As I write this article, I look down at my toolbar and observe the 4 browser icons there (try to guess which major browser isn’t there), all of which I love and despise for different reasons. I want one of them to become the ideal browser, but there’s always something that draws me back, either a technical or morale issue.
I’m a web designer, specialized in front-end development, therefore I guess it’s normal to hold Safari and Chrome close to my heart. They are the most modern browsers in terms of design features right now in the market.
Safari is a solid product, and much better supported now than it was 5 years ago, when it was frequent to see things like WYSIWYG editors with notes like “currently buggy in Safari”. Apple has maintained effort in making it one of the nicest browsers available, by keeping the interface streamlined and quickly adopting new trends in terms of design and usability.
Even though some regard it as an inferior browser because it lacks some small features some people grew used to in Firefox, there are certain things one can do to reduce those annoyances. In my experience, using Glims made the experience a bit more enjoyable on the mac, but Windows users are stuck with a browser that is innocent in many ways, for trying to maintain simplicity in the chaotic interfaces that usually plague programs made in, and for, Windows. But it is also guilty of shutting out a huge community of tech savvy people that want it to go beyond beautiful.
Then we have Chrome, that started with the noble goal of trying to reinvent the browser as a portal to the Cloud, with an even more minimalistic User Interface, an incredibly secure browsing experience thanks to it’s sand-boxed processes, and the most modern and perhaps fastest browser engine currently in the market, which powers Safari, Webkit. What could go wrong?
Once you get past the ooh nice interface part that everyone admires during the first minutes you come to realize that Chrome has more shortcomings than Safari in some ways. Managing bookmarks is harder, because they are centered around your toolbar which is worse than Safari, which provides you with a full-window interface. And the rendering they use is simply horrible compared to Safari. Whether it’s webfonts, or CSS3 tags, everything is just generally worse in Chrome for Windows. Even now, as I type this in Chrome, I’m starting at Wordpress’ round buttons with horrible pixelated rounded curves. Ironically, Chrome on Mac OS X, which is far from finished, renders the web as wonderfully as Safari.
Chrome brought wonderful features and helped create a little revolution in the web browser market, but the latest developments in the HTML5 area leave me somewhat unhappy. Particularly in the way way different manufacturers are taking sides in which media formats to support, rather than all choosing the same one. The only companies who will benefit from that are Microsoft and Adobe, with their proprietary plugins. As much as I’m appreciative of Google for speeding up HTML5’s development, it’s clear that a lot of the suggestions being written on the spec will benefit them the most out of all companies on the web.
I’m not against things like using your localization in a web browser, but which company in the world would profit the most from that feature, if it became 100% support on all browsers today?
Again, there’s nothing wrong with Google defending their own interests, and I’m glad there’s at least one strong company pushing things forward. I just hope HTML5 doesn’t turn into a Frankenspec because of it. The DOM is a mess, as we all know, and right now I look as HTML5 as incredibly tidy in one way, and incredibly messy on the other. This is mostly because of the format wars in the media part of the spec, and conflicts of interest with Microsoft because of web fonts.
So then we have Opera, which has brought us some of the best innovations in User Interfaces which we all now use and love on most browsers. Things like tabbed browsing, and the “new tab” page with a gathering of your favorite or most visited sites. But every time I decide to give Opera another chance, it starts giving me little stabs and tries to take over some of my system preferences. Like turning itself into the default torrent downloader, and mostly acting in ways I don’t like it to. It’s funny how I never have anything specific to say against Opera, but it has enough intrusive little things that make me stop using it after a while so I’ll just use lack of support for some CSS3 properties as the most enduring excuse.
So now we come down to the two leading browsers: Internet Explorer and Firefox. Firefox has a noble goal, like Google seemed to until recently, which was to simply make the web a better place. But between those two companies, to me it’s more evident that Mozilla is the company that stays true’est to that goal. In part that is because they hardly have any conflicts of interest, whereas Google is slowly moving into new markets, and becoming a serious threat in all of them to the pre-established companies.
However, Firefox has stopped being on the cutting edge ever since CSS3 and HTML5 started becoming very popular. It’s always one step behind Safari in terms of CSS/HTML features, and Chrome has made it seem like a more sluggish browser than we ever considered. In sum, Firefox isn’t the fastest, most secure or prettiest browser, it’s second, if not third in all of those aspects. Despite being a great all-round browser, it’s not as an engaging experience as it was a few years ago.
And finally we have Internet Explorer, which is finally picking up it’s broken pieces and moving forward. I’m really glad that they are throwing the towel down and throwing better CSS support, but it’s simply too little, and too late. Like some have said before, Microsoft has become irrelevant. If there’s one browser that is irrelevant compared to all the other major ones, IE is certainly it.
Alas, I’m left with no perfect choice. So I use different browsers for different things. Mostly Chrome for general browsing, due to it’s speed and security, Safari, when I want to browse a CSS3-rich website, and Firefox, when I’m doing front-end development or design. Oh, and Opera when a new version comes out with a revamped interface and some nice new feature, which admire and enjoy until it stabs me on the foot once again.