A Cheat Sheet To All the Browser Betas

Harry writes "I can't remember another time when there were so many Web browsers in prerelease form — 2009 should be a really, really good year for final browser versions. I have posted a quick recap of the state of the upcoming versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari." It is nice to see a healthy market of competition driving innovation in a market that has been largely stagnant in recent history. What do other folks see on the scorecard?

Opera?

[TubeSteak]

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9122719&intsrc=news_ts_head [computerworld.com]
Opera 10 alpha aces Acid3 browser test
Newest preview boosts browsing performance by 30%, claims Norwegian company

OWB always missing from the list??

[AmigaHeretic]

These article always seem to miss OWB for AmigaOS 4.1.

http://strohmayer.org/owb/ [strohmayer.org]

It gets 100/100 on ACID3, check the screen shots on the site.

Geez!! :-)

Re:Well..

[Donniedarkness]

I like Firefox, but I disagree with the comment that it is "the only real browser right now". I much prefer Opera (which you apparrently didn't know still existed), and Safari (which you refuse to try) isn't that bad either. I WOULD rank Safari under Firefox, but Opera's download manager, speed-dial, and the fact that it seems a lot less bloated definately meets my needs better than Firefox does (Disclaimer: I have, and regularly use, both).

Re:Whom is the better?

[Morlark]

Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser. If the website is designed in some dumbass way so that all the boxes are absolutely positioned, fixed width/height, because the designer is naively assuming that "surely all the text on my precious creation must be in this fabulous font that I've chosen at this specific size" then funnily enough things will break if the font is not just so, or if the size is not just so, or if the window is not the right size. It's not the browser's fault that the website is shit, it's the website's fault.

It's exactly the same as back in the days of olde, when shitty web designers used shitty IE-specific tags, and encouraged users to blame the browser if things didn't look the way they were supposed to. Only now those same designers have cottoned on to such concepts as "standards compliance" and turned it into a buzzword without trying to understand what it means. So they create all their web pages, run it through a validator and then pretend they're good to go, when in actual fact their web page might contain dozens of braindead design flaws like absolute positioning on every single element, or fixed width/height on boxes that will need to expand if the font size is changed.

I guess I can't disagree with you on the image zoom point, although I zoom images infrequently enough that it doesn't bother me. :P

Re:Well..

[sdhoigt]

I think your real point should've stuck to the fact that current versions of Firefox do not run on FreeBSD. The other points you make are the same fluff we've been hearing about Opera for years.

I few months back I put Firefox on the sidelines and used Opera for a good solid month. It is a nice browser on many levels (fast, clean UI, etc.), and I would probably use it all the time and be happy if it weren't for Firefox/Firebug/NoScript. I know you can block JS, etc. from running per site w/Opera, but No Script gives you a granularity that Opera just doesn't have. And Firebug is just ridiculously awesome; nothing comes close.

Just my two quid.
SD