Is Safari better then all other browsers?
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I like Safari for copying things with images. It is very useful for that.
Otherwise I am using Firefox.
Otherwise I am using Firefox.
BorderLineSigs
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omg! internet explorer (yahoo/google) is the worst! nothign special about it...(thats what i have a the moment) and my comcast internet stinks terribly! i so wnat to get fire fox (all my friends say that its best)!
AutoItKing
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Firefox is my choice, no matter what. IE renders HTML incorrectly, Safari is slow, and it's from Apple, it's supposed to be run on a Mac, not a PC. Opera is pretty good.
hezuo
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safari is surely good if you run it on leopard, but not on windows. at least, it crashes unexpectedly in my pc (windows xp). Either way, i would recommend firefox as the best web browser, but it's not perfect. It consumes too much resources! I hope ff3 does not consume too much ram as the current version does.
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LHVWB
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ashwinsinha
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To be honest, my first response when I heard that Apple had made a beta of Safari for Windows available for download was … a disappointing yawn. A web browser is just a tool and I find it hard to drum up much enthusiasm for new browsers any more. If you look at the top four browsers out now (Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0, Opera 9 and Safari 2/3), there’s really not much to distinguish between them. They all do pretty much the same thing in pretty much the same way, they all have their quirks, and they all seem prone to the “leaky bucket” syndrome when it comes to security. The idea of having “yet another browser” installed, with all the associated care and feeding that goes with the deal (especially making sure that you’re using the latest patched version) just didn’t seem worth the hassle to me. Nevertheless, I downloaded a copy, installed it onto a Vista installation and took it for a spin.
OK, so the Safari download is nice and small (under 8MB) and the installation is fast (mine was done in about a minute). Apple claim that it’ll run on both XP and Vista and that you’ll need a system with at least 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz Pentium CPU or better. This might be the case, but once I got Safari 3 beta installed, I remembered one of the reasons why I disliked Safari on the Mac and why I’ll still dislike it on Windows - that butt-ugly silver-grey interface. It looks especially rough on Windows Vista where I’m used to the nice Aero glass look.
Looking beyond the interface, Apple has posted twelve reasons they think why we’ll love Safari. Let’s examine each one here one by one.
Blazing Performance
Apple claims that Safari is fast - twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.6 times as fast as Firefox 2.0. Looking at Apple’s website the claim is that Safari is faster than IE7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9 when it comes to rendering HTML, executing JavaScript and at launching the browser.
Personally, I think that it takes about the same time to launch all four browsers on my Vista box (under 1 second) and while I can say that web pages feel like they load up faster, I think that this is due to the fact that the page seems to be composed off-screen. This results in a lag between clicking on a link and seeing the page. Page loading feels faster and certainly looks smoother, but my inkling is that this is nothing more than an illusion. I’m taking Apple’s performance claims with a big pinch of salt.
Elegant User Interface
OK, it’s a minimalist look, but I still think it looks awful. Why hide useful features like the status bar and yet show that Bookmarks Bar?
Also why when the top three browsers all offer tooltips to help explain the user interface does Apple not follow this convention? Likewise, it’s annoying that you can only resize windows using the handle at the bottom-right of the window.
The black text on a grey background motif reminds me of a tombstone on one of those old Hammer House of Horror movies. I was pretty sure that there would be a way to ditch the existing skin, but if there is, I can’t find it. I guess I can understand a look where the interface is subdued because then you can use color to selectively draw the eye to important things, but I don’t see that trick being used in Safari.
Edit:
First, a little history, for the benefit of those who weren’t around during the infamous “browser wars.” Believe it or not, there was a point, a long time ago, when Netscape Navigator dominated the market. At around version 3 the browser was, for the time, excellent. HTML was simple and relatively pure. Eyeing Netscape’s success in a field that they had previously shown no interest in (Bill Gates himself once dismissed the Internet as a passing fad), Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), with the sole intention of dislodging Netscape.
