Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Mon, 16 Jun 2008, Shao Xuan wrote: > > >> I have a habbit of only using the native web browser in all my >> systems/computers: IE7 in Windows (XP SP3 and Vista SP1, both >> 32-bit), safari3 in Mac OS X Leopard, Firefox3 in Ubuntu and >> OpenSolaris. But if your test reveals that one of the browsers is >> superior than any others, I could consider of using this browser >> instead of the native browser in some systems. >> > > To me what matters is if pages render correctly and the browser does > not crash. A couple of weeks ago, after a Solaris 10 Firefox patch, > the browser would not even bring up Yahoo's main page without > crashing. It seems better now after more patches. > > Browser stability is often quite pitiful. Software developers should > be ashamed to deliver software which crashes. As a software > developer, a browser which crashes due to loading a web page is like a > car where the wheels fall off as you drive. > > I have not noticed any browser performance problems so I am not > particularly worried about that. Even on SPARC performance was > satisfactory and the remote sites were the bottleneck. > > Internet Explorer hardly ever crashes but I hardly ever use it due to > its inherent security problems. Safari has been known to have serious > security problems in the past as well. > > Bob > ====================================== > Bob Friesenhahn > bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > Safari is based on WebKit, which is open-source. For the last 6 months there has not been a comparable security flaw to the one related to table code injection. It's not even right to compare Safari to Internet Explorer but if you do keep in mind the majority of WebKit security bugs were on Windows. In terms of performance, Firefox has in the past and is currently tuned cheifly for Windows, though its performance is comparable to Safari (WebKit) on Windows but not Mac OS X. From my experience Carbon (C not Obj-C) on that platform are always slower, and currently the only way Firefox would be faster than Safari is if you were running Tiger and had not upgrade to 3.1.1.
Firefox itself is a security concern, and 20% of people in academic institutions use it now depending on which university you talk to. Internet Explorer holds 60% marketshare with IE6 and IE7 combined on 6 Windows platforms (98, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008). Firefox is certainly better than Internet Explorer though and the extensibility does come in handy. Most embedded devices use Pocket Internet Explorer or WebKit, as Gecko's design doesn't quite fit what is needed, though there are a few people working on improving this. Nokia's S60 Browser, iPhone, PSP, and PS3 uses WebKit derivatives. There is no commercial hardware or software using anything developed from Gecko lineage. On Mac OS X I like Camino, but lack of inline PDF is annoying since I'm quite fond of it, though Solaris x86 doesn't have inline PDF either thanks to Adobe dragging itself deeper into the sand. I don't use Solaris to surf, it's a painful joke compared to even the worst browser on Mac OS X. Partly thanks to Mozilla playing friends only with GNU/Linux. Opera is faster than Firefox 2 on Solaris and it tends to use less resources. If you're a web developer, I totally understand. Firefox 3 RC3 is quite nice on OpenSolaris, I was unable to build it for Solaris 10 U5 so far, hoping someone out there who does contrib builds can do one. James
