For the life of me, I can't figure out why so many people choose to surf the web with Google Chrome. After a week of trying it, I've come to the conclusion that it's the poorest web browser ever invented. Here are the pros to using Chrome:

* It's fast.

* It's pretty.

Here are the cons to using Chrome:

* You can only have one search provider at a time. (Google wants you to only use Google, see.)

* A lot of useless useful features you can trigger by accident. (Dragging text to start a search, dragging tabs to create a seperate window, 'x' button for all tabs, etc.)

* No title bar. (The application title bar is one of the small niceties in life we take for granted. It orients us in a very subtle way that minimalist designer douchebags overlook.)

* Text looks jagged and ugly.

* For all the hype, it can't render some pages correctly.

* For all the hype, it crashed more frequently than IE ever did for me.

* Assorted little nuisances. ('Close tab' not being the first option when you right click a tab, no 'properties' option when you right-click an object, clearing 'recent downloads' list is a hassle, etc.)

So, I've decided to switch back to IE8. The interface is lightyears ahead of Chrome, and it doesn't stumble over itself to be "helpful" like Chrome does. (No, I *don't* want you auto-completing text for me in the URL bar, you piece of shit.) The only downside to using IE is having to endure the snickers of smug nerds when they find out you're an IE user. What can I say? It's nice to have more than one search provider.

Link

I use Chrome on my 6-year old laptop since the it is slow to the point where IE and Firefox freeze up my system. Chrome sucks with .pdf files so I have to switch to firefox to download those.

On my regular PC it's firefox all the way. Not the fastest but fast enough for me and some of the addons are nice.

Internet Explorer is awesome. I still prefer it to Firefox. The only downside to using IE is the one that was already mentioned: smug little nerds will snicker at me when they hear that I still use it. What can I say? I like using a browser that doesn't prompt me for three software updates every time I open it? I have a lot of issues with Firefox that don't apply to IE, actually. I guess the cost for being a smug little nerd is that you have to put up with an inferior browser. It's a small price to pay. :-D

I used to use both IE and Chrome, but both stopped working on my laptop. Tried fixing, re-installing, etc., but to no avail. So now it's FireFox, and it's been working perfectly for the most part. I've also installed a few add-ons for it that I use all the time (particularly Echofon).

I use Camino now. It's definitely more stable than Firefox and Safari on X 10.4.

'Close tab' not being the first option when you right click a tab

You know there's a little "X" on each tab, right?

I only use Chrome because, for whatever reason, Firefox crashes whenever I try opening Twitter, and I like Twitter more than I like Firefox. Chrome's been running pretty flawlessly for me and I like the clean interface (and I consider IE a cluttered, jumbled mess) so the decision's easy.

I prefer to close non-active tabs with a right-click, so I don't close anything accidentally. And how is IE cluttered? At least the way I've configured it, it's absolutely clean and unintrusive. On the other hand, Chrome has that pointless "bookmark bar" that simply takes away vertical space, not to mention the intrusive prompts whenever you browse a site in a foreign language. (CHROME: "Want us to turn this foreign text you can't read into gobbledegoook that makes no sense?" ME: "No. Go away and stop hogging screen space.")

I don't snicker when people tell me the use IE. As a web developer, I yell at them to use a standards-compliant web browser so I don't have to tear my hair out trying to make webpages render properly on IE.

Internet Explorer is used by around 70% of Internet traffic, so Microsoft does at least have logic on its side. If 70% of users prefer it (or at least like it enough to use it instead of bothering to seek out alternatives), then perhaps Microsoft's standards should be the standard.

When I design sites, it's usually Firefox (and the 30% of users that use it and other Mozilla-based browsers) that give me grief. There are so many things that a web developer can do in Internet Explorer that literally can't be done in Firefox. Or at the very least, they're awesome, awesome things and no one has bothered to produce a readily-available Firefox equivalent.

Anyway, I prefer IE for personal use because it runs so much better than Firefox. I run into far too many glitchy sites in Firefox.

"Internet Explorer is used by around 70% of Internet traffic, so Microsoft does at least have logic numbers on its side."

fixed.

See what I mean?

What kind of really awesome things are you referring to, Jason? If it's IE's tendency to ignore image size parameters and display them at the full size and stretch its containing cell if it isn't large enough, then I'd hardly call that an awesome thing.

You can argue about which features of browsers you like til the cows come home. The bottom line is - the current concept of web browsing is based on a model where a site is supposed to render in any browser. IE damaged that idea for years because it was not compliant and produced many websites that don't work or are full of browser exception code. No other browser has generated such a legacy of problems.

When IE finally stopped dragging its heels and did something about that in the latest version, that was good. But you would not expect the legitimate ill will to disappear overnight when everyone had time to become attached to all the high quality alternatives which appeared because of the poor work of IE. The reason its market share has been high is because it came on the computers most people bought, not out of logic or love. The reasons for which its market share fell were obvious.

Thing is that if we just dropped standards (read: common interfaces and methods) altogether, and adopted whatever Microsoft insists on doing at any time (..which is.. in many ways what we've done with a lot of specific document standards, html, and so on) - that wouldn't make anything easier to program for, or give anyone a larger audience.

