vansmith

As a "die hard" *nix user, my interest in a program that doesn't run on a *nix platform is minimal at best. That said, I am interested in IE9. It looks like Microsoft has finally dropped the complacency act and recognized that the browser market is an important one to exert control in.

I had intended to do a review of IE9 but there are quite a few reviews online that would do a better job than I would. To summarize though: it would appear that most are impressed with the increasing attention to speed and standards support present and although most reviews are in favour of the new UI (I sure am), many are confused about the choices made concerning the top 1/5 of the browser. What I mean is why have the tab bar and address bar occupy the same position and why have the blank title bar?

I wanted to note the following though:

Microsoft's first criticism is Chrome's combining the address bar and the search box into a single entry box; IE8 keeps those fields separate. "By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you're visiting aren't automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else," says IE product manager Pete LePage.

(source)

IE9 now does the same thing - there is no search field and searches are done through the address/search bar.

Second contradiction:

"As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google," LePage says. "I haven't even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I'm visiting."

(source)

Let's take a look at what happens when you start to type a search query in the address/search bar:
Note how it says, "Turn on search suggestions (keystrokes will be sent to Bing as you type)". Sure, it's not on by default but IE9 could send data to Bing concerning what you type. My question then is this: why criticize Google for doing something and then implement that feature yourself? The fact that it's off by default is irrelevant because the feature is still present.

When turned on, it appears that the effect is similar to that of Chromium (click here for the larger version):
Sorry Microsoft but you really need to prevent yourself from contradicting your positions.

Tabs on top vs tabs on the left.

You decide. I'm going to stick with tabs on top.

This is by no means comprehensive but more of an observation before I hear people claim this is insignificant because it lacks rigor.

So, I decided to see how far Firefox had come on the Sunspider benchmark (version 0.9.1) by comparing it to four different versions of Opera: 10.10 (6795), 10.52 (8339), 10.61 (8429) and 10.70 (9034). Here is what I found, in order of speed:

1. Opera 10.61: 398.0ms +/- 0.7%
2. Opera 10.70: 407.3ms +/- 0.7%
3. Opera 10.52: 486.2ms +/- 1.3%
4. Firefox 4.0 b4: 700.7ms +/- 6.5%
5. Opera 10.10: 5565.5ms +/- 0.4%

Observations
Opera 10.5 was the first version to include the new Carakan JS engine which explains why there is the much better performance of the post-10.1 releases of Opera. This is important to note as it demonstrates Opera's commitment to not only improving the quality of the browser (Opera >=10.5 is leagues better than Opera <=10.1 in just about every way that I need it to be) but also the speed of JS performance. This brings up the reason for this post - Mozilla just can't seem to catch up in terms of JS performance. I say catch up because Firefox in this test was slower than Opera 10.52 which was released four months ago (see here). Firefox is still trying to catch up to a browser that was released months ago and my concern is that when it gets caught up, it will be four months behind the browsers of today.

Yes, I realize that I excluded other browsers but the point here is not to compare browsers but to demonstrate Firefox's struggle. I also realize that JS performance is not the ultimate measure of success/strength of a browser but in a world wide web landscape that is increasingly becoming dependent on JS to power it, it does become important to handle it well.

I decided to do a "not so scientific" study of memory usage for what I call the four major browsers available for OS X (Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox). Here is what I did:

• Opened each browser and Activity Monitor (these were the only open applications aside from menulets).
• Each browser opened to Google but I navigated to Yahoo in each shortly after opening them.
• Minimized each browser and left Activity Monitor up.
• Recorded the memory usage after half an hour and one hour.

I rebooted the machine before performing this "experiment".

I used the following browser versions:

• Firefox 4.0 beta 4
• Chrome 7.0.503.0 dev
• Opera 10.70 (9034)
• Safari 5.0.1 (6533.17.8)

Results (values in MB)

¹ It's worth noting that although Chrome was only using 63.9 MB of memory after one hour, Chrome spawned three extra processes: Google Chrome Renderer and two Google Chrome Workers. GCR consumed 59.3 MB of memory while the two GCW processes consumed 28.8 MB and 23.8 MB. Therefore, Chrome consumed 175.8 MB of memory when considering the browser and associated processes.

