[radish]

So your suggested fix for a browser which can't display a certain kind of content reliably is to not try to display that kind of content? Genius. It works in other browsers, it should work in firefox. There's no excuse.

another vaporware evaluation

[LordActon]

On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year

So, once again, we compare something freely available and available now, to something not available. And /. is all over it like white on paper. Can anyone spell "Longhorn"?

If the PC World editors want to hang onto the hype train and pretend anyone cares about Microsoft's promises, let them. And ignore them. Because by the time their vaporware materializes, it'll be competing against Firefox 2.0 and 2.5.