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Browser battle: IE 8 vs Opera 9.5 vs Safari vs Firefox 3

By Nate Lanxon on 28 March 2008

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What's new?

The first interesting addition to IE is 'Web Slices'. It's essentially a Microsoft version of RSS and serves a similar purpose. Web developers can assign areas of their sites to be 'sliceable', so updates to that area are available to the browser in the form of a tab. In a provided example, friend statuses in Facebook can be sliced, adding a pull-down tab on IE 8's new 'Favourites Bar' that displays three of the most recent status updates along with their photo. We're not entirely sure of the point of this, as RSS already works perfectly well.

'Activities' are also new, and add actions to the browser's contextual menus, such as 'Send to digg' and 'Share on Facebook'. It's a handy feature, though only 'Search with Live Search' is included with the install, and every example on Microsoft's site produced Javascript errors for us. But this is a beta release after all, and we can see this being a useful feature, even if similar functionality is already available by using add-ons in Firefox ('Digg This!' springs instantly to mind).

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, beta 1

Crash-tested

Microsoft has also integrated 'Automated Crash Recovery'. This lets each IE window or tab be handled by separate Windows processes, so if one tab in a window of ten tabs crashes or hangs, it can be terminated without the entire browser needing to be manually closed and restarted. The feature worked well when we forced IE to terminate its processes in Task Manager, though real-life crash recovery remains to be seen.

Along with improving compliance with Web-design standards, IE 8 is a decent improvement over IE 7. Web Slices may be useful if enough sites adopt it, but RSS is commonplace and isn't tied to one installation of a browser -- Web Slices will only be in place if you're using your home computer, whereas anything subscribed to with RSS can be accessible from any PC in the world if the right services are used. And seriously, where's the download manager? IE needs a download manager.

We do like the lower memory and CPU overheads though -- IE 8 was less resource-intensive than Firefox in our tests, so new computer users or those with less capable machines may be perfect candidates for IE 8.

How it compares

It may save 'company time' being wasted on fixing a crashed Firefox, and it's probably compatible with your corporate VPN software, too, so it's a decent choice in a business environment. There will surely be a beta or two more before the final release, so if you're already using IE 7, keep your office-focused eyes peeled. It's not going to be a crucial download for us, however, if nothing major changes between now and the final release.

Topics: firefox, ie8, internet explorer, opera, safari, flock, browser, browse, beta, introduction

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Comments (66)

  • Mike commented on 23/11/2009 00:47 Report abuse

    I like to use Firefox for my general browsing (because of all the privacy add-ons), but Opera is my second favorite, since it's so fast and it works nearly perfectly out of the box with so many built-in features. The best part of these two browsers for me is that I can easily sync bookmarks between my Windows XP and Ubuntu partitions on my same computer. Also, I can use both in Ubuntu and Windows XP. Chrome is also great, but it still needs a lot of work to get more add-ons and features, as well as some minor bugs and kinks worked out of it. IE is a bug-filled bloated monster, even though IE7 and IE8 have been drastic improvements over IE6. I hate how IE is integrated into Windows, which makes it next to impossible to fix if a virus were to get in and mess things up. IE also stole so many features from Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Safari is an okay browser to me, but I'm just not so crazy about it, even though it blows IE out of the water.

  • suresh commented on 23/09/2009 18:12 Report abuse

    OPERA is fastest browser in the universe

  • kalemer0 commented on 23/09/2009 12:55 Report abuse

    thnx for notice

  • Philosoraptor commented on 18/09/2009 15:03 Report abuse

    SO Opera for light browsing (like flash games on the couch) but for real business i like Firefox (there is a Speed Dial add on)

  • vic commented on 07/09/2009 01:43 Report abuse

    Opera is genius.

  • declinkz commented on 31/08/2009 20:16 Report abuse

    Firefox for me... It has a ton off add-on!

  • mohsinrashid49@yahoo.com commented on 27/08/2009 21:21 Report abuse

    EAST OR WEST OPERA IS THE BEST.FOR MORE COMMENTS HIT ME ON MOHSINRASHID49@yahoo.com

  • dante commented on 27/08/2009 17:35 Report abuse

    safari browser versi 4, the lightning speed browser i ever use

  • fauzi commented on 27/08/2009 17:30 Report abuse

    omg, did you see that ? safari speed ? even my dialup connection speed looks very fast

  • Albi commented on 26/08/2009 02:04 Report abuse

    IE8 is still the best for me, using always IE with all updates and stuff clean, fast and pretty easy with everything... MEM Usage: 20K - IE8 rocks \m/

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