Browser Wars
Which is the best browser for me? This simple question had become the Schrödinger equation of the internet world we live in. The truth is that the word ‘best’ is relative, a browser or any software that is best for me may be the worst of its kind for someone else. In this article, on the basis of performance, security and reliability we would try to find the answer of this complex question.
Background:
The World Wide Web is an Internet-based hypertext system invented in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser World wide Web, later renamed Nexus, and released it for the NeXT step platform in 1991.
By the end of 1992 other browsers had appeared, many of them based on the libwww library. These included UNIX browsers such as Line-mode, ViolaWWW, Erwise and MidasWWW, and MacWWW/Samba for the Mac. This created choice between browsers and hence the first real competition, especially on UNIX.
Further browsers were released in 1993, including Cello, Arena, Lynx and Mosaic. The most influential of these was Mosaic, a multiplatform browser developed at NCSA. Other browsers launched during 1994 included IBM Web Explorer, Navipress, SlipKnot, MacWeb, and IBrowse. In 1995 Netscape faced new competition from OmniWeb, WebRouser, UdiWWW, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0, but continued to dominate the market.
By the end of 1995 World Wide Web had obtained a lot of consideration both from user and developer community and software companies started realizing the great potentials and opportunities of web browser and so the cut throat competition commenced. By the end of 1996, Microsoft with its internet explorer was dominating the browser market. Prior to that Netscape was the dominant company in browser market. With about 80% market shares and a good deal of public goodwill, but as a relatively small company deriving the great bulk of its income from what was essentially a single product (Navigator and its derivatives), it was financially vulnerable. Netscape's total revenue never exceeded the interest income generated by Microsoft's cash on hand. Microsoft's vast resources allowed IE to remain free as the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing. Netscape was commercial software for businesses but provided for free for home and education users; Internet Explorer was provided as free for Windows users, cutting off a significant revenue stream.
Another advantage was that Microsoft Windows had over 90% share of the operating system market. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore Microsoft was able to dominate the market share easily as customers had IE as a default. In this time period, many new computer purchases were first computer purchases for home users or offices, and many of the users had never extensively used a web browser before, so had nothing to compare with and little motivation to consider alternatives; the great set of features they had gained in gaining access to the Internet and the World Wide Web at all made any modest differences in browser features or ergonomics pale in comparison.
In 1998 a case was filed against Microsoft had abused its monopoly on operating systems to unfairly dominate the market and eliminate competition. This case along with several other issues led to the complete defeat of Netscape and Microsoft with its Internet Explorer became the new dominant browser, attaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share during 2002, more than Netscape had at its peak.
Microsoft continued to dominate the browser market till end of 2003, after that by a collection of emerging browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera its market share started eroding. After the defeat of Navigator by Internet Explorer, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, and entrusted it to the newly formed non-profit Mozilla Foundation—a primarily community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite was created, which included features, such as tabbed browsing and a separate search bar, that had previously only appeared in Opera. The browser-only version was initially named Phoenix, but because of trademark issues that name was changed, first to Firebird, then to Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation's development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on 9 November 2004. Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market. Along with Firefox other contenders also made significant improvements to their browsers and started snatching the huge market share that was once the legacy of Microsoft. Significant companies included Safari and Opera. With a diminutive thrashing to Internet Explorer’s market share, the scenario remained unchanged till 2008.
Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 on 17 June 2008, with performance improvements, and other new features. Firefox 3.5 followed on 30 June 2009 with further performance improvements, native integration of audio and video, and more privacy features.
Google released Chrome browser for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and claiming a faster JavaScript engine called V8. An open sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium. According to Net Applications, Chrome had gained a 3.6% usage share by October 2009. After the release of the beta for Mac OS X and Linux, the market share had increased rapidly. On March 19, 2009, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which added accelerators, improved privacy protection; a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 and improved support for various web standards. During December 2009 and January 2010, Stat Counter reported that its statistics indicated that Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser, when counting individual browser versions, passing Internet Explorer 7 and 8 by a small margin. This is the first time a global statistic has reported that a non-Internet Explorer browser version has exceeded the top Internet Explorer version in usage share since the fall of Netscape Navigator. But after the final release of IE 8, it retained its share in the market as the most popular web browser, a privilege that it enjoys even today.
