Wandering electrons... but not too far

No Beta's allowed...

Opera 9.52


Safari for Windows 3.1.2


Firefox 3.0.1


Internet Explorer 7.0

I'm a huge fan of the New York Times and was interested to see this headline:

Browsers Are a Battleground Once Again

"Cool! thought I, they're going to compare Opera 9.5 beta with Firefox 3!"

Over 1000 words later, can you believe that they did not even mention Opera?!

Not even once.

This was especailly angering when I read:

Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

To your emails Opera defenders! :

[NYT] NEWS DEPARTMENT
To send comments and suggestions (about news coverage only) or to report errors that call for correction, e-mail nytnews@nytimes.com or leave a message at 1-888-NYT-NEWS. To contact a reporter, click on the byline of one of his or her articles to access the reader e-mail form.

Remember though: respect and intelligent aurguments. Opera is the smart people's browser!

Update 07:41 p.m.

Since I put up this post, the New York Times has changed the title of the article. It is now "An Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers". Did they see the errors of their ways? I'd like to think so. But even if they've thus avoided the Opera challenge bullet, they've also made me snicker a bit, referring to Firefox as an "upstart".

Ryan at CyberNet News published the results of his Windows browsers comparison, which includes both beta and stable versions of the four biggies: Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8 Beta), Firefox (versions 2.0.0.12 and 3 Beta 4), Opera (versions 9.26 and 9.5.9841 beta ("Kestrel")) and Safari (version 3.1).

He tested Javascript performance, page loading speed, and memory usage. The results found good to excellent performance both for the stable Opera 9.26 version and especially for the 9.5 beta, but the competition is fierce from Safari and the Firefox beta.

For javascript, the Opera 9.5 beta came in second after Safari 3.1 and 9.24 was fourth behind the Firefox 3 beta. The last to cross the finish line--and long after the others were home in bed--were the Internet Explorer versions.

For the first page-loading speed test, done on the official Google blog, Opera 9.5 was the winner, beating out Safari 3.1 in second place and again 9.26 was fourth behind the Firefox beta. In the second speed test done on the Yahoo! Search blog, Opera 9.5 and 9.26 were respectively second and third behind the winner Safari. IE7 managed to finish 7th in front of Firefox 2 in the first speed test, but IE8 was last in both.

As for memory use, the surprise winner was the Firefox beta, using globally between 21.3MB and 124.7MB according to how many pages were open and for how long. The Opera versions were "middle of the pack", let's say. The Stable version of Opera was indeed better than the stable version of Firefox, but the beta version of Opera was behind the Firefox beta in all but startup memory use. Looking more closely at startup memory, the IE versions were, of course, the winners there, and the loser was Safari; surprising considering its excellent results elsewhere. The IE versions were however the worst for in-use memory usage (with multiple sites open).

The results of Ryan's tests seem to suggest that there is indeed a new player in town, and his name is Safari (despite a rather rough start). The difference in Javascript performance and page loading speed are pretty insignificant between Safari 3.1 and Kestrel (not to mention the significant improvements for the Firefox beta), but the Opera development teams are definitely going to need to start thinking of Safari as serious competition in the Windows environment (I'm sure they already are).

Yes, to summarize, the Windows browser performance wars are now a three-way battle between Safari, Opera and Firefox. Internet Explorer seems to be KO for the moment, its only advantage being its ubiquitousness.

It would be interesting to revisit these results once the various betas are all officially released. Indeed, testing beta performance is a bit like tasting a cake while it's still in the oven. In particular, I think one should not jump to conclusions concerning IE8's poor performance in Ryan's tests, as it is the least mature of the betas. But what is sure is that the folks at Microsoft need a lot of Gatorade if they expect to catch up with the others concerning performance.

For those of you out there who have been looking for a clarification on this whole "version targeting" thing that Internet explorer 8 is going to introduce, and how this ties in to other browsers, such as, ahem, Opera, I recommend a tour on the "A list Apart" website, where you will find three articles that address this question:

“Forgiving” Browsers Considered Harmful by J. David Eisenberg

Version Targeting: Threat or Menace? by Jeffrey Zeldman

and

They Shoot Browsers, Don't They? by Jeremy Keith

You're in for about, oh, perhaps 20 to 30 minutes of reading, but when you're finished you'll have a much clearer picture of Microsoft's logic behind the decision to create still another line of code for website developers.

As to whether it's good logic or bad logic, the discussion is open. Let me know what you think!

Like most people I have a good number of web pages bookmarked. However I've noticed recently-in fact for quite a while now-that in reality I virtually never use most of them. In fact, what usually happens is that I bookmark something, and then I just forget that it's there.

Why? Well, Google.

The performance of search engines has become so good these days that I find it much easier to simply search Google for the site that I want, instead of going/searching through the hierarchy of my bookmark folders.

Instead of Bookmarks>folder>subfolder>subsubfolder>subsubsubfolder -- site Y
I use
Google -- Site Y
And baf, I'm there.

If you know the name of the website (and you usually do if it's something that you'd bother to bookmark) you'll get THAT web site as you're first result 99.9% of the time. Even if you don't know the name, a few good keywords will usually make your target appear on the first page of results. This tactic is of course more efficient for large websites, but I'm amazed by how well it works for small sites too, especially if you know their names.

The only bookmarks that I use regularly are those illustrious few that have been ennobled to the personal bar, the first of which is, of course, Google, followed by Yahoo! and then a baker's dozen's worth of others.

There are now bookmark websites, such as del.icio.us, that have put new twists on the idea of keyword bookmarking, but they've never won me over as my preferred way to bookmark...

So what do you think? Is bookmarking still pertinent? As Google and other search engines get better and better at reading our minds, are we going to see a day when browsers no longer offer a bookmark function?

Voilà, today's existential question...