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Buying Guide: Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser Choice
Contents
- Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser Choice
- Speed
- Standards Support
The big three browser makers have been busy. Last Tuesday, Google's Chrome 10 came out, with lots more speed, a new settings interface, and a more secure Flash implementation. Granted, a new Chrome version comes out every couple of months, and in this case it's been less than a month, so that's not exactly huge news. Then on Wednesday night, Mozilla announced the availability of the long awaited Firefox 4.0 as a release candidate (the final version is coming next Tuesday). The new Firefox version was in gestation for nearly a year, and is a significant break from its predecessor, bringing the browser into the fold of fast, minimalist-interface apps we've seen from the likes of Google and Opera. Finally, this past Monday, Microsoft announced at SXSW that Internet Explorer 9 was available in its "release to Web" final form. Like the Firefox product, IE9 is a huge advance on its predecessor, also bringing speed, user interface, and standards support—attributes where IE had trailed the likes of Chrome significantly.
So what's the result of this slew of releases? Three browsers that all sport a minimal interface, are nearly equally fast, and offer good support for HTML5. How do you choose? Below, I'll outline how the three new big-time browsers stack up in the major categories you should care about: Interface, Speed, Security and Privacy, Standards Support, and Extra features. Note that this piece considers only the three new browsers, as Chrome 10 has already beaten out Opera 11 and Safari 5 in our lab testing.
Interface
Google's Chrome started the trend of shaving the browser's interface down to the bare minimum, as part of the company's push towards making every app a Web app. It's Chrome OS is another move in this direction—an operating system that isn't much more than a Web browser—as is the Chrome Web Store, which mimic's Apple's App store for iOS, but instead of offering installable software, lets users "install" Web sites in the browser's tab bar.
Speaking of tabs, parity has pretty much been reached. Now all three browsers let you drag tabs out into their own windows and close background tabs. IE, which in version 8 offered colorized tab groups but little else, now has leapfrogged the competition in tab dragging: a page playing video or audio can be dragged out without missing a beat. And if you drag a tab to the side of the screen, it will obey Windows 7's Aero snap feature, filling exactly half the screen. Chrome offers a clunkier way to have a window fill half the screen, you must drag out a tab and drop it exactly into a page icon that shows up on the edge of its window if your cursor is in the right area.
Firefox's Panorama tab manager is a potentially powerful aid to browsing with oodles of tabs at your beck. It lets you organized them into visual groups for easier access. But Firefox lacks IE9 and Chrome's helpful new-tab page, which offer favorites and history, and in Chrome's case, "Web apps." Instead Firefox offers a blank white page.
Chrome and Firefox offer themes, letting you dress up the browser window in different colors, patterns, and images. IE9, however, dispenses with this frippery, instead letting sites affect the look of the browser. In that browser, you can "pin" sites, meaning they'll get a permanent button in the Windows 7 taskbar sporting jump lists to take you to frequently needed site sections. Pinned sites also adorn the browser with their own icon and predominant color. Chrome and Firefox both let you pin tabs for Web apps, but in their cases this means getting a smaller, persistent tab for the pinned site at the left of the tab bar—no Windows 7 goodies.