IE quickly became popular. Then came a period of flurried activity, with the two browser manufacturers releasing updates to their browser on ever-decreasing time scales. New HTML tags and DHTML extensions were created and then loosely documented. A designer could use these elements, but at the cost of having them fail in the competitor’s browser. A split started to form as pages designed for one of the “big two” browsers would not work in the other.
Netscape released Navigator version 4 in 1997. It was a very poor browser, laced with bugs and new abilities that broke backwards-compatibility. What caused most pain among developers was that it happily blundered into advanced CSS and JavaScript code that it should have had the sense to ignore. Microsoft released the superior Internet Explorer 4, and the tide started to turn very quickly.
Eventually it became obvious that Netscape were fighting a losing battle. Because IE came pre-installed on every Windows machine, most users just used that instead of seeking out alternatives (this is the same problem that plagues any competing browser to this day). By the time Internet Explorer 6 was released, its market share had grown to a high of about 95%.
In the years that followed, lazy or ill-equipped web designers began to design their sites to work only in IE, as making a site look the same in other browsers required a lot of knowledge and effort. This only encouraged users to stick with IE, no matter how many advances were made in other browsers. Even when Netscape belatedly released the vastly improved Navigator 6 in the year 2000, it barely made a dent in the market.
And so, the war ended. Lying in its wake was a web of incompatibilities and sites that only worked in a certain version of one browser. HTML had been blown off course as a structural markup language and was now bloated with presentational elements like the much-maligned font tag. It took years to even begin to undo the damage that had been done.
Happily, things have finally started moving back towards a level playing field. Internet Explorer’s dominancy is no longer absolute, and web surfers now have lots of choice when deciding which browser they should use.
OK, so the Safari download is nice and small (under 8MB) and the installation is fast (mine was done in about a minute). Apple claim that it’ll run on both XP and Vista and that you’ll need a system with at least 256MB of RAM and a 500MHz Pentium CPU or better. This might be the case, but once I got Safari 3 beta installed, I remembered one of the reasons why I disliked Safari on the Mac and why I’ll still dislike it on Windows - that butt-ugly silver-grey interface. It looks especially rough on Windows Vista where I’m used to the nice Aero glass look.
Looking beyond the interface, Apple has posted twelve reasons they think why we’ll love Safari. Let’s examine each one here one by one.
Blazing Performance
Apple claims that Safari is fast - twice as fast as Internet Explorer and 1.6 times as fast as Firefox 2.0. Looking at Apple’s website the claim is that Safari is faster than IE7, Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9 when it comes to rendering HTML, executing JavaScript and at launching the browser.
Personally, I think that it takes about the same time to launch all four browsers on my Vista box (under 1 second) and while I can say that web pages feel like they load up faster, I think that this is due to the fact that the page seems to be composed off-screen. This results in a lag between clicking on a link and seeing the page. Page loading feels faster and certainly looks smoother, but my inkling is that this is nothing more than an illusion. I’m taking Apple’s performance claims with a big pinch of salt.
Elegant User Interface
OK, it’s a minimalist look, but I still think it looks awful. Why hide useful features like the status bar and yet show that Bookmarks Bar?
Also why when the top three browsers all offer tooltips to help explain the user interface does Apple not follow this convention? Likewise, it’s annoying that you can only resize windows using the handle at the bottom-right of the window.The black text on a grey background motif reminds me of a tombstone on one of those old Hammer House of Horror movies. I was pretty sure that there would be a way to ditch the existing skin, but if there is, I can’t find it. I guess I can understand a look where the interface is subdued because then you can use color to selectively draw the eye to important things, but I don’t see that trick being used in Safari.
Edit:
First, a little history, for the benefit of those who weren’t around during the infamous “browser wars.” Believe it or not, there was a point, a long time ago, when Netscape Navigator dominated the market. At around version 3 the browser was, for the time, excellent. HTML was simple and relatively pure. Eyeing Netscape’s success in a field that they had previously shown no interest in (Bill Gates himself once dismissed the Internet as a passing fad), Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), with the sole intention of dislodging Netscape.
