Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser Choice

The big three browser makers have been busy. Last Tuesday, came out, with lots more speed, a new settings interface, and a more secure Flash implementation. Granted, a new Chrome version comes out every couple of months, and in this case it's been less than a month, so that's not exactly huge news. Then on Wednesday night, Mozilla announced the availability of the long awaited as a release candidate (the final version is coming next Tuesday). The new Firefox version was in gestation for nearly a year, and is a significant break from its predecessor, bringing the browser into the fold of fast, minimalist-interface apps we've seen from the likes of Google and Opera. Finally, this past Monday, Microsoft announced at that was available in its "release to Web" final form. Like the Firefox product, IE9 is a huge advance on its predecessor, also bringing speed, user interface, and standards support—attributes where IE had trailed the likes of Chrome significantly.

So what's the result of this slew of releases? Three browsers that all sport a minimal interface, are nearly equally fast, and offer good support for HTML5. How do you choose? Below, I'll outline how the three new big-time browsers stack up in the major categories you should care about: Interface, Speed, Security and Privacy, Standards Support, and Extra features. Note that this piece considers only the three new browsers, as Chrome 10 has already beaten out and in our lab testing.

Interface
Google's Chrome started the trend of shaving the browser's interface down to the bare minimum, as part of the company's push towards making every app a Web app. It's Chrome OS is another move in this direction—an operating system that isn't much more than a Web browser—as is the Chrome Web Store, which mimic's Apple's App store for iOS, but instead of offering installable software, lets users "install" Web sites in the browser's tab bar.

Speaking of tabs, parity has pretty much been reached. Now all three browsers let you drag tabs out into their own windows and close background tabs. IE, which in version 8 offered colorized tab groups but little else, now has leapfrogged the competition in tab dragging: a page playing video or audio can be dragged out without missing a beat. And if you drag a tab to the side of the screen, it will obey Windows 7's Aero snap feature, filling exactly half the screen. Chrome offers a clunkier way to have a window fill half the screen, you must drag out a tab and drop it exactly into a page icon that shows up on the edge of its window if your cursor is in the right area.

Firefox's Panorama tab manager is a potentially powerful aid to browsing with oodles of tabs at your beck. It lets you organized them into visual groups for easier access. But Firefox lacks IE9 and Chrome's helpful new-tab page, which offer favorites and history, and in Chrome's case, "Web apps." Instead Firefox offers a blank white page.

Chrome and Firefox offer themes, letting you dress up the browser window in different colors, patterns, and images. IE9, however, dispenses with this frippery, instead letting sites affect the look of the browser. In that browser, you can "pin" sites, meaning they'll get a permanent button in the Windows 7 taskbar sporting jump lists to take you to frequently needed site sections. Pinned sites also adorn the browser with their own icon and predominant color. Chrome and Firefox both let you pin tabs for Web apps, but in their cases this means getting a smaller, persistent tab for the pinned site at the left of the tab bar—no Windows 7 goodies.

Speed
Before the latest IE and Firefox releases, speed was Chrome's exclusive story among the three. But it's gotten to the point where all three have amped up speed in JavaScript nearly to parity. The progress made in IE9 over IE8 is probably the most notable, with a more than tenfold improvement, though Firefox, too, had been slipping before its latest version 4. On three heralded JavaScript benchmarks, each browser wins one—IE9 wins SunSpider, Firefox wins its own Kraken, and Chrome wins on Google's V8. For the following results, I used a Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz Windows 7 (32-bit) laptop with 3GB of DDR2 memory. I shut down any unessential processes and averaged the results from three test runs.

Browser	SunSpider 0.9.1 Score in ms (lower is better)
Internet Explorer 9	246
Firefox 4 RC	280
Google Chrome 10	283
Firefox 3.6	853
Internet Explorer 8	4020

Browser	Mozilla Kraken 1.0 Score in ms (lower is better)
Firefox 4 RC	6760
Google Chrome 10	8171
Internet Explorer 9	15050
Firefox 3.6	25969

Note: Internet Explorer 8 threw up too many script errors to run this benchmark.

Browser	Google V8 (v.6) Score (higher is better)
Google Chrome 10	8305
Firefox 4 RC	3751
Internet Explorer 9	2360
Firefox 3.6	553
Internet Explorer 8	128

In another measure of speed, startup time: Firefox still lags a bit behind the other, but enough to really matter anymore. I tested both cold (after a fresh reboot) and warm startup times on a low-powered netbook running an Atom CPU with a 1.66GHz Atom CPU and 1GB RAM running 32-bit Windows 7, with the following results. On a typical more powerful machine, the differences become even less significant.

Browser	Cold startup time seconds (lower is better)	Warm startup time seconds (lower is better)
Google Chrome 10	2.6	0.9
Firefox 4 RC	6	2.2
Internet Explorer 9	3.5	1.1
Firefox 3.6	553
Internet Explorer 8	128

The final thing we should consider when it comes to performance is the more future-looking concept of hardware acceleration, which was one of Microsoft's big pushes with IE9. And that browser seems to be in the pole position in this race, though Firefox gained some ground here as well. This measure will be more significant if future websites start taking advantage of a lot of graphics manipulation of the kind used by games. Microsoft claims its advantage in hardware acceleration comes from its restriction to Windows 7 and Vista, which offer the requisite DirectX capabilities. Microsoft has developed many tests to measure graphics acceleration at its IETestDrive site, and Mozilla has one such test.

