IE 8, Mozilla 3.1, Opera 9.6 and Chrome beta browsers reviewed

NEW DELHI - INDIA : 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.

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-a-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.

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.

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.

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.