IE no more! Use Firefox, and better yet Safari!
Comments(2)
Yes, Apple released its infamous browser, Safari to all windows users. I ‘ve been using it for a while, and I tell you its the fastest browser I have ever used ! In addition websites that work well on Safari, look much better.
You can download the beta at http://www.apple.com/safari/
From a web development point of view, most of the CSS work we did for Questler was first done on Firefox, no changes were done to make it work on Safari at all. In contrast, few changes were made to make it work on IE 7 and A LOT of changes needed to be made to make the site viewable on IE 6, which usage will hopefully keep on dropping, as FF is gaining more ground at %36 as well as IE 7 at 21% see the table below copied from Browser Statistics @ W3Schools
| 2007 | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx | Moz | S | O |
| October | 21.0% | 34.5% | 1.5% | 36.0% | 1.3% | 1.7% | 1.6% |
| September | 20.8% | 34.9% | 1.5% | 35.4% | 1.2% | 1.6% | 1.5% |
| August | 20.5% | 35.7% | 1.5% | 34.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| July | 20.1% | 36.9% | 1.5% | 34.5% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.9% |
| June | 19.7% | 37.3% | 1.5% | 34.0% | 1.4% | 1.5% | 1.8% |
| May | 19.2% | 38.1% | 1.6% | 33.7% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.7% |
| April | 19.1% | 38.4% | 1.7% | 32.9% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.6% |
| March | 18.0% | 38.7% | 2.0% | 31.8% | 1.3% | 1.6% | 1.6% |
| February | 16.4% | 39.8% | 2.5% | 31.2% | 1.4% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
| January | 13.3% | 42.3% | 3.0% | 31.0% | 1.5% | 1.7% | 1.5% |
2007 was the year I quit using IE, its Firefox and Safari now.
Will I quit windows in 2008 too?
Well it’s all about following the CSS standards, Firefox 2.0.x does well in following them, safari 3.0 follows the standards precisely which is why you didn’t have to alter the CSS, internet explorer on the other hand ;\ they invent new corrupt ‘standards’ that has nothing to do with the actual standards.
There’s a standards test called ACID2, basically it’s a smiley face made entirely out of HTML elements fixed with CSS, if the browser render the face 100% correctly then it’s following the CSS standards precisely, currently firefox 2.0 render almost the whole face, safari 3.0 render it perfectly, internet explorer 6.0 looks entirely messed up and internet explorer 7.0 isn’t much better, not sure about opera though, Firefox 3.0(coming soon) does pass the ACID2 test though.
About the speed, I totally agree, Safari 3.0 execution of Javascript is much faster than Firefox, which is faster than internet explorer, even the browsing is much smoother in Safari 3.0 you don’t get lockups like you do in Firefox, too bad Safari 3.0 is awful when it comes to security.
I’ve tried Firefox 3.0 beta and I could tell you the Javascript execution and the browser speed has been greatly increased, it no longer almost freeze when you open web pages that require lots of Javascript processing and such, and tabs seem to independent(no longer a tab loading heavy elements lagging the other tabs), I can’t wait for Firefox 3.0 at the moment.
nice blog btw, bookmarked
Thanks Yaseen for the more detailed analysis and the extra information, will check FF 3.0.