Review: The Perfect Browser

The media has recently noted a significant drop in the popularity of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE)—at it's peak at or near 95% of all desktops—as the browser of choice for the world. Reports vary, but most agree Firefox has taken somewhere between 10 to 15%—according to some reports, maybe as much as 20%—of the active browser market away from Microsoft.

But here’s the thing: this has never happened before.

If you have Windows on your desktop—no matter the version—then you’ve got Internet Explorer. It doesn’t occur to most users to even look for another browser if only because everyone they know also uses IE. Why does nearly everyone use it? Because, as Edmund Hillary said about another big thing, it’s there.

Internet Explorer’s Security Problems Magnified by It’s Popularity

Some tech pundits interpret this drop in popularity as a reaction to the endless parade of security threats against IE, most of which were the result of that “popularity”—it’s just a much bigger target. Every browser has vulnerabilities; IE’s popularity has greatly magnified it’s inherent flaws.

And so we’ve seen some discussion about which alternate browsers—and they are out there—are safer and more secure, with some features necer seen in IE. Microsoft has been busy, furiously trying to keep up with each newly revealed security hole; so busy they haven’t released a new version of IE since 2002, although it did receive some under-the-hood changes when Win XP was upgraded to Service Pack 2.

Meanwhile, other companies, both large and small, have been trying to fill that void, waiting for their time to come. With news of IE’s popularity drop, many of them feel that time is now.

Features We’d Like to See in Our Perfect Browser

But before we discuss some of the other browsers, here’s a list of things we’d like to see in our perfect browser:

  • Security—The browser shouldn’t allow drive-by downloads, Trojans, viruses or any other malware onto your system. Hackers and marketers efforts to invade you machine should be automatically repelled.
  • Tabbed Browsing—Once you’ve used tabs, you never want to go back. The tabs, running along the top of your browser window, allow you to open other pages in the same browser; no longer will you need to search among a dozen or so instances of open browser windows on the task bar. They’re all right there in one window.
  • Pop-up/Ad-Blocking—One of the most annoying things online is the proliferation of pop-up windows and banner ads; on a dial-up connection, all they do is take up already meager bandwidth. We understand that some sites rely on banner ads to operate their businesses; we say, there’s gotta be a better way—some sort of an opt-in system, perhaps.
  • Download Manager—As geeks, we download lots of stuff all the time. Patches, hotfixes and shareware demos, we don’t want to wait until one finishes so we can start another. A download manager allows you to create a queue of downloads, all of them waiting patiently in line, kinda like us New Yorkers.
  • Turn off Flash applets—We have yet to see a Flash graphic that we couldn’t live without. They’re too big and few, if any, do them well—the vast majority of them seem to be ads for something we don’t care about. A good ad-blocker will disable those, but we’d like to have the option of turning them on and off at will.
  • Simple Favorite/Bookmark Storage—There are two basic ways of storing bookmarks: a Favorites folder with individual shortcuts or a HTML file called “bookmarks”, which is a simplified webpage with a hierarchal list of your favorite sites. How about we pick one way—global bookmarks for all —and everyone uses that, hmmm?.

We should also mention this: we like Internet Explorer. We wish it were more secure, but we’ve never had a problem with it, but that’s only because we’re geeks. We have all sorts of other stuff installed to prevent those problems—firewalls, anti-virus and the like.

Update: Since the release of Win XP's Service Pack 2, many security issues appear to be resolved; IE is a much more secure browser, with a rudimentary pop-up blocker, but sadly, still no tabs.

We love a tabbed browsing interface. What’s surprising isn’t that everyone else is doing, but that Microsoft hasn’t co-opted it yet. As for the rest, we have separate programs that fill most of our other needs: a download manager, pop-up blocker (a real one), spam filters, etc.

Other Browsers, Other Views

Of the alternate browsers, we like Firefox the best. It features a tabbed interface, a download manager, pop-up stopper (though not a really powerful one) and because it’s an Open Source project, it’s both free and very customizable, with many extensions to add familiar things like an approximation of the Google toolbar or new functions, like turning off Flash applets (though this is a bit buggy and had to be removed). The fact is Firefox undergoes constant improvement. It’s also a relatively small download (4.5 MB) compared with all other major browsers.

We tried Netscape Navigator…again. We’d used it years ago, but uninstalled it because it kept crashing our system. It’s still buggy, its still a huge, bloated download and for it’s newest wrinkle it installs spyware on your computer in the form of a “media player” that likes to report back to it’s mothership. We cannot recommend it.

Opera 7.0, which has a small, but very vocal fan base, was also a good sized download (16.2 MB) for the advertiser-supported “free” version; so long as you don’t mind banner ads on every page you view, it’s merely OK. You can make the ads go away, but it’s gonna cost you $40 USD. When all these other browsers are, for all intents and purposes, really free, this does not appeal.

Update: Opera's free version no longer requires the banner ads, but I'm still not impressed and don't see what all the fuss is about.

Conclusion

These days, Firefox is our default browser , though we still use IE for some site that don't play nice with Firefox, as if they just failed to recognize any non-IE browser.

We also review all our websites in IE, also making sure they look good in as many browsers as we can get and validating the code. While it’s not perfect, understand there is no such thing at this point as a perfect browser; even with all that, it’s close enough that we can live with it.

Updated: November 18, 2005