Web Browser Grand Prix 3: IE9 Enters The Race

[magnushegge]

This is the most provoking article TH has written. You can't imply you did not know ff4 would be out the day after the article was published, and you can not ignore that either.
This article alone made me loose all respect for this site, which I have been a devout reader of for years, because of it's professional, thorough and unbiased reviews.
You lost me, but maybe made som money from MS, who knows.

Ps. I do not use FF, I prefer Chrome and Opera, but as a web developer, I naturally have FF 3.6 and 4 installed, as well as IE9, Opera 10, Chrome 10 and 11, Safari, and RockMelt out of curiosity.

 

[magnushegge]

@adamovera
http://blog.kylehuey.com/post/4011561909/the-sorry-state-of-tech-journalism

 

[clarence_t]

It's hard to believe the continuing wave of comments/complaints regarding FF4 even after Tomshardware released its official statement. And, as hinted and as I have stated before, FF4 is likely to be last in performance anyways. Although, this doesn't discount its merits, and I am personally using FF4 for its other features, I have never relied on Firefox to deliver on performance. IE9, on the other hand, has thoroughly impressed me with its cleanup and performance.

 

[rooseveltdon]

[citation][nom]pirateboy[/nom]I wonder how much microsoft paid tomshardware not to include Firefox 4 RC1[/citation]
lol ff rc 1 is good but not that great there are still some issues that need to be resolved right now i think this article is correct

 

[Peciura]

Just closed Chrome 10 with 7 tabs - free RAM increased by 3.5 GB...

 

[ide]

About Memory Use:
More is better!

 

[assafbt]

The comment update on the first page doesn't make things right, if anything, it makes them worse. It blatantly ignores the fact that the review author knew very well, as someone who follows browsers' updates, that the official release of ff4 was due a single day after the publication.

I for one am not that interested in an update to the review anymore, as the way the review was made, and MUCH more importantly, the way that TH has responded to the complaints, made me trust TH much less about software reviews, and as a matter of a fact, about reviews in general.

The only response for complaints about missing a major revision of one of the big two in browsing, is "Our apologies, how embarrassing, we are taking off the review, and we'll re-post in a few days with an up to date review". I thought that would be the response because of my past appreciation of TH, and I thought that the accusals of commentators here about MSFT being involved are exaggerated. The response that came, however, is that ff4 belongs to the next WBGP, that a day before is still a day before etc. That just makes me think that responsibility is not taken due to other reasons.

It wasn't the grave mistake of missing out on the BIG number two in browsers, anyone can err, it was the responses made by the crew that finally convinced me that maybe there is something fishy here, and I will take all reviews of TH with a grain of salt now on.

 

[davewolfgang]

The comment update on the first page doesn't make things right, if anything, it makes them worse. It blatantly ignores the fact that the review author knew very well, as someone who follows browsers' updates, that the official release of ff4 was due a single day after the publication.

I for one am not that interested in an update to the review anymore, as the way the review was made, and MUCH more importantly, the way that TH has responded to the complaints, made me trust TH much less about software reviews, and as a matter of a fact, about reviews in general.

The only response for complaints about missing a major revision of one of the big two in browsing, is "Our apologies, how embarrassing, we are taking off the review, and we'll re-post in a few days with an up to date review". I thought that would be the response because of my past appreciation of TH, and I thought that the accusals of commentators here about MSFT being involved are exaggerated. The response that came, however, is that ff4 belongs to the next WBGP, that a day before is still a day before etc. That just makes me think that responsibility is not taken due to other reasons.

It wasn't the grave mistake of missing out on the BIG number two in browsers, anyone can err, it was the responses made by the crew that finally convinced me that maybe there is something fishy here, and I will take all reviews of TH with a grain of salt now on.

How many times do we have to tell you - they didn't DO the review the day before, it was done almost TWO weeks ago. What don't you get about that???

 

[Guest]

Opera seems to be the ignored Gem of browsers. Why North America seems to reject this browser is the real story.

 

[natmaster]

Here's how to do an actual comparison: http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20047314-12.html?amp&amp&amp&amp&amp

(Most importantly note the inclusion of JSGamebench, probably the best benchmark out there because it uses real code (that reflects actual websites), not synthetic machine translated OS schedulers.)

