Is older better?

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There are some web browsers that are safe in older versions and some that aren’t.

If you are like me you may think that the latest version of some browsers out there, far from being bigger and better have mastered the bigger bit at the expense of the better. Firefox is a case in point. While undoubtedly one of the better browsers out in the wild, its been getting larger and larger with each generation; ever more memory hungry and prone to problems. The fastest, most stable version of Firefox was arguably the last release of version 1.5. I installed it earlier today for an experiment and while not as pretty as its younger sibling, it is fast and it is small at around 5mb compared to 7mb for the latest incarnation. It was also the only version of the fox that I could reliably install the much used Freecycle addon. The only snag to this is that all the information on 1.5 suggests that its open to exploitation, so the choice is have the addon and be unsafe or play it safe and do without.


But all the above made me wonder if there were other cut down browsers out there that could be installing in their more venerable forms. Older versions of the Opera browser seem pretty much the same as their younger brother and the newer editions do seem to have more features and feel more up to date.

Running a fast lightweight Firefox-like browser means moving to the Seamonkey platform. Like the fox, this is based on the Netscape Navigator platform and for I tried it earlier today and it does indeed zip along speedily. You can install it with Firefox and they do seem to play nice together.

People who live on social networks should check out Flock which is Firefox customised for Facebook, Myspace, Gmail and the like.

There is no lightweight, older faster version of Internet Explorer, running earlier versions on a Windows XP/Vista platform is asking for trouble! IE is the single most targeted browser on the net, so while it may not sit well, if you have IE the best option is to keep it up to date no matter what.

Versions after IE 7 are considered safe and its worth bearing in mind that if you are running Windows 2000 you are running at best IE6 which is regarded as unsafe. Probably best to download Firefox, Opera or even Seamonkey pretty quickly unless you fancy contributing to the infected computer universe.

IE 8 is new and some people have been reluctant to upgrade for compatibility reasons. Its not much fun to find you suddenly cannot access your bank details, or credit card or some other secure site. With that in mind, its always worth having at least one other browser on your machine and again, the way forward here is Firefox. A copy of Firefox 3 sitting on your machine can be deployed with IE and a website decide they have never heard of one another.

For people who automatically assume that anything from Microsoft was even badly made or impossibly resource hungry (and I confess to being one of them during the early days of Vista) its worth noting that the old firm seems to be getting back on form. Windows 7 is getting a lot of positive reviews and Internet Explorer 8 is looking good with reports that it will toddle along happily on an XP rig with 512mb of RAM under the hood.

Its not really advisible to have the older browsers on your machine, upddates negate possible exploits and while they make the browser slower from time to time, slower is better than compromised with all the expense or hassle of the solution. My advice would be to have Firefox and possibly Seamonkey on tap to go with IE8. You can't really retro-load your browser, but with a couple of other browsers installed you can cover all eventualities.

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Firefox not so hot.

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Mozilla is reported to be feeling the pinch from the opposition and wants to make its Firefox browser a leaner, meaner runtime environment tool, rather than a simple web rendering device. Ben Galbraith, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, says that browsers are evolving from page rendering applications into application runtime environments and need to be able to recreate many of the functions of operating systems. No argument from me, but I think I can hear the sound of grinding teeth from Redmond.

The spring board for this, has to be Google'a "Chrome" something which Mozilla acknowledges despite the fact that Chrome is a serious rival for the affections of the user and its business model needs to see people using the embedded Google search engine.

In the past five years or so, Firefox has been ahead of the pack but lost ground rapidly to Chrome, Safari and even IE8. It continues to rely on outdated programming which can lead to memory problems and it exacerbated with badly coded addons. It remains more feature rich, but a year or so down the line could be behind the competition, especially where user value speed.

Galbraith says he wants to have a group which will look at the way memory is used in Firefox. "We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple. For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren't collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took."

Firefox had 21.77% of the market earlier this year and remains the most customisable browser in the collection. But with efficient memory usage the future of the fox could be in doubt.

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Safari 4, Firefox 3.1, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 compared

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Safari 4, Firefox 3.1, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 compared

Whats the best browser? Its not the easiest question to answer, but have a look at some of the notes below before you decide on your weapon of choice.

for surfing the net. Each will act as your window on the web, with support Google Chrome is minimalistic. It aims for simplicity, and the interface is stripped down to bare essentials. A single text field (dubbed the “Omnibar”) acts as both address bar and search bar, and tabs protrude into the title bar to save space.

The middle ground is occupied by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.1. Outwardly, both browsers offer sober front-ends though IE8 does support some interesting new technologies. Safari 4, is a veritable orchestrate of whistles and bells.

Safari has two distinctive features. The first is the “top sites” view. When you open top sites, you’ll see a shiny curved grid of clicka

Image via CrunchBase

ble thumbnails enabling you to jump straight to a particular website. Safari watches your browsing habits and populates the grid with your most commonly visited sites. Safari’s other feature is its history view Safari also gives you a visual thumbnail of each page, making it easy to spot the site you seek even if you don’t recall its title.

Firefox 3.1 seems almost austere. The newer version offers a new plug-in manager to make it easier to manage Firefox extensions. Firefox's approach has always been to keep the main browser relatively conservative and offer a versatile plug-in architecture to enable third parties to add extra features and visual themes - and there are hundreds of free extensions available ranging from simple file viewers to advanced networking tools and interface tweakers.

Image via CrunchBase

Google prefers to trickle out incremental updates, typically upgrading the software every few weeks without even alerting the user. But the main features that set Chrome apart are the Omnibar and the “most visited” view, though rendered more plainly and without the configuration options.

The last contender, Internet Explorer 8 introduces some interesting new ideas: web accelerators let you send text or a link from one page directly to another web service enabling you, for example, to search, define or translate a word at the click of a button. IE8 also features a new mode called InPrivate, which enables you to send out a minimum of personal information while browsing, and to cache a minimum of received content to your hard disk.

Chrome: at its launch, it was able to render pages with unprecedented speed. And, more importantly, its JavaScript engine (known as V8) was much faster than any other browser’s, enabling web applications to become more powerful. It remains a fast browser, but today it no longer enjoys pole position: Firefox 3.1 uses an updated rendering engine and an all-new JavaScript engine, the curiously-named TraceMonkey. IE8 is a long way behind the rest of the pack on speed, so feature-rich sites likely to feel less snappy and responsive.

RAM usage, especially if you’re choosing a browser for use on a low-powered system such as a netbook is a big consideration. Firefox used to be a notorious memory hog, but the current version is impressively efficient. Chrome and IE8 make much greater demands. Safari is not a browser for a lightweight PC and is very RAM heavy in use.

Safari : FOR: Combines superfast performance with head-turning visual effects. AGAINST: Heavy on memory, and some may find the graphics irritatingly showy.

Chrome : FOR: A lightweight, simple and stable browser that just keeps getting better. AGAINST: Neither the fastest nor the best-featured option.

Firefox : FOR: Hugely extensible, with a low RAM footprint and great performance. AGAINST: Rather light on features until you mess around with third-party plug-ins.

Internet Explorer 8 : FOR: Brings some genuinely promising new technologies to the table. AGAINST : The slowest browser for JavaScript by a large margin.

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