IE quickly became popular. Then came a period of flurried activity, with the two browser manufacturers releasing updates to their browser on ever-decreasing time scales. New HTML tags and DHTML extensions were created and then loosely documented. A designer could use these elements, but at the cost of having them fail in the competitor’s browser. A split started to form as pages designed for one of the “big two” browsers would not work in the other.
Netscape released Navigator version 4 in 1997. It was a very poor browser, laced with bugs and new abilities that broke backwards-compatibility. What caused most pain among developers was that it happily blundered into advanced CSS and JavaScript code that it should have had the sense to ignore. Microsoft released the superior Internet Explorer 4, and the tide started to turn very quickly.
Eventually it became obvious that Netscape were fighting a losing battle. Because IE came pre-installed on every Windows machine, most users just used that instead of seeking out alternatives (this is the same problem that plagues any competing browser to this day). By the time Internet Explorer 6 was released, its market share had grown to a high of about 95%.
In the years that followed, lazy or ill-equipped web designers began to design their sites to work only in IE, as making a site look the same in other browsers required a lot of knowledge and effort. This only encouraged users to stick with IE, no matter how many advances were made in other browsers. Even when Netscape belatedly released the vastly improved Navigator 6 in the year 2000, it barely made a dent in the market.
And so, the war ended. Lying in its wake was a web of incompatibilities and sites that only worked in a certain version of one browser. HTML had been blown off course as a structural markup language and was now bloated with presentational elements like the much-maligned font tag. It took years to even begin to undo the damage that had been done.
Happily, things have finally started moving back towards a level playing field. Internet Explorer’s dominancy is no longer absolute, and web surfers now have lots of choice when deciding which browser they should use.
Last edited:
ashwinsinha
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Safari
Safari is Apple’s own web browser, and for its first few years was only available to lucky Mac owners, coming pre-installed on all new Macs since 2003. A Windows version was released in June 2007. Safari is a clean, fast browser based on the WebKit rendering engine that also powers the Linux browser Konqueror.
Safari comes with all the features you would expect in a modern browser, like tabbed browsing, popup blocking and built-in search functionality. It also has the best RSS-reading feature available to date, which makes keeping track of a number of websites much easier than using bookmarks.
Because it’s designed by Apple, it feels right at home on the OS X operating system, and in general performs faster than the Mac version of Firefox, or the Firefox variant » Camino. It can also tie into other programs on the OS, so web forms can be spell-checked through OSX’s built-in dictionary and the Keychain program can keep track of your logins.
Safari also forms the core of the browser installed on Apple’s iPhone, so checking how your site renders in the desktop version is a must.
Firefox
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Get Firefox Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
Internet Explorer 6
In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.
Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.
To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.
Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.
Oh, and for all those Mac users out there; currently » IE5 is the latest Explorer release. It’s actually better in some ways than the Windows version, having better support for CSS. It has been discontinued though, and has become a rather poor choice, so a better option is Apple’s own » Safari or Mozilla’s » Camino.
Internet Explorer 7
After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.
» Download Internet Explorer 7.
Opera
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.
The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.
Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.
The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.
The browser built into Nintendo’s wonderful Wii is based on Opera, so if you want Wii owners to be able to surf your site in between bouts of Wii Tennis, you should test in Opera first.
All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.
» Download Opera
Netscape Navigator 4
Netscape 4 is a pile of old crap. There’s really no getting away from that fact. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”
For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.
Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore.
Safari is Apple’s own web browser, and for its first few years was only available to lucky Mac owners, coming pre-installed on all new Macs since 2003. A Windows version was released in June 2007. Safari is a clean, fast browser based on the WebKit rendering engine that also powers the Linux browser Konqueror.
Safari comes with all the features you would expect in a modern browser, like tabbed browsing, popup blocking and built-in search functionality. It also has the best RSS-reading feature available to date, which makes keeping track of a number of websites much easier than using bookmarks.
