IE8 vs. Firefox vs. Chrome battle royale

Internet Explorer 8 has moved from release candidate to final release, and Chrome 2 is now available as a beta rather than a “might work, might not” developer release. Both browsers promise to be faster than before, but are they useful enough to fight Firefox? There is, of course, only one way to find out. Let look under the hood of each.

Interface
Full screen browsing makes Chrome nicer and more useful on netbooks, but it isn’t skinnable so if you don’t like the look, tough luck. Both IE8 and Firefox are more customizable and with the plethora of extensions and skins that Firefox offers I really like the Firefox interface best.

Features
Firefox’s multitude of add-ons gives it a significant advantage here: no other browser is as easily or as amazingly extensible. IE has a few extensions together with web slices and accelerators, but it isn’t even close to Firefox – although it’s still much more expandable than Chrome.
Chrome is all about form following function, but the latest beta of Chrome boasts some useful improvements that make it a bit less bare bones than before. Page zoom is smooth and now increases or decreases everything, not just text, and you now get form auto-filling as well as the previous version’s form field resizing. Chrome still doesn’t do RSS, although that’s on the to-do list, and extensions are still a ways off.

Safe Browsing

All of the browsers offer pop-up blocking but not ad blocking: for that you’ll need to install add-ons or ad-blocking proxies. They also offer variations on Private browsing (Porn Mode) theme so your movements aren’t stored on your PC (although, of course, they don’t do anything to stop “The Man” from spying on you), and they promise to protect you from phishing and other nastiness on the net.

The private browsing is implemented in nifty but different ways in Firefox, IE8 and Chrome: when you switch to private browsing in Firefox, it offers to save your currently open tabs so you can return to them when you’ve finished browsing in secret. With Chrome and IE8 you can run one window (and associated tabs) in normal mode and another window with privacy enabled

The other evil to consider is crashing. IE8 and Chrome both use separate processes for each open tab, which means you can kill misbehaving sites or applications from Task Manager, and Chrome also gives you a tab manager (Shift + Esc) so you can see what process is handling which page or application. The Firefox is all single-process jobs, so if something crashes it takes the browser with it. Firefox’s extensions more than compensate for that, though.

Final thoughts
So have the new builds of IE8 and Chrome changed my recommendation for my favourite browser? Not really. Firefox’s add-ons still do it for me: while there’s a clear difference in performance when you run the benchmarks, on a reasonably specified PC all three browsers run perfectly quickly. It’s a different story on netbooks or low end machines I’ve heard, though, where Chrome is noticeably faster than IE or Firefox.

If add-ons matter, Firefox is still my pick for browsing; if you prefer speed and simplicity, have a netbook, or low end machine you may want to give chrome a try. Still for overall compatibility with the most websites and top notch security settings IE8 is the browser for you.