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Many haven’t noticed it yet, but for three days now we are living in a new era. This era is marked by the release of the new and updated Internet Explorer 7.0 and the continuation of the Browserwars! I’ll try and copmpare the outcome of Redmond’s torturing of it’s employees with what Firefox 2.0 (due anytime now, testing RC3) has to offer.

Introduction: Browser Wars

The Browser Wars are rememberd because of the easily grasped, bipolar nature of the story. There was Explorer, there was Netscape, and they were locked in Eternal Struggle. This kept the story simple and reminded people of other bipolar struggles with Good vs. Evil overtones in recent world history.
Browser Wars II

I remember the times when the IT-industry (and the geek-community) was split on which browser to use and ultimately which browser to support. Often the average user had to cope with what his internet-provider provided him with. So the browser that was packaged with AOL, T-Online or Compuserve¹ had big influence on which browser had to be supported by the webdesigners of the time.

I seem to remember that at some point, AOL decided to switch to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and that had my employer pounding at me to get his online-shop working properly (especially all the javascript hover-effects). Mentioning one or both browsers infront of the right audience sparked a heated debate about which was better and did a better job at implementing the html-standards.

Of course at that time, noone really knew what those standards were about and blaming one browser or the other for not displaying some element (possibly invented by the other browser) was rather hypocritical. For example: with the release of Internet Explorer 6.0 Microsoft had invented their own DOM that was very handy but not really standards-compliant..

Tabbed Browsing

Although mainly introduced² by Firefox, Tabbed Browsing has become very popular and by now is something, every internet browser should have although there still isn’t any standard of how to implement it..

Firefox 2.0’s tabs open fast, they can be moved and resorted and they become narrower when more are opened. The problem of too many tabs has been solved in the past by stacking tabs in more than one line. Version 2.0 now has the ability to scroll tabs to the left and right. At the right side of the tabs there is a button that shows the tabs in a horizontal list (also scrollable). It is enabled once the tabs exceed a certain amount.

Each tab has it’s own “close”-button, which i find rather counter-productive, especially since this button is only visible, when the tab is active. Of course it will be possible to change this behaviour and place a common “close”-button at the right side via plugin. Furthermore one can close the active tab with the combination [Ctrl-W] or via middle-button click.

To open a new tab in Firefox or Internet Explorer, one can middle-click or Ctrl-Click on a link, type Ctrl-T or double-Click on an empty space on the tab-bar.

Internet Explorer 7.0’s support of tabbed browsing is very close to that of Firefox but there are some minor differences: although the opened tabs can be scrolled right and left, it’s not possible to scroll using the scroll-wheel on the mouse. On the other hand, Internet Explorer supports a miniature view of all the opened tabs (called Quick Tabs) via Ctrl-Q or the button at the left side of the tabs-bar,³

Internet Explorer’s tabs implementation isn’t quite as good as that of Firefox. Opening a new tab is rather slow and switching between tabs per keyboard is a little bit uncomfortable. The shortcut to switch between tabs is the same as switiching between open documents in Word or Excel: Ctrl-Tab for forward and Ctrl-Shift-Tab for backward. Other than that one can chose a specific tab by pressing Ctrl-#⁴. In Firefox it is additionally possible to switch forward and backward via Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown, which can be a huge advantage for pro users..

Internet Explorer’s tabs have one advantage: the user can chose to open the tab by default next to the active tab! In Firefox 1.5 it was possible to drag the link to the tabs-bar and release it there either to overwrite an existing tab or to add a new one at any place in between or at the end of the tablist. I hope this function will be in the final Firefox 2.0!

Web 2.0 - Webfeeds, Configurable Search Engines and Encyclopedias

Both browsers support viewing and subscribing to Webfeeds. They automatically pick-up alternative feeds and give the user the option to view them. Additionally Internet Explorer 7.0 gives one the option to sort the feed-items by Date, Title or Author or to search the feed. Since these functions are pure xslt-functions, they are executed rather fast and could give the user some advantage..

Equally both browsers provide the ability to search in different search engines although the list of search engines for Microsoft’s browser is a little bit smaller than that of Firefox⁵.

Internet Explorer 7.0 incoorporates the ability to “research”, which roughly means “looking up things in msn-services” like Encarta for example. Until now i couldn’t figure out, what the difference to the normal search via wikipedia or any other service was.

Pageview and Zoom

In Firefox, pressing Ctrl-+ and Ctrl– zooms the text on the active page in or out. The zoom-level is nearly infinite. In Internet Explorer 7.0, the zoom-function zooms the whole page⁶. This way, images and other objects stay at an appropiate size. At the same time, the scroll bars get zoomed too..

Equally both have a function to Preview Print-Output, where the Internet Explorer has a slight advantage since it can zoom the printed page in and out and change the page-margins.

More Firefox Features

Firefox is getting even better with the release of version 2.0:

Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.

Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms without having to use a separate application.⁷

JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.

Furthermore, Firefox has over Internet Explorer, that it supports SVG. The support is far from being optimal, but at least it’s something.

Conclusion

I hope my take on the two browsers can be helpful for further examination and improvement. Although we can look forward to a new Browser War, this time around, the opponents will have to be more civilized (i.e. standards are there to be held) and they both have to deal with a growing number of alternatives⁸ be it opera, Safari or Konqueror. I will hope for the best for both browsers but will remain for the beginnning a loyal Firefoxer.

1. i think they all still exist in one way or the other [↩]
2. i know, some browsers had Tabbed Browsing before Firefox, but Firefox was the one to really make it popular [↩]
3. Of course there is a plugin for Firefox to do this, but to be honest, it’s not that fast.. [↩]
4. # stands for a number, that way it’s possible to navigate to the first nine tabs [↩]
5. missing imdb and Technorati for me! [↩]
6. via “View”>”Text Size” it’s still possible to only zoom the text! [↩]
7. in practice, there is still some work to be done here! [↩]
8. which i ignored blatantly in this article [↩]