Browser Battles: IE vs Firefox vs Opera

Ever since the de facto demise of the Netscape browser, I had been merrily maintaining my neutrality in the browser wars. I was happy enough with Internet Explorer 6.0. It did everything I thought I needed, and its market share made it the logical choice of browser to target for web applications. Most of my clients agreed that if it ran OK in IE, they wouldn’t sweat the rest. Besides, their applications were largely written using the .NET Framework, so they were heavily invested in Microsoft products.

Then I began working with Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. In a rather intensive AJAX application using Rails, I was disappointed with Internet Explorer’s responsiveness, and with all of the buzz over Firefox and Opera, I decided that I really needed to evaluate these browsers under the same conditions some day.

As serendipity would always have it, another reason for this evaluation presented itself. I signed up for coComment and installed the “Bookmarklet”, so I could keep track of comments I make on other blogs. When I tried to use it, though, it kept on asking me to log in, and would pop up a message box complaining that Cookies did not seem to be stored correctly. Well, I knew I had cookies enabled, because other sites remembered my information just fine. After discussing this with a few folks on Makeyougohmm.com, RyanB suggested I try Firefox instead. Time to download.

I found that not only did Firefox work first time right out of the box for coComment, it also performed much better with my Rails/AJAX application. ‘Tis time, methinks, for a more complete comparison.

As I mentioned in my chipstips.com download of the application, when navigating away from a page that had a timed XmlHTTPRequest (AJAX) transaction every second, Internet Explorer 6.0 took about 16 seconds to load the other page. Opera (8.51) took 13 seconds. Firefox (1.5.0.1) took only 5 seconds. This was very unscientific and used a local WEBrick server with MySQL on the same machine, but the difference was, I think, significant. Examining the server’s log, it appears that what ties up IE and Opera is that the AJAX calls seem to get queued up, because they keep happening for a while after the next page loads. Firefox seems to handle that scenario better, with fewer calls getting queued up.

Another little thing I noticed: in my application I preload the images that are referenced in the HTML that is returned by the AJAX calls, so they don’t have to be loaded on the first such call. To hide them, I sized them at 0 width and 0 height. On IE and Opera, they are still visible as 1-pixel images spaced a few pixels apart. Firefox hides them as I intended. It’s a small thing, but it means a lot to me.

Internet Explorer also doesn’t support a CSS style for “td:hover” that changes the background color, whereas both Firefox and Opera do. This makes it difficult to create a “hover button” linkbar for IE without resorting to an ActiveX control or applet.

Try this: go to this page. In IE, the iFilm object (the banned GoDaddy ad) fails to load properly, and a script error message results. Firefox and Opera both seem to load it OK.

I like the automatic RSS feed detection and loading available in both Firefox and Opera. I have heard that this is coming in IE 7. Likewise with tabbed browsing. That’s great, but I’m not ready for IE 7 yet (or, as I have heard, IE 7 isn’t ready for me). If I get a chance to spin it up on a virtual machine I will, but otherwise I’m not touching it until it’s released.

I like the “sessions” feature of Opera, but I like the “folders” concept in Firefox even better. You can use folders both for organization and for launching all of the pages in tabs.

Oh, and Opera seems to have trouble with coComment. It freezes while “submitting comment to original blog”. Only Firefox works for me here. Other users mentioned this difficulty with Opera in the coComment.com forums.

I am also annoyed with Opera’s wanting to open the previously open page on startup, especially when that page was an application I’m working on that has a bug that makes it difficult to get out of. Give me a regular home page. Ok, that’s a “Preference”. I can live with that.

A big reason to like Firefox: extensibility. Greasemonkey gives you lots of control. I also like the way you can easily switch between all kinds of search engines.

Overall, then, you can see that I have quickly become attached to Firefox. I use it now as my default browser.

I welcome your comments. Let the battle begin!