Because it’s designed by Apple, it feels right at home on the OS X operating system, and in general performs faster than the Mac version of Firefox, or the Firefox variant » Camino. It can also tie into other programs on the OS, so web forms can be spell-checked through OSX’s built-in dictionary and the Keychain program can keep track of your logins.
Safari also forms the core of the browser installed on Apple’s iPhone, so checking how your site renders in the desktop version is a must.
Firefox
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Get Firefox Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
Internet Explorer 6
In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.
Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.
To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.
Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.
Oh, and for all those Mac users out there; currently » IE5 is the latest Explorer release. It’s actually better in some ways than the Windows version, having better support for CSS. It has been discontinued though, and has become a rather poor choice, so a better option is Apple’s own » Safari or Mozilla’s » Camino.
Internet Explorer 7
After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.
» Download Internet Explorer 7.
Opera
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.
The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.
Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.
The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.
The browser built into Nintendo’s wonderful Wii is based on Opera, so if you want Wii owners to be able to surf your site in between bouts of Wii Tennis, you should test in Opera first.
All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.
» Download Opera
Netscape Navigator 4
Netscape 4 is a pile of old crap. There’s really no getting away from that fact. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”
For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.
Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore.
ashwinsinha
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The Reviews
Firefox
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Get Firefox Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
Download your new default browser:
The Mozilla Suite
The Mozilla suite is a collection of software — a browser, a mail and newsgroup client, a chat client and a HTML editor. This was Mozilla’s flagship product until the constituent parts were split up, reworked and developed separately into standalone products — Firefox for browsing and the excellent » Thunderbird for mail.
Most of the good things said about Firefox also apply to the suite, but I would still recommend the standalone Mozilla products for speed and ease of use. If you’re looking for one download to do the whole lot, the suite does exactly what you want.
» Download the Mozilla suite.
Safari
Safari is Apple’s own web browser, and for its first few years was only available to lucky Mac owners, coming pre-installed on all new Macs since 2003. A Windows version was released in June 2007. Safari is a clean, fast browser based on the WebKit rendering engine that also powers the Linux browser Konqueror.
Safari comes with all the features you would expect in a modern browser, like tabbed browsing, popup blocking and built-in search functionality. It also has the best RSS-reading feature available to date, which makes keeping track of a number of websites much easier than using bookmarks.
Because it’s designed by Apple, it feels right at home on the OS X operating system, and in general performs faster than the Mac version of Firefox, or the Firefox variant » Camino. It can also tie into other programs on the OS, so web forms can be spell-checked through OSX’s built-in dictionary and the Keychain program can keep track of your logins.
Safari also forms the core of the browser installed on Apple’s iPhone, so checking how your site renders in the desktop version is a must.
» Download Safari
Netscape Navigator 8
Netscape Navigator 8 is a browser originally based on the Mozilla suite, with some Netscape branding and extra unnecessary interface options thrown in on top. As such it’s also an excellent browser, but the Mozilla suite or Firefox will be more regularly updated so I’d advise you to go for one of them. One very interesting feature it has in the Windows version is the ability to switch the rendering engine between Internet Explorer’s and Gecko, so you can easily see how your site looks in both.
» Download Netscape Navigator 8.
Internet Explorer 6
In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.
Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.
To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.
Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.
Oh, and for all those Mac users out there; currently » IE5 is the latest Explorer release. It’s actually better in some ways than the Windows version, having better support for CSS. It has been discontinued though, and has become a rather poor choice, so a better option is Apple’s own » Safari or Mozilla’s » Camino.
Internet Explorer 7
After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.
» Download Internet Explorer 7.
Opera
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.
The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.
Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.
The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.
The browser built into Nintendo’s wonderful Wii is based on Opera, so if you want Wii owners to be able to surf your site in between bouts of Wii Tennis, you should test in Opera first.
All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.
» Download Opera
Netscape Navigator 4
Netscape 4 is a pile of old crap. There’s really no getting away from that fact. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”
For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.
Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore.
» Download Netscape Navigator (or don’t.)
