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My third tech-oriented post, again stemming from my annoyance with the many wars raging around the net. The Browser Wars (Netscape vs IE and now IE vs Firefox) are quite famous among the educated side of the Internet users. In fact it’s been supposed that the only thing that keeps IE alive right now is the uneducated side of the Internet users which don’t care enough for the matter.

It’s not good to click indiscriminately that IE icon on your desktop but it’s just as bad to try and switch without knowing why and what you’re aiming for.

Sure enough IE 6 was a bad browser and it’s sure that this one is kept alive only by users who don’t know much. It’s slow, allows undiscriminated access to core system resources, doesn’t comply with web standards and many more. There are too many security bulletins concerning IE(which is a metric for me, I’m concerned with those vulnerabilities not yet announced) but what’s disturbing is the fact that many past vulnerabilities will never be fixed (not to mention Microsoft’s erratic patches for IE 6).

That’s that for IE 6. It’s bad. Stay away.

Is Firefox any better? Only slightly I would say. Sure, when it appeared Firefox triumphed through blazing speed and security options which would allow a knowledgeable user to make his browsing quite safe (nothing is impenetrable though). That means that FF used to be fast … but not safe out of the box. Now it’s even worse, FF got slow as a turtle, it has better compliance with web standards than IE 6 (but still not quite there yet) and with all the plugins security has gone to hell (I remember a nice torrent plugin right on the official site which was loaded with backdoors, how fun is that?). Sure enough IE6 has its ActiveX capability which eventually will kill your computer.

So, to sum things up, FF is only slightly better than IE6, through its encryption and better standard compliance.

IE7 is mama’s new toy, with enough improvements to be seen as a new browser. Security has seen a lot of improvements as in restricting access to system resources, more warnings about potentially malicious sites, downloads and activeX. To me that’s fair, after all no one can stop a user to download a virus to his computer. Past the decision, it’s out of any browser’s hands. IE7 also has better standard compliance, but also not quite there yet, especially when looking at its JS implementation. But it’s damn better than IE6. In terms of speed, it’s faster than both IE6 and FF (truth is anything is faster than FF).

If only IE7 would be completely separated from the Windows’ core, I would say well done, but I just can’t. Any exploit that can penetrate the browser gains access to the system itself (I’m thinking to the file system mostly). I don’t want that on my computer, especially given Microsoft’s erratic take at updates (hundreds of bulletins and a patch every 6 months? damn …).

And we have Opera. Small. Blazing. It’s the fastest browser in use today. Almost perfect standard compliance. Very secure and has the best SSL encryption yet (double than IE7/FF). I’m not going to go into details, but I will mention why Opera isn’t my main browsing tool (as a web dev I MUST use all): a few annoying usage feats, such as annoying bookmark management and pointing to new tab when opening a tab from a page.This I -really- hate … sometimes when visiting a page I like to open like 20 new tabs from it but only look at them after finishing reading current page. So what gives?

That’s why I use Opera only for online shopping and despite the headaches I use FF as my main browser with the mention that I’m blocking all plugins and have activated the access to Google’s database of malicious sites.

To make a top of browsers (I’m still evaluating FF3, which so far looks around tying with Opera) …

1. Opera

2. IE7

3. FF2

4.FF1.5

5.IE6

6.FF