Firefox 4 vs. Internet Explorer 9 vs. Chrome 11

I hope you will welcome my contributions to the V-Tek blog, this is my first post.

As a project manager here at VeraciTek I am always trying to polish my fluency with the latest technologies. The browser war being one of the most relevant to my job.

Microsoft recognized very early that building the browser meant owning the traffic. At least to some degree. The internet landscape is changing very quickly and has advanced light-years beyond the early days when Netscape and Internet Explorer fought for dominance. The same early days that Microsoft lost the court battle to force IE on Windows users.

Today IE is still the top, at 55% market share. A gouge out of it is Firefox’s and Chrome is still the “little guy”. However, recently Chrome has been taking market share from them both.  The summary review of Chrome is: it’s super fast, and buggy. Many sites don’t work correctly with it and it has the habit of announcing: “He’s dead Jim” on sites that work fine in the other browsers. However, it is VERY quick compared to the others.

Firefox 4 claims to be faster, by a factor of 5, it claims. However, in our office the consensus is that is just not true. One developer said: “It might be the same speed as FF3, but that’s just might be.” Another complains that he stares at a full screen white out for about 10-20 seconds before it does anything at all. He once opened and closed Chrome and visited Google twice in the time it took for FF4 to leave the white screen. Another says: “It’s ugly.”

IE 9 is the one we open just to test. At 55% market share we have to be compatible, but that doesn’t mean we have to use it. I have been in IT for years and I remember when it was IE vs. Netscape. There were some others, but those were the big players. Beginning at around IE4 there was a long period where developers would complain about trying to support all of the versions of Netscape. That flipped at the end of IE5’s reign.

Today, Chrome has done something a bit counter-intuitive. Instead of asking if you’d like to update Chrome, it just does it. Perhaps taking a lesson from Apple, Google seems to have realized that most users just get stressed out by questions like: “Would you like to upgrade?” Whatever the reason, Firefox and even IE fails to keep their users at the current point release. Both of those ask users, and Microsoft does so so inconspicuously that it seems like unless someone is an expert typist (in other words, have reasonable computer skills) there will be an explanation mark in their task area. So easy to just ignore, which the stats say is being ignored.

So the verdict is, Chrome is crashing the party. Not today, or tomorrow, but IE had better come up with something more exciting than another integer number to hold on to its market share. Firefox remains the developer’s choice. Even at FF4 the Firebug plugin is ultra functional in FF with limited support in Chrome (firebug lite). What our senior developer let me know though is that Chrome has something called Dev Tools and many Firebug holdouts don’t even know it exists. He uses both depending on which browser he is in.

I’m sure that means something. However, if you’re like me you leave the deep end for those guys. I installed Chrome just a few months ago, I highly suggest it. Even if you’re like me, and relegated to the kiddie end. Then maybe you’ll notice when your web developers leave your site non-functional in Chrome. You can let them know that you know what’s up.