 

[assafbt]

[citation][nom]davewolfgang[/nom]How many times do we have to tell you - they didn't DO the review the day before, it was done almost TWO weeks ago. What don't you get about that???[/citation]
I don't know if that comes from you due to hate of open code, love of big corporations, or just plain unawareness of how things work in online review sites.

Tom's HW, as all online review sites, strive to be up to date (on major issues at least) on the day they are POSTED, when they cannot, they either have a note in the review that it will be soon updated with important info, or that "you should wait" with your decisions as something is just around the corner. You've seen that enough in Tom's and in other sites to know that NOTHING stays two weeks out of date if there is major new information on the day of publishing. And with market share for IE in high 40s, for Firefox in low 30s, Chrome way behind in 'teens and all others in single digits, I'd say that for a WBGP any information about a new major revision for the big two or the smaller third should be more than a major comment in the review (even that was not present), it should delay the whole thing as it renders the whole review obsolete on the day it's out.

Bottom line, final editing and publication was made a day before, ff4 was overlooked and it just begged for criticism, when customers complained an apology and a pull of the review should have come, but instead the author chose to react with accusations and criticism of the readers and Mozilla. THAT was what pulled me into the comment frenzy here as well, I did not expect an "offensive defense" towards customers and Mozilla, that is what smells oddly to me.

 

[davewolfgang]

I don't know if that comes from you due to hate of open code, love of big corporations, or just plain unawareness of how things work in online review sites.

Tom's HW, as all online review sites, strive to be up to date (on major issues at least) on the day they are POSTED, when they cannot, they either have a note in the review that it will be soon updated with important info, or that "you should wait" with your decisions as something is just around the corner. You've seen that enough in Tom's and in other sites to know that NOTHING stays two weeks out of date if there is major new information on the day of publishing. And with market share for IE in high 40s, for Firefox in low 30s, Chrome way behind in 'teens and all others in single digits, I'd say that for a WBGP any information about a new major revision for the big two or the smaller third should be more than a major comment in the review (even that was not present), it should delay the whole thing as it renders the whole review obsolete on the day it's out.

Bottom line, final editing and publication was made a day before, ff4 was overlooked and it just begged for criticism, when customers complained an apology and a pull of the review should have come, but instead the author chose to react with accusations and criticism of the readers and Mozilla. THAT was what pulled me into the comment frenzy here as well, I did not expect an "offensive defense" towards customers and Mozilla, that is what smells oddly to me.

????? Shows how much you know.

I use FF exclusively, and have updated to FF4 on all three of my machines, including two Ubuntu dual boots, and a couple VM's.

And when a company is REGULARLY LATE and delaying their "next release" (Duke??) - sites can't wait FOREVER.

So what about me now??

 

[Guest]

Funny.

You say Chrome can't run Dromaeo DOM, yet it works fine. What a bunch of tosh this data-less grand prix is.

 

[assafbt]

[citation][nom]davewolfgang[/nom]So what about me now??[/citation]
So you're no longer staying with your first reasoning and now it's a different reason, obviously you're just desperate in trying to believe that this article is legitimate, I'm out, believe what you will.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

Ok

Too many camps hating the other camps. TH got the message ppl.... offered an excuse... excuse ignored or in just a few instances, attacked as it was considered lame.

Should this article have been published sooner? Considering, yes.
Considering WHEN it was finally published, should the FF4 final date have been known? yes.
Considering WHEN it was finally published, notations made about how soon FF4 was going to be released? yes.
Considering WHEN it was finally published, should it have been postponed another week? Many here think so.

Now, Opera, I like it, I tell it to report back as Opera, unfortunately some sites want to treat it as if it had less users than it does and thus don't even try to make their sites Opera Friendly. (it IS in the big-5 developers!)

Now FireFox, I like it too, FF4 is taking some getting used to since the interface has changed...

Now IE9, I gave up on IE since IE6 (its vulnerabilities, and failure to meet W3C standards) and had grabbed FF and Opera, I only use it when I absolutely need to. (I do use IE for dev testing or sites too narrow minded to want to see any other browser tho.)

Chrome? not my cup of tea considering the questions of privacy that still are floating about concerning it. So, just a dev test use.