Firefox
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Get Firefox Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
Download your new default browser:
The Mozilla Suite
The Mozilla suite is a collection of software — a browser, a mail and newsgroup client, a chat client and a HTML editor. This was Mozilla’s flagship product until the constituent parts were split up, reworked and developed separately into standalone products — Firefox for browsing and the excellent » Thunderbird for mail.
Most of the good things said about Firefox also apply to the suite, but I would still recommend the standalone Mozilla products for speed and ease of use. If you’re looking for one download to do the whole lot, the suite does exactly what you want.
» Download the Mozilla suite.
Safari
Safari is Apple’s own web browser, and for its first few years was only available to lucky Mac owners, coming pre-installed on all new Macs since 2003. A Windows version was released in June 2007. Safari is a clean, fast browser based on the WebKit rendering engine that also powers the Linux browser Konqueror.
Safari comes with all the features you would expect in a modern browser, like tabbed browsing, popup blocking and built-in search functionality. It also has the best RSS-reading feature available to date, which makes keeping track of a number of websites much easier than using bookmarks.
Because it’s designed by Apple, it feels right at home on the OS X operating system, and in general performs faster than the Mac version of Firefox, or the Firefox variant » Camino. It can also tie into other programs on the OS, so web forms can be spell-checked through OSX’s built-in dictionary and the Keychain program can keep track of your logins.
Safari also forms the core of the browser installed on Apple’s iPhone, so checking how your site renders in the desktop version is a must.
» Download Safari
Netscape Navigator 8
Netscape Navigator 8 is a browser originally based on the Mozilla suite, with some Netscape branding and extra unnecessary interface options thrown in on top. As such it’s also an excellent browser, but the Mozilla suite or Firefox will be more regularly updated so I’d advise you to go for one of them. One very interesting feature it has in the Windows version is the ability to switch the rendering engine between Internet Explorer’s and Gecko, so you can easily see how your site looks in both.
» Download Netscape Navigator 8.
Internet Explorer 6
In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.
Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.
To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.
Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.
Oh, and for all those Mac users out there; currently » IE5 is the latest Explorer release. It’s actually better in some ways than the Windows version, having better support for CSS. It has been discontinued though, and has become a rather poor choice, so a better option is Apple’s own » Safari or Mozilla’s » Camino.
Internet Explorer 7
After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.
» Download Internet Explorer 7.
Opera
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.
The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.
Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.
The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.
The browser built into Nintendo’s wonderful Wii is based on Opera, so if you want Wii owners to be able to surf your site in between bouts of Wii Tennis, you should test in Opera first.
All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.
» Download Opera
Netscape Navigator 4
Netscape 4 is a pile of old crap. There’s really no getting away from that fact. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”
For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.
Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore.
» Download Netscape Navigator (or don’t.)
mender42
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It certainly rocks in the graphics and user interface department. Originally it was for Windows XP and above. They just recently fixed that and all of a sudden it fired right up on my Windows 2000.! Super Social Network capbilities make IE .....well boring.
Another flocking good browser is well, "Flock". It's Firefox base under the hood.This group just added a bunch of add on extensions for Firefox, but go over to their web site and check them out in their native habitat:
http://www.flock.com/ This one is Social Centric also and gives you that "Firefox Fix" if you really need it.
Another flocking good browser is well, "Flock". It's Firefox base under the hood.This group just added a bunch of add on extensions for Firefox, but go over to their web site and check them out in their native habitat:
http://www.flock.com/ This one is Social Centric also and gives you that "Firefox Fix" if you really need it.
MarioMaster
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eliasr
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Maybe is the better browser.
Safari pass the acid! test, have a better performance in javascript, good memory manage, is based on khtml so have a good render and raster engine and have a great development tool, for html.
But have a little-big things that i dont like, ie., the better ads-blocker actually don't blocker, don't works fine with some javascript features [joomla's WYSIWYG] and dont have the great catalog of extensions that have Firefox.
Is good but i prefer Firefox, and the version 3 pass the acid test, have a good memory control, and use the new gecko engine.
