I have never found time till today to express my thoughts on the browser wars. I follow the browser wars very frequently. I not only follow the browser developments and i dare to take the risk of downloading the latest build of one and test it out. Just to tell you i have played around with Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE8, Chrome, K-meleon, Kninja, Deepnet, Flock, Amaya, Maxthon, Netscape for couple of months. I am always amused to see what browsers will be capable of in the future. I recently realized that somehow chrome has become my default browser instead of Firefox which was my default for almost 3 years prior losing out to chrome. 
Rendering Engine:- Webkit is the best (I mean it) ever rendering engine, that i have seen so far and used. Two companies(Google, apple) trust it, makes it worth looking into. Web kit is known for its speed and cold start. gecko is till on the heels of Webkit to be precise. Google was supporting Mozilla for a very long time and in spite of it they chose to go with webkit and Gecko, proves worthy. Memory Management:- The browser has been redesigned in such a fashion, that each tab is managed as a separate process makes it really simple to manage multiple tabs, i.e if a tab crashes due to a plug-in problem or memory problem or something, your browser will be still up and you will loose only the tab that crashed. There is not better browser than opera on memory management, i feel chrome will be there soon. UI simplicity:- The UI is designed to be minimal and uncluttered, which helps people view more of the web than the browser. Before Chrome, Safari had the simplest of UI, after chrome safari changed it to the chrome style, shows simple the UI really is. Community:- A browser gets really complete when it has an open community working on it to improve it in all possible directions, Google has created that environment for webkit, with the initiative of chromium. A lot of add-ons, new features etc will be available as the development progresses. Moving ahead chrome will have a major market share. Chrome still is in its very early stages of development and has to travel a long way to be the best browser, but am confident its on the right track. It is rough, it crashes etc.. so it might not be your favorite for now, but you can’t stay away. I have been and am still a fan of Firefox and i extensively try a variety of the stuff the Mozilla labs innovates. I will miss the Weave, Ubiquity and a long list of add-ons that i use, But considering the general user on the web, what matters most is speed, memory and the UI and chrome will win everyone in no time on these aspects. If you are really interested in what changes browsers will bring in tomorrow have a peek here… i seriously wish chrome also gets a similar community.
5 responses
Hi Saru,
I agree with a lot of your points, though the memory management one is contentious. While having each tab managed as a separate process makes a whole lot of sense from a security and stability point of view, it does increase the amount of memory used by the browser as a whole, since each tab cannot share memory space for the same data. Instead, each process will need it’s own copy. Also, I haven’t really seen google chrome being more stable than, say, firefox, and my most common experience with google chrome problems have been ones where all tabs simultaneously crash(though easily recovered by refreshing the page, this has to be done for every single tab, unlike firefox’s “reload all tabs” functionality), in spite of the fact that they are supposed to be isolated.
In summary: stability and security are improved, but memory usage efficiency is hurt.
Hi Jacem,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I definitely accept that chrome is not the best on memory management at the moment, but given the fact that chrome is evolving at a faster pace when compared to any other browser(including firefox), i am sure it should be up to the task by this year end.
HiSaru…I absolutely agree with u… I have been using Firefox and IE earlier. I still remember the days when my IE crashed with multiple tabs. I know how frustrating it is. Offlate I moved to Chrome and believe me….It is awesome. As most of the internet users, I really dont understand the underlying technology but I am enjoying Chrome. Overall its a nice post with lot of info.
Good Work !!!
Hey suresh, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Keep Checking for more similar posts.
Google Chrome is not yet available for mac. But, I tried installing Crossover Chromium web browser that was built on google chrome’s base code. I must say Safari is still my favorite and I think it is the best browser for mac platforms. May be I will wait until chrome for mac is available and give an another try.
Nice article!