IE

Microsoft have a nice new page telling you how great IE8 is and how it’s miles better than Firefox and Google Chrome. Well, they would say that. The “facts” they’ve put forward, however, are dubious to say the least.

Apparently Chrome doesn’t have crash recovery or tab isolation. Well, as far as I was aware, tab isolation (where if one of your web pages crashes, it doesn’t take the whole browser down with it) was one of the major features of Chrome. This makes crash recovery less of an issue, but if the whole thing does go belly up, then trust me – Chrome will recover, send info to Google should you choose and then ask you if you want all your pages back. If that’s not crash recovery, I don’t know what it.

Firefox, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t have tab isolation. Although it may be in v3.5 which is due out at the end of this month. This version also features “private browsing” where your history and so forth aren’t recorded on your PC. This is to secure your privacy. And ensure you can look at porn without your wife finding out. According to Microsoft’s little table, Firefox doesn’t have this… which is true for about 2 weeks. Chrome, on the other hand, does already feature it. If you’re using Chrome, try hitting Ctrl+Shit+N and you’ll find yourself in “incognito”.

OK, technically the table says that IE8 has “InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering”. Given these are copyrighted terms then it’s fair to say the others don’t have them. For some reason, though, MS is effectively saying their privacy is better than the others’, but not justifying it.

Security: IE8 has it, the other two don’t. Well, unless you add extensions. A fair point “out of the box”, but the sheer volume of plugins available for Firefox alone says that it’s got better protection. If you want more protection, download AVG‘s free antivirus. It offers a cobble-on for IE and FF which protects against malware.

As for “compatibility”, for some reason MS are claiming that IE8 is better as it works with more web pages than the others. I’d be really interested in knowing how they tested this. The only way to check if a page has rendered correctly is to look at it. And I seriously doubt they sat a handful of temps down and got them to check several billion web pages.

Microsoft’s claim that IE8 is best for development as you don’t have to install other tools has a flipside as well – bloat. If you decide you don’t want to use the MS tools then you’ll have to install other ones alongside the cludge already there.

Then there’s something MS don’t mention – user base. Where’s the link on the web page to download the Linux version? Or the Mac? Both alternative browsers are available for both platforms (Chrome only in beta on Linux and Mac, admittedly), as is Opera. Even Safari is available for Windows.

At the end of the day, pretty much every Windows user will end up with IE8 as a part of Windows Update. Non-Windows users can’t get it. So why bother trying to plug it?

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Firefox and Chrome have no security