March 1st, 2008 by Vineet | 3 Comments »
March 1, 2008 was a historical day in the history of web browsing. Official support for all Netscape client products was removed . (Please read about Netscape in wikipedia to know how much Netscape has contributed to our online lives).
Also another big current news in the browser world is that Firefox has crossed the 500 million downloads milestone. Read below and you will know why…
Recently I have been working on some javascript codes and for testing I tried six common browsers. Here I would like to present a comparison of these five browsers. The browsers I tested are
1. Mozilla-Firefox 2.0 (Windows and Linux (It’s called Iceweasel on Debian))
2. Opera 9.26(Linux)
3. Netscape 9(Windows and Linux)
4. Flock 1.1 (Linux)
5.1. Internet Explorer 5 (Windows)
5.2. Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
6. Epiphany (Linux)
PS: The list misses Apple’s Safari browser. I don’t have a Mac yet and Safari for Windows sucks so much that I did not even bother to test it. (Sorry, Apple fanboys)
Internet Explorer 5 is now a stone age browser. It doesn’t support .png images and has limited support for javascript … In simple terms you cannot get those beautiful, translucent images and cool animated effects (which are now so much a part of any website). It does not have tabbed browsing and is really slow. For all of you who are still on IE5 I beg you to please switch over to firefox or atleast IE7.
Next in line IE7. Well it’s somewhat better than IE5 but practically again a nuisance. No doubt it is fast, has tabbed browsing, Support for various image formats (transparency included), better support for javascript BUT the problem lies in its security. It is too secure to use … won’t open anything you use Internet for, mostly . You can compare its security to a building without a boundary wall but a big gate with a big lock !!! And yes, there are still issues with javascript … Mr. Ballmer please understand that not all coders work for MS and if not support Open Source atleast live in harmony with it.
Opera is a good browser (for Linux users) if you are able to install it. I use Debian etch . I downloaded the debian package , installed it, ran it and booooom …. My CPU fan started shouting at me… had to kill the opera process. Then I downloaded the source code and ran the script without installing (installing from the source code was also useless) … it worked fine but your PWD must be the directory where the script is present . I had to tweak the script a bit to get it working from anywhere. Once you get Opera working you will love it .
Epiphany … Don’t even think about it … It’s a counterpart for IE5 ….OK, a little better.
Flock is a young browser … I did not play much with it but it is recommended by our old experienced , late Netscape so I trust it is good .
Netscape is awesome but unfortunately there is no more official support for it … so it’s not the browser of the future. Now the Netscape users are recommended to use Firefox or Flock.
Finally, Mozilla-Firefox is a clear winner… With a huge community support and so many useful plugins (more than 2000) and such a good support for almost anything there is no doubt that it is the best.
Happy browsing !