Conclusion
I wasn't surprised to see Firefox consume more memory than Safari or Opera (and I thought I could include Chrome but see the caveat above) but I was surprised to see Opera consume as much as it did. I was also surprised to see Firefox take the title of "only browser to lower memory usage." While I now have a much better appreciation of how Firefox performs in terms of memory usage, I am still disappointed in its performance. I still experience interface speed problems with Firefox that I may experience in other browsers but not anywhere near the same extent.

I was also intrigued by Chrome's memory usage. While the browser consumed considerably less memory than the other browsers, considering additional processes reveals that Chrome uses much more than the others. This is something people need to consider - look at the whole picture instead of just how the one process is doing.

I have been switching between browsers now for a while, much like I hopped from distro to distro when I was first trying out Linux. That said, much like I did with Linux distros, I have come to the conclusion that one browser is not good enough to get all the jobs done. Although this is the case, I definitely prefer one over the others. While this is the case, I definitely don't use Firefox.

Firefox is terrible. To say anything else of it would be me being verbose for no apparent reason. It's slow, it's bloated and requires the installation of extensions and themes to make it feel like a quality app on the Mac. While many will argue that the vast and rich extension ecosystem that Mozilla has fostered is a strength of Firefox, I will claim that it is in fact a weakness. No other browser requires me to install a theme (in this case, GrApple) just so Firefox can actually look like a Mac app. On top of this, many people install extension after extension (again, claiming the ability to do so as a strength) only to have their browser bogged down to the point where it becomes unusable. In terms of actual browsing, Firefox used to do a commendable job of rendering anything I threw at it. The darling of open source software pushed the browser into a competition of sorts to see who could deliver the best experience, much to the benefit of end users. This I cannot possibly claim is a bad thing and I thank Mozilla for this. That said, while Gecko can still handle just about anything, so can the other layout engines. While Firefox started as an attempt to build a light and fast browser, it has become a slow and bloated mess (especially on the Mac). For instance, let's take a look at some browser comparisons:

SunSpider 0.9.1

• Firefox 4.0 beta 2 - 843.4 +/- 4.2%
• Opera 10.70 (8407) - 396.6 +/- 0.7%
• Safari 5.0 (6533.16) - unable to run for some reason
• Chromium 6.0.479.0 (53979) - 361.9 +/- 0.8%

Acid3

• Firefox 4.0 beta 2 - 97/100
• Opera 10.70 (8407) - 100/100
• Safari 5.0 (6533.16) - 100/100
• Chromium 6.0.479.0 (53979) - 100/100 (reported as so but did not render as such)

While this is not a huge sample of tests, it does demonstrate that, although Mozilla has done a lot with Firefox, it still can't compete. Oh how I wish it could though.

Integration
Firefox, as an application that works across operating systems, has a harder time integrating than applications tailored to one platform. I am very much willing to concede that and this is why I will not compare Firefox to Safari in this regard (I realize that Safari works on Windows but who are we kidding when we say that it is given equal treatment on Windows). For this, I will compare it to Chromium and Opera, both of which work on Windows, OS X and Linux. First, a simple example:

That is a dropdown box as it is rendered in Firefox. That does not look like an OS X dropdown box by any means. Looking at the same dropdown box in Chromium and Opera will demonstrate that both of these browsers have no problem rendering native widgets. If you would like to try this, go here (this is where the example comes from). Then there is the second style of dropdown box that Firefox has which is odd since it should only have one style (you know, the proper one):

In this instance, Mozilla is halfway there. Why Mozilla can't get all the way there in terms of native widget usage (both in the browser and in the application) is beyond me considering that Google and Opera have no problem doing so with their respective browser.

This is just one of many examples of the flaws with Firefox. I sincerely hope that Mozilla does not continue a trend that I see occurring with browsers - the smaller the market share, the better the browser (obviously, a highly subjective claim). If that were true, Mozilla has some work to do.

Conclusion
I want to love Firefox, I truly do. I criticize only because I want something better. Mozilla has the means to make a fantastic browser and the reason is simple - if other browser developers can do great things, so can they as they are no less talented. Don't get me wrong though - Mozilla has done great things. That said, they seem to have lost some desire to make Firefox a truly fast (both in rendering and in application speed) and light browser. Now, I say desire only because, despite their aspiration to make the best browser, they don't seem able to catch up to the other browser developers in some key areas. For starters, Mozilla needs to stop resting on their own past laurels and stop focusing development on Windows. While the Linux version isn't bad, the OS X version is simply atrocious. Sure, I could use Camino but why should I have to use it? Is it not obvious to individuals that there is something wrong if there has to be a separate client (Camino)?