Browser Wars, the Next Generation

Cut to the chase: The Acid Test results for new browsers.

Actually, it has been awhile since we’ve seen a PC inflection point such as the one that 2006/2007 brings. Early to the battle was Mac Darwin OS, OS X, and had it been on time, Vista from Microsoft. Nevertheless, Vista will finally arrive in early ‘07, barring any (very highly doubtful) potential surprise for an early Christmas. Along with these platform refreshes now comes a refresh of browser code, as well.

ExtremeTech takes a close and timely look at Firefox 2 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3, and Opera 9.0. Personally, I have been a browser gypsy from the very beginning; fickle in my allegances, I happily trounce back and forth between browsers as improved products present themselves, be it mosaic, netscape, ie, maxthon, mozilla, opera, konqueror, firebirdfox, flock, avant, etc.<blockquote>Right at this moment, big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0—it’s in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0.</blockquote>Presently, the Opera 9 offering is particularly impressing me. Subjectively, on my middle-aged 1GHz/1GB/60GB tablet pc, it seems to run the snappiest, especially with multiple tabs open. I like the selective content-blocker, though it would be nice to access some way other than right click. Maybe I can map a shortcut key with a little homework into the now legendary flexible and tuneable Opera *.ini files. Of course, I have nine-million extensions installed in Firefox, so as I continue to meddle with Opera 9, it may begin to hog up memory, as well. We’ll see.