The Microsoft test I use, Psychedelic Browsing, displays a spinning color wheel while playing spacy sounds and reports a result in RPM. While no one touches IE9, Firefox 4 beta drubs Chrome 9, but Firefox doesn't play the sound as the test requires while Chrome does. Here were my results for this test: for each browser on the same machine.

Browser	Psychedelic Browsing RPM (higher is better)
Internet Explorer 9 RC	3911 (correct sound)
Firefox 4 RC	2830 (no sound)
Google Chrome 10	98 (correct sound)
Firefox 3.6	19 (no sound)

Mozilla's Hardware Acceleration Stress test spins a spiral of photos in the browser window and reports a score in frames per second. This test showed the two browsers furthest along in implementing hardware acceleration to good advantage (note the benchmark no longer reports frame rates over 60FPS, as that's the limit of standard LCDs):

Browser	Mozilla Hardware Acceleration Stress Test FPS (higher is better)
Firefox 4 RC	60+
Internet Explorer 9 RC	60+
Google Chrome 10	17
Firefox 3.6	8

Standards Support
Firefox and Chrome have supported HTML5 features longer than IE, but Microsoft has been very thorough with any features it has added, submitting tests to the official Web standards organization, the W3C. That body is in the midst of developing definitive tests for standards support, but those aren't complete yet. Meanwhile, a little test of HTML5 functions I like to run is HTML5Test.com, which shows how many HTML5 elements and features a browser supports out of 400. It also notes "bonus" points for features that aren't required parts of HTML5, but are good to have, such as extra video codecs. Microsoft reps pointed out to me that this test doesn't actually show whether a browser has correctly implemented the functions, but just that it's been implemented. Chrome here leads all other released browsers, with a score of 288 and 13 bonus points, and Firefox comes in second. IE9 ups its game hugely from IE8, but it still trails most other new browsers.

Browser	HTML5Test.com Score (higher is better)	Bonus Points
Google Chrome 10	288	13
Firefox 4 RC	240	9
Firefox 3.6	139	4
Internet Explorer 9 RC	130	5
Internet Explorer 8	27	0

Privacy and Security
Security is an aspect of Web browsing that no one can afford to ignore. While all three browsers offer excellent tools like malware blocking and anti-phishing, Chrome has an edge, with its full code sandboxing for the browser. This means the browser code can't mess with other areas of your computer. IE has partial sandboxing, with its protected mode, but we all know how often we've seen a grave exploit of IE uncovered. Only time will tell whether IE9 will be an exception, but it's encouraging that the recent Pwn2Own vulnerability found in IE8 didn't apply to IE9.

All three browsers include an "over the shoulder" privacy mode, which hides a browsing session from any future users of the computer in question. But IE has the strongest answer to another kind of privacy invasion: tracking and profiling by third-party sites, with its Tracking Protection feature. This allows users to block tracking sites (such as DoubleClick) from following your Web surfing history and tracking you. The tracking it protects you from is mostly a technique for Web advertisers to profile you, and this IE9 feature is akin to the "Do Not Call" list aimed at telemarketers. This technique requires less buy-in from all sites than Mozilla and Google's anti-tracking initiatives, so I consider it more flexible and comprehensive.

Extras—Syncing, Extensions
Both Chrome and Firefox offer syncing of bookmarks, passwords, and preferences, which lets you keep your customizations when move among different computers with the browser installed. Chrome's version is easier to setup up, requiring nothing more than a login. Firefox, however, can also sync open tabs, history, and even tabs, so you can pick up where you left off when you switch computers—or even move to a mobile device running Firefox or Firefox Home (for iOS). Oddly, Firefox doesn't let you sync extensions, while Chrome does, as well as syncing themes. IE9 doesn't offer any syncing at all.

All three browsers offer extensibility through extensions, a capability most often associate with Firefox. Chrome offers over 10 thousand extensions in its gallery, but Firefox's 5,000-plus can more drastically change the operation and look of the browser. Chrome does have a couple advantages in this arena, too: its extensions don't require restarting the browser, they update automatically, and you can choose whether they should run when you're in privacy mode. Internet Explorer's extensions mostly fall into the Accelerator, Web Slice, Search provider, and toolbar categories, but there are a surprising number in many categories at Microsoft's IE Add-ons site.

Which New Browser is Best?
All three browsers are fast, trim, and up-to-date with standards support, and all are good choices. If you like what you read about IE9, remember that it really only shines in Windows 7, so you'll have to be running Microsoft's latest operating system version. Chrome and Firefox both work in all major OSes—Linux, Mac, and Windows back to XP. Chrome's Instant feature, built-in Flash and PDF reader, auto-updating, and great speed give it some serious advantages, however. And its full sandboxing for security further tips the odds in its favor, making it the best of the big three browser to release in the last week or so. Chrome 10 fights off IE9 and Firefox 4 to retain our Editors' Choice for browsers.