CATEGORIES
- NYC COVERAGE
- WEB STARTUPS
- WEB NEWS
- CONFERENCES
- WEB TECH JOBS
- VENTURE CAPITAL
- MICROSOFT
- INTERVIEWS
- ADVERTISING
- VIDEO
- ALL TOPICS
- ALL COMPANIES
CONTRIBUTORS
My Response to the IE8 Comparison Chart
by Curtiss Grymala on June 18th, 2009
Earlier today, Allen posted a story about Microsoft releasing a chart comparing IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome (who knows which version). Following is my response to that chart. I would say that I’m disappointed not to see Safari included in this comparison, but since much of the comparison is spin and misinformation, there wouldn’t be much point.
- Security – it may very well be that IE8 has some security tools built in, but that doesn’t mean that those tools work the way you would expect. Some people would call this “bloat.” Besides, it cuts down on the amount of choice the users have. What if I want to install AVG with its toolbar? I’ve used Firefox with the AVG toolbar, and find it much better and easier to use than the “filters” built into IE8.
- Privacy – Really? The don’t even give a nod to Chrome? Chrome was the first major browser to offer private (or “incognito”) browsing.
- Ease of use – Who judges this? As far as I’m concerned, Chrome is much easier to use than IE8. The “most visited” feature in Chrome (similar to Opera’s speed dial, but it automatically populates the list with your most often visited sites) gives Chrome a huge advantage in my opinion. The autocomplete function in Chrome’s address bar and the automatic Google search give it a few steps up, too.
- Web standards – I like the spin they apply to this category. I also find it curious the way they define “standards.” Granted, IE8 does account for many of the CSS 2.x standards available now, but it also still includes a great deal of IE-only “features” that make it difficult to utilize the standards. It’s also interesting that they didn’t include Safari in any of these comparisons, as, from what I’ve heard, the latest Safari would beat all of the browsers hands-down. Still, IE8 is much, much, much better than IE7 or IE6, so I will give props to Microsoft for that.
- Developer tools – Really? Microsoft is trying to say that IE includes better developer tools? Firefox’s built-in javascript console still beats the heck out of the IE javascript console. Add on top of that the add-ons that are available for Firefox, and IE falls flat. The IETester “MyDebug” toolbar does offer a few great tools, but that has nothing to do with Microsoft; that’s a completely independent product.
- Reliability – I haven’t had IE8 crash on me, yet (though I very rarely use it, so that’s not saying much), so I can’t comment on it’s crash recovery. Still, Chrome has only crashed a handful of times for me, so I certainly wouldn’t knock its reliability.
- Customizability – are they serious? They’re spinning “we’ve bloated the heck out of our browser by giving our users no choice as to what features they want” into “we win!” There’s no browser out there that beats Firefox in terms of customizability. There most likely never will be (which is unfortunate, because I would really like to be able to download an extremely barebones browser, then customize it with my desired features).
- Compatibility – If we’re talking about the browser’s compatibility with specific Web sites, I do have to give this one to IE8, but that’s sheerly because there are still so many sites out there that were developed specifically for IE6, using proprietary Microsoft technology. Of course IE8 is going to work with those sites; and of course the other browsers won’t. Even if we only take into consideration the Exchange Webmail applications out there, that still makes IE8 more compatible than Firefox or Chrome, unfortunately. Sloppy, lazy programming is the only reason IE8 is more compatible. However, if we’re talking about the browser’s compatibility with operating systems (which I’m sure never even crossed their minds), Firefox wins with Chrome coming in second (having just released a pretty nice – though it doesn’t support Flash, yet – beta version for Linux and Mac). In fact, I’d guess that the number of users with an operating system other than Windows is probably equal to or larger than the number of users visiting Web sites that are only compatible with IE.
- Manageability – I’m not sure what this even means, so I can’t really comment on it. Still, I’d almost be willing to bet that there are Firefox add-ons available that do these things, if they’re even necessary with Firefox.
- Performance – A tie? Really? There’s no way Firefox is as fast as IE8, and there’s no way IE8 is as fast as Chrome. I’d be very curious to see the actual test data used for this comparison.
Curtiss Grymala is the full-time Webmaster for a community college in Virginia. In his spare time, he runs a freelance Web development company called Ten-321 Enterprises, is an active participant in the HTMLCenter Forums and offers small snippets of code and bug reports to the developers and modders of the YaBB Forum system. He has been developing Web sites and applications for nearly 15 years.
1. IE 8 filtering is very easy to use. Requires only a couple of clicks to turn on or off. It doesn’t require u to install a bad AV like AVG which has bad virus detection rates, which also slow down the browser with their toolbars.
2. Safari was the first browser to offer the private browsing mode, not Chrome. Chrome just made it very easier to use.
5. If IETester is an independent product, so are the add ons for Firefox used for debugging. Although, IE 8’s dev tools aren’t bad either.
7. Theming isn’t the first feature people look for in a browser. At least the average person. Customization means, you can add toolbars, plugins and add ons which do a good enough job. Although the extensions for FF give more choices, they can really slow down and bloat it.
9. Manageability is important for IT staff in offices and corporations. Using it they can put different types of restrictions easily on the browser. IE also works very well with the group policy client in Windows making life easy for IT staff.
10. You can’t put a final word on the performance between these browsers IMO. Some websites load faster in IE, some in FF, and most in Chrome.
the stupid chart will only damage the IE’s reputation anymore, obvious this type of advertising not work for me.