It isn't that MS is evil, or something like that. But they keep insisting on migrating specific solutions into standards other people have to adhere to. When those specific solutions really belong in their own protected code.

It's like a car-manufacturer suddenly deciding to manufacture wheels on their cars that need new roads. People crash everywhere on the non-local highways, because it's such a popular car, and it costs almost nothing, and it's subsidized, and it gets a lot of mileage in the sales-period, and all that. But it still crashes, unless the rest of us fix the roads.. Which, of course, we will continue to do, because so many people use that damned car.

..it's just unnecessary, that's the problem.

A different example would be Opera, or Safari - Opera is based on a proprietary rendering and parsing engine. But adheres to the actual standards for the open sphere - i.e., the html. While Safari is based on WebKit, which is partially under GNU license.

Both of those rely on open standards for the public sphere. All of the different browsers do that - the reason why we've had the burst on the web is - because of those open standards in the public sphere.

While the solution they use internally is not something designers and programmers would need to worry about. Once that happens, though, you transfer trickery from inside the project out where it doesn't belong, creating extra work with no payout. While also locking out content that perhaps would be more worth if it was available to everyone.

I've noticed that all the people who complain about IE are web developers. Why not just forget about all the browsers with smaller marketshare and focus on IE, like Jason? Seems logical enough to me.

The reason is precisely that: logic. It's not a matter of shutting IE out of websites, it's a matter of writing a set of instructions and then IE doing something we don't expect with them.

To expand on the car analogy, web developers are putting up roadsigns that mark specific things like intersections, one-way roads, shoulders etc. The really popular car sometimes misinterprets a Four-Way Stop to mean No Left Turn, and then drivers phone the city to complain that they can't turn left at the intersection.

Needless to say, the road engineers are very confused.

I'm talking about things like mouseover effects and transparancies and cell placement within CSS and stuff, Will. There are more options for all of those things than Firefox provides. I will readily agree that IE and Firefox handle some things differently. Clearly, one side or the other could give. Firefox could stop being so retarded, or Internet Explorer could strip away functionality so that it drops to Firefox's level. However, most people who conclude that Firefox and its ilk, which are championing their standard, should be the standard that the competition adopts. Microsoft, with the larger market share, essentially is making the same argument and somehow Microsoft is wrong and the little guy is right just because... he's not Microsoft? It's one thing to prefer Firefox, but most of Firefox's supporters adopt an almost fanatical devotion to the browser that you won't see this side of a Mac fan.

I've never had a problem with mouseover effects or CSS object placement in Firefox. Maybe you're thinking of a legacy version?

In terms of displaying HTML, Microsoft and Firefox don't provide any features -- it's just a question of which browser is better at interpreting the code.

IE has a history of being slow to implement new CSS, and it has a history of implementing those features in a way that doesn't match websites that have already been built. If I created a functional program based on a newly-created "standard" and some high-selling interpreter came along and mangled that program's output, I'd be pretty pissed.

I'd be happy if everyone used the same version of IE -- that would make it easy to code a site -- but I'd be even happier if they would just interpret code appropriately.

//Zig

"In terms of displaying HTML, Microsoft and Firefox don't provide any features -- it's just a question of which browser is better at interpreting the code."

:) it's starting to be that more or less completely now, at least.

One part is that a lot of the functions MS added. Like the mousover effects, and the shortcuts for a bit complex java-script, and so on. That was very useful. Like with many things MS does, it was easy to get things up to a presentable level with minumum work. And that's a good thing, obviously.

The other part is that if we lack someone to propose and maintain standards for functionality, then it will be very easy to create branches that never can meet up again. And if there's too many of those branches, then everyone will have to create the same thing over again later.

And that's what we've had for a long time. Until it's become more common to create packages, and have web-sites produce different formats for different devices, launch different effects depending on the capabilities of the browser, and so on. Than hard-code things into the documents, things like that.

So there's two parts to this. One is that web-designs become more sophisticated, with more content, more functions, and so on. So suddenly it really is in everyone's interest to have something to go on. And that's what we've got.

And then it's the increased amount of "extra effects" browsers come with, in terms of menus and presentation, options for switching out layouts, rendering buttons, order of elements, ways to update, etc.

So now Firefox is full of the new "extra" functions for html that partners "propose" (but don't typically use). While IE tends to have more of the visual extras and quirks on top of the rendering engine.

And that's the opposite of what we used to have. Except neither of the browsers on the market typically will end up actually garbling your web-page any more.. Been a while since that happened.

So all in all, it's pretty interesting how all of this developed, and became pretty good :) ..even if you get a few "loop-de-loop Hotwheels jumping turnstile" intersections in some cities.

(Here's a link to the Opera desktop team blog.. they've had a few lecture series at the uni.. they know what they're doing. And have a lot of interesting things to say about standards and design. ...I think they still have that series of articles they used ahead of the last "fight" on css and html4 somewhere on the site. I'll post it if I find it again.)