This leads us to focus our attention on three popular contenders of the browser market, one of which would be the final answer to our question. The nominees include:
ü Microsoft IE8
ü Mozilla Firefox
ü Google Chrome
Now we will discuss each of the above browsers in detail and analyze its performance and user share.
Microsoft Internet Explorer:
Microsoft Internet Explorer, now called Windows Internet Explorer and abbreviated as IE is the series of web browsers launched by software giant, the Microsoft and shipped with its popular operating system Windows. IE has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95%usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6. Since its peak of popularity, its usage share has declined in the face of renewed competition from other web browsers to 55%, and is slowly trending downward. Microsoft spent over $100 million per year on IE in the late 1990s, with over 1000 people working on it by 1999. Since its inception with version 1, Microsoft had released 8 stable versions of IE, the latest being IE 8, that would be our prime concern in this article. It is is available as a free update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or later, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008, and is included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. IE 8 was in development since 2007 and was released on March 19,2009. It is supported in Windows SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 on both 32-bit as well as 64-bit architectures. It includes much stricter compliance with web standards, including a planned full Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 compliance for the release version. All these changes allow Internet Explorer 8 to pass the Acid2 test. However, to prevent compatibility issues, IE8 also includes the IE7 rendering behavior. Sites that expect IE7 quirks can disable IE8's breaking changes by including a meta element in the HEAD section of the HTML document. IE8 also includes numerous improvements to JavaScript support as well as performance improvements, although it still does not pass the Acid3 test, with version 8.0 scoring 20/100. It includes support for Accelerators - which allow supported web applications to be invoked without explicitly navigating to them - and Web Slices - which allows portions of page to be subscribed to and monitored from a redesigned Favorites Bar. Other features include In Private privacy features and Smart Screen phishing filter.
The most striking feature of IE8 is its tabbed browsing which was introduced to compete with Firefox which was already presenting users with this feature. The new tab can be opened from an already opened page, you can drag the tab to any location and reopen the recently closed tabs from the menu. Each tab is secluded from the others, so if one tab collapses, the entire browser doesn't go down. You can then return to the crashed tab, and when you do, it reloads with the information that had been in it when it went down, such as a incompletely written e-mail. And if you were watching a video, the video will start playing at the point the tab crashed, not at the start of the video.
The second most important feature of IE is ‘Favicon’. The feature became so popular that all the leading browsers included this feature. It lets you organize your favorite websites and save their addresses for later use and they can be accessed from the favorites drop down menu. IE uses accessibility features provided in windows; it also had the pop up blocker feature. Internet Explorer caches visited content in the Temporary Internet Files folder to allow quicker access (or offline access) to previously visited pages. The content is indexed in a database file, known as Index.dat. Multiple Index.dat files exist which index different content - visited content, web feeds, visited URLs, cookies, etc. Another important feature is Accelerators and Web Slices, both designed to let you get information from Web pages and services without having to visit them.
Technically speaking internet explorer supports HTML 4, CSS, XML, DOM Level 1, and XSLT. It partially supports (until IE 8) CSS level 2, DOM level 2. It had a partial support for XHTML, with full support in its latest IE9. Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between standards mode and a "quirks mode" in which it deliberately mimicks nonstandard behaviors of old versions of MSIE for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript.
Internet Explorer uses a zone-based security framework that groups sites based on certain conditions, including whether it is an Internet- or intranet-based site as well as a user-editable whitelist. Security restrictions are applied per zone; all the sites in a zone are subject to the restrictions.
Standout Features:
1. Smart address bar
2. Tabbed browsing
3. Tab grouping
4. Inprivate browsing
5. Tab crash resolution
6. Favorities bar
7. Web Slices
8. Accelerators
9. Visual Search
10. Compatibility
Along with these features the biggest advantage IE8 enjoys is its interface is based on legacy of the most popular web browser, IE7 and it is supported by one of the most popular operating systems, Microsoft Windows. It also offers its users the trust of a company like Microsoft. These features, friendly user interface and support from Windows make IE8 the most popular and extensively used browser in world to date.
Shortcomings:
1. Internet Explorer was found to be a lot slower than its contenders, it uses more memory and resources than both Firefox and Chrome.
