Beta Browsers War

The Web browser space is heating up again. First Microsoft launched beta 2 of

its IE 8, which is being touted as one of their most secure, reliable and

efficient browsers yet, then Google stunned the world by entering the browser

race with Chrome. And as if these two beta releases were not enough, developers

got two more beta browsers from the other big names in the browser space: Opera

and Mozilla. Following Chrome's release, Opera released the beta for their next

upcoming browser version 9.6. And in mid-October it was Mozilla to release the

beta for next Firefox browser code-named as “Shiretoko”.

With so many releases expected, it's only obvious that there is a browser war

is in the making. But now this competition has ventured into beta stages of the

browsers, and it won't be wrong to term this competition as Beta Browser War. As

browser providers are trying to attract more user-base by announcing the major

enhancements or features in their beta releases.

By pressing the Ctrl + Tab keys, the 3-D like tab-switching interface is triggered that shows a preview of the tabs content.

In this next-generation of browser battle, we have a new entrant: Chrome.

Now, each one of these browsers is upping the ante upon their rivals to get the

maximum portion of the browser market pie. In doing so, they are not just

becoming faster in performance and more reliable, but also providing many added

features to give ease of usability and enhancing user's browsing experience.

Here we take a look at each of these browsers and compare them vis-à-vis of

features, usability and performance.

The Firefox 3.1 'Shiretoko'


Adhering to their tradition of code-naming Firefox as name of a place, the
Firefox 3.1 has been named as Shiretoko, a Japanese national park. Firefox has

been front-runner in innovations, and with Firefox 3.1 the notable innovative

feature is the new 3-D like tab-switching interface that shows previews of the

tab's content you are switching to. This new release is based on Gecko version

1.9.1, an improved rendering platform. Firefox has always focused upon

performance, and with Firefox 3.1 it incorporates a new JavaScript rendering

engine named TraceMonkey. As Web-pages are becoming more JavaScript based,

TraceMonkey uses tracing optimization of script and lets multiple scripts run as

background processes, thus resulting in quicker rendering of the Web page.

Following on Chrome's feature of scooting tabs around between browser windows,

same has been incorporated in beta 1 release of Firefox 3.1 (alpha release of

Firefox 3.1 didn't had this feature of tearing tabs from one window to another).

Awesome Bar, the smart address bar of Firefox 3 has been improved in the

newer beta version by supporting the use of special characters. Now you can

restrict the search to your history by typing “^”, or bookmarks with “*”

character succeeding the search keyword. Comparing the cold application startup

time against other browsers, Firefox 3.1 still lags behind IE8 and Chrome. That

is, when you initiate the browser application Firefox consumes maximum time to

start up, while Chrome and IE8 start up immediately. Firefox also doesn't have

independent processes for separate tabs like Chrome has, so if a web page

crashes the whole browser application will crash. Also there is no private

browsing option that Chrome and IE8 have, maybe by final release this option

will be incorporated.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2



Microsoft's Internet Explorer enjoys about three-quarters of the browser

market pie. And having Microsoft at helm, IE enjoys a reputation of being safe

and a reliable browser. With beta 2 being released in August this year, the

final release of IE 8 is expected by the end of 2008. Internet Explorer has been

the follower of trend like in case of tabbed browsing, which was being used by

other browser for long time; Microsoft incorporated that in IE 7. With IE 8,

that's not the case. The feature of private browsing mode has been offered first

by Microsoft and later Google provided the same in Chrome. This private browsing

in IE 8 is branded as InPrivate Browsing and no-record of the users' browsing of

web sites is saved. This feature is highly useful when using a bank site or

doing an online transaction. IE 8 also offers a Smart Address Bar that offers

similar functionality like Chrome's Omnibar, whereby one can type in URLs or

search keywords and then be showed a suggested list of URLs. Another feature

that Microsoft has introduced with IE 8 is of providing third party add-on

options called as “Gallery” and is similar to Firefox's Extensions.

From the 'Safety' menu, select the option of “InPrivate Browsing” and the browser won't retain any user's history.

Comparing speed of rendering JavaScript based web pages with Chrome or

Firefox, IE 8 lags behind. But IE 8 is very quick while starting up the browser

application. It is slower to rival browsers only when speed is considered while

rendering web pages.

Opera's Speed Dial lets you fix nine web sites that you visit most frequently and also has an integrated mail client.

Google Chrome



The first thing one notice about Chrome is its minimalistic appearance, its void
of any title bar or status bar, and there's one combined bar in place of

traditional address bar and search bar. Even the tabs bar is merged with the

title bar. Ripping away these bars has given Chrome an extra 3-4 line of viewing

space when compared to other browsers. And the address bar, called as “Omnibar”

in Chrome offers suggested URLs from history as well as it offers web searches

too. When you open a new tab, Chrome shows you a matrix of nine thumbnails of

the most visited sites along with recently added bookmarks and a search box to

search within browser history. Now talking about history, with InCognito

browsing you can avoid the pages you visit being saved in the browser history.

Reliability and stability has been a key concern, and with tabbed browsing if a

web-page crashes due to corrupt JavaScript, the whole browser crashed due to

that. To tackle that in Chrome, Google has made each tab a separate process.

That means, even if a site crashes in one tab, the entire browser won't come

down and the other tabs will remain intact.

Chrome has a task manager which functions the same as Windows Task manager,

with which you can monitor and kill a tab (process) that's eating too much of

memory or is functioning weirdly. Besides, Chrome renders a webpage a little

quicker owing to V8 JavaScript engine. But what goes against Chrome is its

limited support to just Windows platform, maybe there will be releases for Linux

as well as Mac platforms in future. Unlike Firefox, Chrome doesn't have any

add-ons feature for users to customize the browser as per their preferences.

Opera 9.6 Beta 1



While IE 8, Chrome and Firefox were released with much buzz going around, Opera
launched the beta of their upcoming Opera 9.6 browser in a very quieter manner.

So with this new version Opera offers new features and speed enhancement. Since

Chrome had followed the suit of Opera in providing the thumbnail preview of most

often visited sites while opening up a new tab. The same feature exists in Opera

but is termed as speed dial, whereby a user can allocate each box a URL that he

likes to visit most, unlike Chrome where this is dependent upon the users

browsing history.

Chrome in InCognito browsing mode. A tab can be torn off from the browser into a separate standalone window.

The newest feature in Opera 9.6 is of Opera Link that synchronizes the typed

website address history and custom search. This is convenient for people who use

different computers, and now with Opera Link they will be able to get their

typed history and bookmarks on other machines as well. Another feature unique to

Opera is of RSS feed preview, so now before subscribing to any feed a user can

have a preview of that feed. And with their latest release Opera has introduced

a new low bandwidth mode in their email client, which makes Opera use bandwidth

as little as possible. The mail client interface is very simple and easy to

configure. Coming to browsers performance, it is slow at start-up if you have

set all the boxes of the speed-dial as it fetches the preview of each box's

content online. While in case of Chrome, the thumbnails were displayed based on

the browsers cache and so the browser didn't slowed up.

Verdict



It surely remains interesting how the other browsers will catch up with the
popularity of IE. IE 8 is reliable but slower, therefore a choice between

Chrome, Opera and Firefox 3.1 gets tougher. Though, Chrome and Firefox 3.1 have

“state of art” JavaScript rendering engines (V8 and TraceMonkey respectively)

that loads web applications faster compared to IE 8



and Opera. Firefox 3.1 gains an upper hand over Chrome in terms of features like
ad-blocking and extensions. Till Chrome gets such features of expandability and

customizability,



Firefox 3.1 with its TraceMonkey can be said a leader in this browser race.