The Last Podcast

The last few days have seen the release of major milestone for all the major browsers but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3 is now at RC3, which should be the last testing version before its release. Apple’s first built of Safari 4 was just released to developers (but you can find it easily all over the web already); and Opera just released Version 9.5 yesterday.

All the major browsers are trying to distinguish themselves from the others by speed at this point. I ran the SunSpider Benchmark on all three browsers (on an Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 Vista machine running at 3GHz with 3GB RAM).

Here are the results:

This test mainly gives you an idea how fast AJAX heavy pages will be rendered and is not by all means comprehensive – but it does give a good indication of how well a certain browser will do with today’s complex pages.

However, the performance data really isn’t all the interesting – in many ways, the way users perceive performance is far more important (just like most users don’t care if a browser passes the Acid Test). Firefox and Opera seem to be faster at displaying something to the user – which gives the perception of speed, while on Safari, it often takes a bit longer to start seeing something on the page, which makes it feel slower. And Opera, while it doesn’t do well in the benchmarks, does often feel a lot faster in rendering a page than both Firefox and Safari do.

But speed isn’t everything anyway – all three browsers are perfectly fine for surfing the web. They all render the CNN homepage in a second or two. They all have very well designed interfaces.

So who do I prefer? It’s still Firefox – and probably for the same reason I would prefer having an iPhone over any other phone. Firefox simply has more developers behind it. The sheer amount of extensions and plugins for it simply give it an edge over the other contenders. Besides that, it’s far easier to mold the interface of Firefox to your own preferences. I can move various taskbars around and combine them in Firefox – in Opera, I am stuck with the layout as it is (and I hate to devote screen-estate to menus I never use).

Safari’s interface is clean and minimalist – but it’s also the least interesting browser. At least Opera is doing some interesting stuff with its speed-dial pages and voice activation.

So for now – Firefox will remain the #1 browser on my machine, just as it has in the last few years. But I’m happy there is competition – browsers are complex pieces of software and the four main contenders are pushing each other to constantly challenge the status quo.