2. Although IE 8 uses separate processes for each tab, yet it failed to make the browser completely crash free.
3. IE 8 lacks the Add ons feature, the strongest one found in Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox:
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. As of August 2010, Firefox was the second most widely used browser, with 22.93% of worldwide usage share of web browsers. Some sources put Firefox's usage share between 20% and 32%. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to display WebPages which implements most current web standards in addition to several features which are projected to anticipate likely additions to the standards. Firefox runs on various versions of GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 3.6.10, released on September 15, 2010. Firefox uses a sandbox security model, and limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites based on the same origin policy. It uses SSL/TLS to protect communications with web servers using strong cryptography when using the HTTPS protocol. It also provides support for web applications to use smartcards for authentication purposes. Mozilla Firefox implements many web standards, including HTML, XML, XHTML, MathML, SVG 1.1 (partial) CSS (with extensions),ECMAScript (JavaScript), DOM, XSLT, XPath, and APNG (Animated PNG) images with alpha transparency. Firefox also implements standards proposals created by the WHATWG such as client-side storage, and canvas element
Firefox passes the Acid2 standards-compliance test from version 3.0. Firefox versions 3.6 and 4.0b4 do not pass the Acid3 test; they score 94/100 and 97/10 respectively. It is unlikely that Firefox will pass the Acid3 test in the near future, since implementing SVG custom font support is a very low priority for Mozilla, as of May 2010.
Firefox also implements a proprietary protocol from Google called "safebrowsing" (used to exchange data related with "phishing and malware protection"), which is not an open standard.
Versions:
1. Mozilla Firefox 1.0
2. Mozilla Firefox 2.0
3. Mozilla Firefox 3.0
4. Mozilla Firefox 3.5
5. Mozilla Firefox 3.6
6. Mozilla Firefox 4.0
Tests performed by PC World and Zimbra in 2006 indicated that Firefox 2 used less memory than Internet Explorer 7. Firefox 3 used less memory than Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.50 Beta, Safari 3.1 Beta, and Firefox 2 in tests performed by Mozilla, CyberNet, and The Browser World. In mid 2009, Betanews benchmarked Firefox 3.5 and declared that it performed "nearly ten times better on XP than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7". In January 2010, Lifehacker compared the performance of Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3.6, Google Chrome 4 (stable and Dev versions), Safari 4, and Opera (10.1 stable and 10.5 pre-alpha versions). Lifehacker timed how long browsers took to start and reach a page (both right after boot-up and after running at least once already), timed how long browsers took to load nine tabs at once, tested JavaScript speeds using Mozilla's Dromaeo online suite (which implements Apple's SunSpider and Google's V8 tests) and measured memory usage using Windows 7's process manager. They concluded that Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 were the fifth and sixth fastest browsers respectively on startup, 3.5 was third and 3.6 was sixth fastest to load nine tabs at once, 3.5 was sixth and 3.6 was fifth fastest on the JavaScript tests. They also concluded that Firefox 3.6 was the most efficient with memory usage followed by Firefox 3.5.
Standout Features:
Latest Firefox features include:
1. User friendly interface
2. Tabbed browising
3. Inprivate browsing
4. Themes
5. Add ons/Extensions
6. Spell checking
7. Live bookmarking
8. Download Manager
9. Geolocation
10. Developer Tools
Along with these features the most popular attribute of Firefox is its developer tools, which makes it extremely popular in developer community and no other browser had been able to challenge this status. Firefox provides its users 13386 add-ons ranging from appearance to web development, including everything relevant you could think of about a web browser.
Shortcomings:
1. Being open sourced always makes Firefox more vulnerable to threats, the add ons also possess a certain degree of risk while you use them
2. Like IE 8, Firefox is not completed crash free. It does not proved the separate environment for each tab, so an error in one tab could crash the whole browser.