Safari pass the acid! test, have a better performance in javascript, good memory manage, is based on khtml so have a good render and raster engine and have a great development tool, for html.
But have a little-big things that i dont like, ie., the better ads-blocker actually don't blocker, don't works fine with some javascript features [joomla's WYSIWYG] and dont have the great catalog of extensions that have Firefox.
Is good but i prefer Firefox, and the version 3 pass the acid test, have a good memory control, and use the new gecko engine.
hermitobserver
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I definately like Safari better than anything. It is faster than everything else on my computer and is more "User-Friendly". I have used it for 1.5 years and love it. I'm downloading the latest version in a couple of weeks. The only other thing that is near as good as Safari is FireFox.-
tnl2k7
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Hi,
In my opinion Safari is ugly, overrated and boring. You can't get addons for it, the skin looks too dull and it doesn't exactly render pages all too quickly either. Everyone's welcome to their own opinion, that's mine.
I personally prefer Firefox 3.0. I know it's a beta, but the new Gecko engine renders web pages really quickly, it hasn't been on RAM raids like it used to since I upgraded, and the new theme is a pretty good improvement. Firegox rocks.
-Luke.
In my opinion Safari is ugly, overrated and boring. You can't get addons for it, the skin looks too dull and it doesn't exactly render pages all too quickly either. Everyone's welcome to their own opinion, that's mine.
I personally prefer Firefox 3.0. I know it's a beta, but the new Gecko engine renders web pages really quickly, it hasn't been on RAM raids like it used to since I upgraded, and the new theme is a pretty good improvement. Firegox rocks.
-Luke.
jonathanyaniv
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Safari > Firefox > IE
Safari has a very small memory footprint, Firefox is getting better, IE 8 is also getting better
They are almost the same.
Safari has a very small memory footprint, Firefox is getting better, IE 8 is also getting better
They are almost the same.
When Apple first released their newest Safari for Windows users, I had to try it after their big success in their company with the ipods and everything else (Apple was booming). So I downloaded the browser and it never installed correctly. I downloaded it about 4 times and tried to install and uninstall and still never worked. ??? I have no idea why, my computer never had a problem and I made no mistakes in downloading the right one.
I use internet explorer for most of my browsing. But when it comes to website designing, Firefox is the best. It really has a lot more potential and features than IE and I would recommend it more than any other browser.
(e.g. Pagerank, CSS view, images view, source, etc...)
Microsoft is coming out with their new IE 8 pretty soon.
I use internet explorer for most of my browsing. But when it comes to website designing, Firefox is the best. It really has a lot more potential and features than IE and I would recommend it more than any other browser.
(e.g. Pagerank, CSS view, images view, source, etc...)
Microsoft is coming out with their new IE 8 pretty soon.
TarouSensei
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I've personally never cared for Apple products. They seem to concerned with over-polishing old things, and re-releasing them, rather than actually making improvements. My browser of choice is the default for Ubuntu, Firefox. It works fine, loads quicker than it used to (running the latest beta), and I love the customization. I'm a StumbleUpon addict, and although I can run SU with IE, it is an old version, and IE doesn't run in Linux (without wine).
mcklovin
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I tried all browsers out there. I use firefox as my main browser, I tried IE but got nowhere as it takes long to load and actually get started. I then went on to Opera which loaded amzingly fast, but actually loaded web pages slowly. :S So then I tried Safari I went to a few pages and lets just say I'm sticking to firefox.
Sohail
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I've tried out all these browsers too . IE just sucks, Windows worst application ever! I used to use Firefox for quite a while on my Mac and it worked perfectly with its addons, themes and quick shortcut keys. Though i finally turned to using Safari because its much quicker for me, it's a really good browser though it would be better with themes, addons, and quick keys...
. IE just sucks, Windows worst application ever! I used to use Firefox for quite a while on my Mac and it worked perfectly with its addons, themes and quick shortcut keys. Though i finally turned to using Safari because its much quicker for me, it's a really good browser though it would be better with themes, addons, and quick keys...