Saturday, December 02, 2006

What I love [or hate] in the 4 browsers I use...

I just read here that now that the november figures are out, Internet Explorer's market share dropped to 80.65% over the last year, Safari is up to 4.03% and Firefox is also up to 13.5% (and it's growth seems to be accelerated.

Seems like a good chance to sum up what I personally like [or not] in each one of the fox browsers I use (include by Treo 650's mini-browser):

Safari
++ being able to press one single key (expose) and get a glimpse of every browser window open is just great
+ same metallic look & feel than itunes and Tiger.. feels born to be work together with the rest of the system.. and it does quite well
+ the google toolbar comes embedded
+ tabbed browsing..althought navigation with keys from tab to tab is not that great
- the embedded google toolbar lacks images and the clover button
- last week for the first time I found one page that crashes it (on the + sign it seems that the reporting of the even going directly to apple should help getting that solved)
- blogger just doesn't work as seamlessly from Safari... strange

Firefox
+ it feels the fastest of them all to me
+ the integration of the google search bar works the best
+ the anticipation of the search term compared to the past search stream and common searches (with numbers of links) is just fantastic
+ foxpose is an OK imitation of expose from safari
- foxpose takes a full extra tab (can that be solved)

Treo 650's minibrowser
++ well.. it's just VERY VERY practical to be able to browse when not in front of a NB/PC
+ wapedia is a fantastic repackaging of wikipedia... even with images
+ google images has a specific page for these type of device.. just great
- certainly not that fast
- only able to support a single browsing session
- clumsy when you need to go to your e-mail or calendar and get back to the

IE
+ proven. just works... and hence my employer's intranet mostly uses it
- it seems to inherit the classical Microsoft reliability [frequent crashes, I mean]
- I just don't know how I can have a look in a single glimpse to all the browser windows (do I need vista for that?)
-- it feels quite slow compared to any of the others
--- for a long while searching news around a specific term only landed on the google news page, which was quite frustrating

Would that continuous slide on the MSFT share in the browser wars generate any significant comeback.. I hope so. If they don't invest seriously on improvements.. they'll keep seeing their share slide further

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