@Imran – Thanks for your response. I would be curious to see some data (and the source of that data) showing AVG failing when detecting viruses. Obviously there are some viruses that Symantec or Norton will catch that AVG won’t, but there are also viruses that AVG is the first to identify and eliminate. Personally, I much prefer the AVG toolbar over IE8’s protection, but, again, that is just my opinion.
Also, thank you for pointing out the fact about Safari. I did not realize that Safari offered private browsing before Chrome. I stand corrected. Still, though, IE8 certainly was not the first.
Regarding number 5, thank you for pointing that out. That’s a very valid point.
As far as your response to number 7, I’m not sure what part of my post inferred that I was even referring to themes.
Your response to number 9 makes perfect sense. Of course, if that was truly as real of a concern as you make it out to be, they’d be using Linux instead of Windows.
Regarding performance, you’re absolutely right. I can’t put a final word on it, nor can Microsoft. Still, in my personal experience, Chrome is the fastest of the three, then IE8 and then Firefox lags way behind (in start-up time and page load time).
@Wallace – I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. Unfortunately, that type of advertising does work on great numbers of people. That’s just the way the world works. When people see charts and graphs, they automatically assume that the data is factual.
Mr Curtiss Grymala,
4. Web standards
The first obvious-blatant thing you missed to say is that W3C web standards is not just HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 but also ECMAScript 10262 3rd edition, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, DOM 1 Core, DOM 2 Core, DOM 2 Events, DOM 2 HTML interfaces. In all these specifications (final technical releases), IE 8 is weak and/or incomplete and/or with a buggy implementation. Test suites have been done on each/all of these web standards specification and can be verified, tested by anyone.
Back in 2006 (1), I warned Microsoft that web standards is not just CSS 2.1 but also other W3C Technical recommendations.
I personally filed and/or reported 226 bug reports regarding IE 8. I know several who filed and/or reported dozens of bug reports at connect IE beta feedback on in their websites. I *know* IE 8’s CSS 2.1 implementation would not be as good (correctnessly speaking) if it had not been of dozens and dozens of people reporting bugs. Some of them have been reporting bugs about IE during years, even over a decade you know. And I know that there are still (at least 50, possibly more than 100) CSS 2.1 bugs remaining to fix and CSS 2.1 features waiting to be implemented.
3. Ease of use
Toolbars and buttons are more configurable and customizable in other browsers.
No need for compatibility switch button in other browsers.
5. Developer tools
Firefox DOM inspector is easier to use, I’d say, and quite powerful. Safari developer tools are quite powerful. And so is Opera’s Dragonfly.
7. Customizability
The add-ons extensions I use in Firefox, mostly developer tools, I can not find any of them, not one, for IE 8. Now, since IE8 rely on a broken-document-switch-to-compatibility, you would logically expect them to provide more and helpful/assisting add-on extensions to support upgrading webpages… but they have not.
No Site Navigation toolbar add-on for IE 8. Firefox 2+, Seamonkey 1+, Opera 7+, Konqueror 3.x, Konqueror 4.x and lots of other browsers have this; one notable exception is Safari.
No HTML validation add-on extension (working offline) for IE 8. Firefox and Seamonkey have this.
No HTML Tidy add-on extension embeddable into IE 8.
10. Performance
Many people, including me, complained about creating a new tab being slow, considerably slower than for other browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari). A bug report was even created twice regarding this.
One weak area of IE 8 is accessibility. Other browsers (except Safari, I’d say) are more advanced than IE 8 and this can be measured, established by tests and careful reading of UAAG 1.0.
No minimum font-size settable in IE 8: aging baby-boomers and people with low vision will prefer Firefox and Opera here.
Many HTML object elements will not work or render alternate content. (eg: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~sairwas/object-test/java/ and I’m using the latest JRE 1.6.0_u14)
No possibility for the IE 8 user to override attributes like noresize (for frames), scrolling=no, frameborder=0.
No way for the IE 8 user to restore window resizability (and scrollability and other window toolbars) of secondary windows. Etc, etc.
And I can show you the channel9 wiki page where several people requested those back in 2005.
regards, Gérard
–
(1): “but W3C web standards is much more than just CSS. W3C web standards includes also HTML 4.01 specification, DOM 2 interfaces specification, User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 1.0 specification and other key specifications: when comparing with other browsers (Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.04), the latest MSIE 7 is behind – way behind – other browsers in all these specifications.”
http://www.gtalbot.org/BrowserBugsSection/MSIE7Bugs/CWilsonMSIE7AndCSSCompliance.html
6 september 2006
Oh my god, first I read a very “generic” article without “putting your hands on the fire”, ok not so bad, but you didnt point out much things…
Then the typical comment regarding the wrong things that the article has.
But at last I found what I would call the comment of the month, and at this time of the year I would say the comment of the year xDD
Dammit “Gérard Talbot” you rule! Just pointed out some of things I had in my mind (ease of use/customizability/performance) so objectively and… just great. I use Opera and really, it’s not on the same league. It’s just an apples to keyboards comparison, not aplicable… And if some of you have some kind of principles, dont go with a Microsoft browser. I don’t mind about other programs, but please, not a Microsoft browser, ever!!
And the last thing, most used browser = most attacked browser, so it’ll sooner or later be a easy to catch prey…