Siu Lun

Lately, there seems to be a lot of browser choices to make. I find myself struggling to go away from Firefox (due to the development plugins across platforms) to trying to decide between Chrome/Opera as my browser of choice for general browsing.

Firefox for me is over, I’ll only be using it for development purposes as once I install development plugins, the speed reduction is noticeable.

Here I present two choices for you common folks and present to you an easy to understand breakdown:

1) Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome

In use by Google as the ‘future’ of web browsing experience. It consist of many technical enhancements and UI enhancement. I won’t bore you with the technical details, however I’ll make a mention of the UI enhancement Google has brought to the world. The most important UI enhancement for Google Chrome is the maximised area in which websites can flaunt their eye candies.

2) Opera http://www.opera.com/

This little known browser has been around for a long time. It dates back to the days of Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer. Over the years this little guy has actually been the revolutionary party to implement a lot of new ideas first, after which are copied by the bigger players.

As of writing, Opera 10.10 is out and it is a browser that is FAST at loading websites.

When compared to Chrome, on a Windows 7 Ultimate setup, Opera loads sites faster than Chrome.

That’s it for my review. Can’t decide which one to use for your normal day browsing? Nor can I.

Take it as it comes, Opera does usually gets left behind in the browser testing arena on a lot of websites and so it tends to be a little less compatible than Chrome and other major browsers on the market today. Right now, I’m using Opera.

Aftermath:
Interestingly, I decided to go dig for some test results on the net. I’ve found this article that seems to have done some test on Opera 10 and Chrome and Chrome’s javascript performance seems to be much higher. But on my Windows 7 PC, Opera 10′s website rendering speed is much quicker than Chrome’s.

I guess for your ‘everyday’ non-’web 2.0′ heavy sites, Opera is still better. Interestingly though, I found Google Finance’s site loads better on Opera.

With the release of Google Chrome beta for Windows and the planned beta soon after for Mac and Linux. It is obvious that a major player in the internet field has finally extended it’s claws into the browser.

Google Chrome, based on webkit, has essentially made it’s rendering speed and features the same as Safari. A lot of people are hailing about it, even newspapers for the ordinary folks.

According to techCrunch, some people thinks it can catch up to firefox’s 20% market share in 2 year time.

I’m not so sure about that. Don’t get me wrong, Google is certainly strong however, with no development tool comparable to Firebug and I certainly can’t see any easy module installation functionality at this moment.

Google Chrome will not be as successful as Firefox, Google Chrome will only be categorised the same as Opera and Safari.

The 20% marketshare that Firefox enjoys today at the end of the day is due to the developer community spreading it like fire whenever they have the chance to do so on their relative’s machines and at their workplace.

The ability to have completely customisable addons is what made Firefox. Unless other browsers do the same, they’ll always be “consumer” oriented browsers that will require enormous amount of public advertising to get any market shares.

So. I don’t doubt Google Chrome as a browser that we developers will need to add it onto our list of “supported browsers” in a year or two. But gaining the marketshare of Firefox? Maybe in 5 years time.

I’ve found it really frustrating to learn that many people in the developer world and indeed the world in general stupidly mixes ‘key’ selling words like ‘Open Standards’, ‘Open Source’ etc.. wrongly.

Here is what the Director, BBC Future Media & Technology had to say about seeing AAC and H.264 being adopted in the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/open_industry_standards_for_au.html.

After reading that, I think it can be concluded that Erik Huggers is not suitable for the job. Either he is rediculously not clued up. OR he is in the pockets of Apple.

AAC _requires_ a patent license to implement. It is NOT open standards. Ogg Vorbis and Theora can very well be! (At this time apparently no one knows whether there are hidden patents associated with those technologies)

In any case, this is more reasons not to have software patents in the first place. Erik Huggers could be right that they’re open standards in the UK as software patents are not recognised. However we live in a world, not a single country. Half the world do acknowledge software patents.