3. Google’s focus on its own browser, Chrome will deprive Firefox of a lot of features it is using because of Google.
Awards
Mozilla Firefox has been given a number of awards by various organizations. These awards include:
§ PC Magazine Editors' Choice, June 2008
§ CNET Editors' Choice, June 2008
§ PC World 100 Best Products of 2008, May 2008
§ Webware 100 winner, April 2008
§ Webware 100 winner, June 2007
§ PC World 100 Best Products of 2007, May 2007
§ PC Magazine Editors' Choice, October 2006
§ CNET Editors' Choice, October 2006
§ PC World's 100 Best Products of 2006, July 2006
§ PC Magazine Technical Excellence Award, Software and Development Tools category, January 2006
§ PC Magazine Best of the Year Award, December 27, 2005
§ PC Pro Real World Award (Mozilla Foundation), December 8, 2005
§ CNET Editors' Choice, November 2005
§ UK Usability Professionals' Association Award Best Software Application 2005, November 2005
§ Macworld Editor's Choice with a 4.5 Mice Rating, November 2005
§ Softpedia User’s Choice Award, September 2005
§ TUX 2005 Readers' Choice Award, September 2005
§ PC World Product of the Year, June 2005
§ Forbes Best of the Web, May 2005
§ PC Magazine Editor’s Choice Award, May 2005
Google Chrome:
On 2nd September 2008, the search giant Google entered the browser wars with its light weight and efficient browser, the Google Chrome. In August 2010 Google Chrome was the third most widely used browser after IE and Firefox. The browser was first publicly released for Microsoft Windows (XP and later only) on 2 September 2008 in 43 languages, officially a beta version. Chrome quickly gained about 1% market share despite being only available for Microsoft Windows. Google Chrome uses the web kit layout engine and application framework. Chrome includes Gears, which adds features for web developers typically relating to the building of web applications including offline support. Google Chrome aims to improve security, speed, and stability. There are extensive differences from its peers in Chrome's minimalistic user interface, which is atypical of modern web browsers. For example, Chrome does not render RSS feeds. Chrome's strength is its application performance and JavaScript processing speed, both of which were independently verified by multiple websites to be the swiftest among the major browsers of its time. Many of Chrome's unique features had been previously announced by other browser developers, but Google was the first to implement and publicly release them. For example, its most prominent graphical user interface (GUI) innovation, the merging of the address bar and search bar (the Omnibox) was first announced by Mozilla in May 2008 as a planned feature for Firefox. The first release of Google Chrome passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests. Beginning with version 4.0, Chrome passed all aspects of the Acid3 test. The JavaScript virtual machine used by Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine, has features such as dynamic code generation, hidden class transitions, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google in September 2008 showed that V8 was about twice as fast as Firefox 3.0and the WebKit nightlies.
Several websites performed benchmark tests using the Sun Spider JavaScript Benchmark tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which include ray tracing and constraint solving.[57] They unanimously reported that Chrome performed much faster than all competitors against which it had been tested, including Safari (for Windows), Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Internet Explorer 8. The Gears team implemented a multi-process architecture in Chrome, similar to Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) implemented by Internet. By default, a separate process is allocated to each site instance and plug-in, a procedure referred to as process isolation. This prevents tasks from interfering with each other, increasing security and stability. An attacker successfully gaining access to one application cannot gain access to others, and failure in one instance results in a Sad Tab screen of death, similar to the well-known Sad Mac, except only a single tab crashes instead of the whole application. This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front, but results in less memory bloat overall as fragmentation is confined to each instance and no longer requires further memory allocations. By default, the main user interface includes back, forward, refresh, bookmark, go, and cancel buttons. The home button can be configured through options to take the user to the New Tab Page or a custom home page.
Tabs are the primary component of Chrome's user interface and as such, have been moved to the top of the window rather than below the controls. This subtle change contrasts with many existing tabbed browsers which are based on windows and contain tabs. Tabs (including their state) can be transferred seamlessly between window containers by dragging. Each tab has its own set of controls, including the Omnibox. Google has included aero peek capability for each tab on Windows 7. This has not been added by default but can be user enabled, resulting in a displayed thumbnail image of the tab. This will create similar functioning to that which is already included in IE8, Firefox and other browsers. On 9 September 2009, Google enabled extensions by default on Chrome's Dev channel, and provided several sample extensions for testing. In December, the Google Chrome extension gallery beta began with over 300 extensions. Along with Google Chrome 4.0, the extension gallery was officially launched on 25 January 2010, containing over 1500 extensions. As of 19 August 2010, the extension gallery featured over 6000 extensions.
Standout Features:
1. Google Chrome is so far the most lightweight browser, with minimum memory and resource consumption and yet giving best possible results.