Safari? Haven't really used it that much... just mostly keep it around for Dev testing.


RockMelt? Haven't heard of it until someone (magnushegge) mentioned it... So I don't even know how big or small the following is compared to the others.


IMHO, bad decisions have been made here in the thread, and I would say some have been made in the article too... does that mean the rest of TH is full of bad decisions? I'll decide that as the issue comes up.


@TH, I forget now what all is tested, but a solid suite of tests need to be solidified that make sure all browsers meet standards, in addition to known vulnerability testing (at least noting where a new version supposedly plugs old ones) and memory use and release. It seems there are more tests out there that might be worth a better look.

EVERYONE ELSE: I can't say what the motivations of the publish date was, but at least some of the manufacturer reviews clue us in on who sponsored them, right in the title.

 

[douken]

I vote for no WBGP4. EDIT WBGP3. It's better for the website to do that than release a new article while the other exists. And BTW

Eventually, the official response on the 21st was that the 22nd is tentative and that the QA process was still ongoing.

If you heard the 21st, just before you released the article, there was a tentative 22nd release you should have waited. You said you waited 3 months, one more day is 0.01% more time.

 

[Guest]

I hope next week you make the same tests with Chromium Firefox4, with opencl activate - is optional - and in severla OSs as OSX, Ubuntu Linux, (IE with wine if it works and Safari under Linux in wine too), Android OS, WebOS etc.

And of course with 32 bit and 64 bit versions of all the browsers / OSs.

It seems a IE9 ad instead of a real benchmark.

 

[Guest]

Opera keeps recently closed tabs in it's preallocated memory cache, the size of which can be changed through the settings (default setting is "auto" I believe, that can be adjusted between 0 to maximum available). The purpose of keeping the closed tabs in memory is so they can be recalled quickly, so I suppose if you're not using that feature very frequently you can adjust the memory footprint accordingly through the cache settings.

An intresting thing that I've noticed in comparing IE and Opera is that in the 'Windows Task Manager' shows Opera as a single process, regardless of the number of tabs, yet ever single tab of IE is displayed as an individual iteration of IE, whether that's good, bad or inconsequential, I leave up to the experts.

Also Opera (even the older ones) duplicates a tab a LOT quicker than IE9 (a feature I personally use for opening multiple windows of the same forum or shopping/review site or Youtube et al). Perplexingly even though IE9 has a much bigger memory footprint under multiple tabs it still tends to re-download the duplicated pages, EVEN when "Check for newer versions of the stored pages" is set to "Never".

Opera is far from perfect; I f%@#%$g hate Opera's utter incompetence in handling the various online BBS. Posting a comment online is really a hit-or-miss affair with Opera; sometimes your posts would mysteriously disappear, sometimes Opera would post your single post 30 freaking times in a forum and have you banned for spamming, or make all the text of your post made in a birthday thread disappear, posting an empty reply instead, making you look like a bit of a jerk, well you know, other "fun" stuff like that.

 

[aravindkrd]

Thanx for that wonderful comparison.
Looking forward to "the best browser of 2011" - comparison - involving the Opera 11.10 - (the stable release).
Also, I have one suggestion: While benchmarking startup time and memory usage, Opera starts with all it's addons & extensions (opera unite, mail client, link, turbo etc) - on the other hand - on Chrome and Firefox - plugins/addons are all third party and nothing comes bundled with the browser - thereby giving a wrong impression that Opera is memory thirsty compared to other browsers.
Also - about the features - as Opera requires very less third party stuff, features like mailing, unite , ad blocking etc are possible without affecting the browser's stability. On the other hand - Firefox and Chrome are prone to becoming unstable when we install any plugins/addons.
Also, I would be happy if the built in features are also compared...

 

[Guest]

Wow. Someone at MS must've plowed you like never before! There is no way that someone who has any clue what they're talking about when it comes to browsers could choose an IE product over the entire lot of leading-edge open-souce. That does not happen. IE9 is a HUGE improvement, but it is still slow with more than one tab open at a time, it still doesn't display modern websites properly and does not come near the technology support of the real browsers. Yeah they must've lined up your pockets pretty well for you to swallow THAT much pride. Goood byeee credibility!