“Right at this moment, big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0 – it’s in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0. So, three new browsers in the same year, after no action for a half decade. How do they stack up?”
Umm… Damn right you are Mr. Reviewer. Firefox has a BOOKMARKS button which you can add to the browser. It’s there by default as well; no extensions required.
Attention to detail… none!
What I do is I usually just drag and drop the favicon into some folder in my Bookmarks pull-down menu. That’s one click and it’s not a feature that you somehow need to turn on.
If you drag and drop the favicon to the home icon it will also use that page as your home page.
“Umm… Damn right you are Mr. Reviewer. Firefox has a BOOKMARKS button which you can add to the browser. It’s there by default as well; no extensions required.
Attention to detail… none!”
Funny, it is not in my Firefox unless I download the extension. There is a bookmarks menu, no bookmarks button.
lets see…. right click up on the grey toolbar area. click on customize… drop ‘bookmarks’ button to the tool bar… hey, i have a bookmarks button!
“lets see…. right click up on the grey toolbar area. click on customize… drop ‘bookmarks’ button to the tool bar… hey, i have a bookmarks button!
“
Thanks. Never knew that was there
You can also just press Ctrl+B and toggle the bookmarks sidebar open / close.
Keyboard shortcuts rock!
uh, my Firefox install did not have a bookmark button by default either, it’s easy to turn on, but it is not on by default
Firefox has a BOOKMARKS button which you can add to the browser. It’s there by default as well; no extensions required.
I don’t have any Bookmark button on my default Firefox on Linux here.
Solution: Google Browser Sync
This even remembers what tabs were open between in different computers
One feature unique to IE7 is its tile view of your tabs<…>
No way, Opera has it too.
Though some things are essential (like security, pop-up blocking, etc) others are not.
Yes, i might use lot this or that feature but many people don’t and for some it’s just confusing and/or bloat.
Having said this, i think the article doesn’t try to “benchmark” the browsers but instead do a good clean comparison.
Thumbs up!
I hate the new places for Refresh and Stop buttons. It’s as convenient as the find dialog/bar in FF.
1) Opera has spellchecker.
2) “One-Click Button to add Favorites”, use ctrl + d, luke.
It seems to me that Firefox 2 has this http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1990854,00.asp“>miss… feature.
At least, if I read the http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bonecho/releases/2.0b1.html“>re… we see:
Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash.
By the way. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191605&cid=15744000“>Someon… May be with an extension.
Edited 2006-07-19 20:42
Yes, just google SessionSaver or Tab Mix Plus. They both do this.
Will those do full Opera-style crash recovery? Namely, recover stuff like the text you had entered into forms when it restarts after crashing?
One peeve: Why isn’t there still a one-click button (by default) for adding a new tab? You can use the middle mouse button …, but sometimes you want a new empty tab, which in Firefox requires going through menus, or double clicking on the empty space to the right of the last tab …
Did they take away CTRL-T? That’s one of my most-used key sequences when using Firefox. I wouldn’t use those mouse thingies in any case.
We also ran the browsers through the Acid2 Browser Test, from the Web Standard Project. It’s an attempt to test how well a browser complies with web standards.
Yes! That’s what I wanted to see. And Opera wins. I’m disappointed the other two didn’t pass, especially Firefox.
Actually, I would also have liked to read more about CSS implementation improvements and bug fixes.
I think the article gave us a fair and even-handed comparison of the three rival browsers. What I found slightly annoying: the rather simple list of what was new in their latest incarnations, ‘according to the makers’ (or some such phrase). This gave me the idea ExtremeTech looked in from the outside, so to speak. A regular user knows exactly how a new version differs from an earlier one. That’s why I myself, for instance, have still not ‘upgraded’ to Opera 9, because I don’t have a use for widgets or a torrent client. Opera 8.54 is perfection.
But, all in all: a nice, informative review.
there’s always the new built-in content blocker and a number of stability/rendering fixes…
The ‘stability/rendering fixes’ you mention might be useful. And I agree one never must say of any piece of software that it is ‘perfection’… BUT – ever since I started using Opera 8.54, I haven’t had any serious problems.
This was already on OSNews before from another source
(quite different results though…)
http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/157
“But all the themes we found merely changed the interface buttons and perhaps added an image to the top menu area; they don’t change the window borders the way you can with WindowBlinds.”
Nooooo, really? Did anyone seriously expect Firefox to skin the entire OS?
“Unlike the other two browsers in this roundup, IE7 has an RSS button that’s always there below the address bar.”
Oh, just like how Firefox also has an orange button for sites with RSS feeds? It’s even right there in the addressbar.
Memory Usage in MB (no pages loaded)
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 42
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 24
Opera 9.0: 53
IE 6.0: 17
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 17.8
We used the same group of tabbed pages on all of the browsers—ExtremeTech home, Yahoo, PCMag.com, YouTube, BBC World, and Flickr (with the same picture showing). With this tab load the results were as follows:
Memory Usage in MB Loading Six Tabs
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70
Opera 9.0: 52
IE 6.0: 155
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56
So This proves that Opera actually uses less memory, when it has 6 tabs loaded, then Opera without any page open. Wow. Does this translate into — if I open 100 tabs in opera, the memory usage would be 10 MB and if I open 500 tabs then Opera will not use memory at all 🙂.
Pun Intended.
Otherwise a nice article.
>> So This proves that Opera actually uses less memory, when it has 6 tabs loaded
I think they screwed up on that one – on XP Opera’s normal footprint at LOAD with no tabs open is 41,820kb… Once you’ve opened some tabs though, regardless of how many you have open or closed it hangs around 52k, and doesn’t really climb past that until to total size of the pages you are viewing exceeds 8 megs.
What I think happened there is they closed opera with tabs open, started opera, it opened the tabs they had open when they closed it… then they closed all of them for their reading, giving a false number higher than a true ‘baseline’
oops. that should read 52megs… my bad.
Isn’t Showcase extension for FF what Quicktabs is for IE7?
Opera’s anti-phishing technology isn’t as sophisticated as the others, but it has been there since version 8.0.
Pretty much every new feature in Firefox 2.0 is stolen from Opera or Maxthon.