2. The multi process architecture makes it reliable and crash free
3. Tabbed browsing, and separate environment for each tab makes it stable, even if one tab crashes it never affects other tabs and can be reopened in the state it was in before
4. It is simple, clean and efficient.
5. Searching made so simple, thanks to the Omnibox, The Omnibox lets you type search terms or URLs into a single spot and figures out what you want.
6. Chrome offers an "Incognito" mode that lets you easily leave no footprints from where you've been resulting in Enhanced privacy.
Shortcomings:
1. Chrome is believed to collect user data and monitor activity even before pressing Enter key, leading to privacy concerns.
2. Being a new arrival in browser market, it lacks support. The Webkit system also deprives Chrome of developer’s attention
3. Chrome doesn't yet have any add-ons or customization options available. It's yet to be seen how these, once developed, will compare to the rich options available for Firefox
Performance Tests:
Sunspider benchmarks (lower numbers are better)
Firefox 3.1 - 1771.4ms
IE8 - 6837.6ms
Chrome - 1923.0ms
Memory Footprint (ten tabs)
Firefox 3.1 - 91MB
IE8 - 230MB
Chrome - 141MB
Launch time
Firefox - 37s
Chrome - 15s
IE8 – Greater than 45 s
Firefox 3.1 - 1771.4ms
IE8 - 6837.6ms
Chrome - 1923.0ms
Memory Footprint (ten tabs)
Firefox 3.1 - 91MB
IE8 - 230MB
Chrome - 141MB
Launch time
Firefox - 37s
Chrome - 15s
IE8 – Greater than 45 s
Page load time
Firefox - 8s
Chrome - 11s
IE8 - n/a
Below the performance, reliability and market share statistics are shown.
Firefox - 8s
Chrome - 11s
IE8 - n/a
Below the performance, reliability and market share statistics are shown.
2010 | |||||
August | 30.7 % | 45.8% | 17.0% | 3.5% | 2.3% |
July | 30.4 % | 46.4% | 16.7% | 3.4% | 2.3% |
June | 31.0 % | 46.6% | 15.9% | 3.6% | 2.1% |
May | 32.2 % | 46.9% | 14.5% | 3.5% | 2.2% |
April | 33.4 % | 46.4% | 13.6% | 3.7% | 2.2% |
March | 34.9 % | 46.2% | 12.3% | 3.7% | 2.2% |
February | 35.3 % | 46.5% | 11.6% | 3.8% | 2.1% |
January | 36.2 % | 46.3% | 10.8% | 3.7% | 2.2% |
2009 | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
December | 37.2 % | 46.4% | 9.8% | 3.6% | 2.3% |
November | 37.7 % | 47.0% | 8.5% | 3.8% | 2.3% |
October | 37.5 % | 47.5% | 8.0% | 3.8% | 2.3% |
September | 39.6 % | 46.6% | 7.1% | 3.6% | 2.2% |
August | 39.3 % | 47.4% | 7.0% | 3.3% | 2.1% |
July | 39.4 % | 47.9% | 6.5% | 3.3% | 2.1% |
June | 40.7 % | 47.3% | 6.0% | 3.1% | 2.1% |
May | 41.0 % | 47.7% | 5.5% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
April | 42.1 % | 47.1% | 4.9% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
March | 43.3 % | 46.5% | 4.2% | 3.1% | 2.3% |
February | 43.6 % | 46.4% | 4.0% | 3.0% | 2.2% |
January | 44.8 % | 45.5% | 3.9% | 3.0% | 2.3% |
2008 | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera |
December | 46.0 % | 44.4% | 3.6% | 2.7% | 2.4% |
November | 47.0 % | 44.2% | 3.1% | 2.7% | 2.3% |
October | 47.4 % | 44.0% | 3.0% | 2.8% | 2.2% |
September | 49.0 % | 42.6% | 3.1% | 2.7% | 2.0% |
August | 51.0 % | 43.7% | 2.6% | 2.1% | |
July | 52.4 % | 42.6% | 2.5% | 1.9% | |
June | 54.2 % | 41.0% | 2.6% | 1.7% | |
May | 54.4 % | 39.8% | 2.4% | 1.5% | |
April | 54.8 % | 39.1% | 2.2% | 1.4% | |
March | 53.9 % | 37.0% | 2.1% | 1.4% | |
February | 54.7 % | 36.5% | 2.0% | 1.4% | |
January | 54.7 % | 36.4% | |||
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