I haven’t checked stats for a long time.  I used to be very concerned about which browsers were most popular and therefore had to support.  These days I write w3c compliant xHtml and test in IE and FF.  That usually means Safari works fine.  Every now and again, I yuck it up on my BlackBerry.  If I can legitimately use the site on the BlackBerry and it looks relatively consistent between IE and FF, I move on! 

IE comes with Windows so it goes without saying that the average consumers will use IE.  I’m astounded by how many people still have IE6, as Microsoft is so persistent with Windows Update, but IE 6 is still a lingering Png hater.  Those people who choose, for whatever reason, to use an antiquated browser will have a down-level experience. 

FireFox has done a great job providing a free-IE-alternative that actually surpasses IE in many, many ways due to an awesome plug-in (add-in) architecture and devoted community support.  It also happens to be standards compliant, an absolutely critical feature.

Browser Beefs

So these two browsers are both duking it out for Internet supremacy while the rest are dismissed as geek toys that real clients would never use.  Since they are in a feature war, performance has been declining.  On the other hand, one company has focused on making a browser that is lightweight enough to run on a handheld yet give full browser feature support such as JavaScript and real html page rendering with css. Safari is an incredibly efficient browser that is also standards compliant so it isn’t difficult to support nor challenging to use. 

Firefox and IE suffer from the same problem: bloat

The simple act of surfing the Internet is no longer the simple act of surfing the Internet as we have phishing filters, content filters, experience trackers, toolbars, etc.  I couldn’t live without FireBug for FireFox.  However, for regular surfing, I just want an Html browser, nothing more.

The Sleeper

Safari not only is the default browser on the ever more popular Mac computers, its the browser on the iPhone and iPod Touch (I think, will know shortly).  For this reason, the Safari browser is very quickly becoming a main stream browser. 

I’m quite pleased with this.  Recently, I’d started using Safari on Windows.  My home computer had gotten so bogged down and slow that that it was almost unusable even to browse the Internet.  It has 760MB or so of Ram and plenty of HD space but I’d been too liberal with service based tools and everyone needs their always on "helper" or "update" service installed with their software so just launch windows and I’d start paging.  

I had switched, almost exclusively, to Firefox.  About a year ago, however, FF started crashing whenever there was Flash on a page.  As it turns out, there is Flash on almost every website, once you leave Google, and FF was completely useless with this problem.  I tried reinstalling Flash.  I uninstalled FireFox, deleting everything I could find, only to find it happily restored its old settings and bad behavior from some unknown location.  I couldn’t reasonably find all the FF references, in order to fully remove it, because searching the hard drive took freakin’ forever.  The computer was dying a slow, slow death and was asking for the hammer treatment.

After installing iTunes (because I got an AppleTV and had to), I discovered that, using Safari, I could launch the browser, load Google, complete my search, and walk away before IE would load the first Google home page.  IE would pop sometime after I’d gone to bed, I think.  Even when IE was already open and waiting, I could launch and use Safari before IE would finish rendering a page.  I recently reformatted that computer and installed a clean version of XP.  Oh how I miss how a clean XP install is so snappy.  The same is not true of Vista, unfortunately (at least not, typically, before the last service pack.  Perhaps they’ve affected some improvement?).  After my clean XP install, I quickly changed the default browser to Safari and refused the IE7 updates (I guess I’m one of those people mentioned above.  I’m also overdoing the parenthesis).  The computer that was ready for the scrap pile is now a perfectly suitable Internet machine with games for my 5 year old and Open Office for when someone sends you a document in your email. 

When you click an Internet link, Safari happily services your request within seconds.  It launches super fast now.  It browses ridiculously fast.  Pop-up blocker?  not so good.  That’ll discourage me from wasting time on those sites that pop windows.  If you are a site that pops windows and you aren’t peddling porn, you suck.  If you are peddling porn, you definitely don’t care and you probably also swa||0%.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.