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Despite Popularity, Top Browsers Can Still Have Flaws

Matthew Tilmann — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:59:47 -0600

Despite their recent popularity, browser behemoths Safari and Firefox have also been found to be the most vulnerable to attacks according to a recent study from this week.

The study found that of the 3,100 exploits that were tracked by researchers, 44 percent were able to break through and attack Firefox, while only 15 percent would work within Internet Explorer. Safari was not far behind, at 35 percent.

The reason for Safari's large share was due in part to Apple including it on its iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

Apple has been quick to work on fixing these exploits through recent patchwork within the iPhone operating system.

Mozilla's Mystery App Coming Soon

J Keirn-Swanson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:22:30 -0500

While Apple retains the right to deny apps that they claim duplicate core features (the supposed excuse for the Google Voice blanket rejection), there are any number of apps that do just that. Try searching browsers in the app store for proof.

So with an announcement from Mozilla's CEO John Lilly that the open source giant plans to "release an app to the iPhone App Store in the next few weeks," that he claims will "surprise people," speculation began. Theories centered around two strong contenders.

Tech blogger Om Malik has one theory. He interviewed Lilly when the comment was made, then later discussed Weave with Lilly and Jay Sullivan, VP of Mozilla Mobile. Weave, a Firefox extension that syncs bookmarks, cookies, passwords, and other elements of your Firefox experience to multiple machines, allows you access to the same data from different locations. Malik believes Mozilla's new app will allow iPhone users to access this information while on the go. Would this app play nice with Safari? Other apps do offer an "Open in Safari" option, so that seems the least controversial route.

Others, such as Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun, suspect that Mozilla plans to present an iPhone version of Fennec, their mobile browser already supported on Windows Mobile. It's no secret that Mozilla wants to get in on the mobile game in a big way and getting on the iPhone would be a feather in the browser's cap. Tofel goes on to indulge his speculation with fantasies involving a mobile version of Flash built in to Fennec that would bring the entirety of the Web to the iPhone at last.

While the first theory would hardly qualify as a surprising move, Tofel's at least has the level of improbability to it that might qualify. Whether or not Apple approves such an app is a completely different matter. Mozilla has stated previously that Firefox won't be on the iPhone and Apple has all but declared Flash on the iPhone a non-starter. Time will tell in this matter. In this case, a few weeks. Feel free to indulge your own speculation or debunking in the comments.

OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

Michelle Delio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:59:34 -0500

No matter how happy you are with your current Web browser, chances are you’ve wondered if another browser would make your Web wanderings faster, easier, or at least a little more festive. We speculate about that too (probably far too often), so we decided to run some tests, compare features and figure out which browser currently rules the Web.

The Lineup

Browsers are powered by engines which transform a raw mess of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a more or less tidy website. Mac browsers typically use the Mozilla Gecko or Webkit engines. Opera uses its own proprietary engine, Presto.

Current releases of Mozilla Gecko-based browsers for the Mac include:

Firefox 3.5.1: Once the geeky alternative, now almost mainstream, known for its customizability
Flock 2.5: A browser for the socially-minded Mac user
Camino 1.6.8: Firefox, basically, but tweaked for Macs

Current Webkit-based browsers include:

Safari 4.0.2: Apple’s very own browser.
Stainless 0.6.5: Cool features for the technically inclined (under development).
Cruz 0.2: For the social networker who likes to multi-task (under development).

If a browser has not yet reached version 1.0, we didn’t include it in our overall benchmark scoring as it could have skewed the results. Early-stage stripped-down betas can appear superfast, and could lack some functions that can skew benchmark-based comparisons.

Testing Methodology

To gauge basic performance levels we used Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript testing suite which aggregates a number of tools including Dromaeo, Apple's SunSpider suite and Google's V8. We measured CPU/Memory usage with iStat pro. Streaming video playback was determined by comparing how smoothly the same set of three YouTube videos played in each browser.

We installed freshly-downloaded copies of each browser and tested on a Mac Pro (2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 8GB of SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7) and a MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7). Each browser ran in its default configuration with no third-party plug-ins and a minimum set of bookmarks. That’s the closest we could get to creating a level playing field but there’s a flaw here: over long-term usage, a browser’s performance may slow as information is added to its database, extensions can also bog things down.

Bottom line: Benchmarks are not the Voice of God. There are too many variables that come into play, such as network latency when testing browsers. And while a sluggish but feature-rich application is not a good application, features and functionality matter far more to most of us than whether a browser can load 15 tabs a few fractions of a second faster than another browser.

Test results

General Performance:

Overall, Safari was the fastest of all the browsers we tested, with Camino a hair behind Safari.

Firefox exhibited the slowest startup times of any tested browser, but beats Safari by an average of two seconds in speedy page rendering, primarily due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Opera was a bit faster than Firefox on start-up times but really shone in the tab-tests -- opening up eight, and then 15 tabs faster (but we’re talking percents of seconds here) than the other browsers. Safari was the next fastest on the tab test, with Firefox and Camino neck in neck near the back of the pack.

Flock didn’t score well at all, coming in dead last in all tests but its capabilities not its performance are what makes this browser attractive to some.

Resource Usage We tested each browser by opening 15 tabs -- nine of them flash-heavy -- and checked CPU and memory usage in iStat pro after 10, 20, and 30 minutes.

Firefox, Safari and Opera did the best on this test; Firefox showed 9% CPU utilization at 30 minutes, Safari and Opera had consumed 11%. Camino was in second-to-last place, with a 13% CPU utilization score. Flock ate up the most resources, spiking to 15% on occasion.

None of the browsers gobbled enough resources to create a performance lags in other applications or the browser.

NEXT: Video Playback, Features Compared and Your Next Browser.

Video Playback:

All of the browsers rendered good playback of three YouTube videos, with the glaring exception of Firefox 3.5.1 which stuttered disturbingly. Having run into this issue before, we were not surprised; some folks suspect the problem is due to Firefox’s crash recovery system which takes frequent snapshots of the browser’s state. (In case you’re experiencing this problem, a previous experiment in about:config changing the browser.sessionstore.interval from 10000 to 120000 alleviated the issue somewhat, but not entirely.)

The Results

Looking at all these scores as a whole, Safari is leading the pack but there’s just not enough of a significant difference to crown one browser as the ultimate for everyday use. So let’s have a look at what features each contender offers:

Firefox: Firefox has morphed from the scrappy little renegade browser to a solid -- dare we say unexciting? -- workhorse. Not that this is a bad thing, Firefox 3.5.3 manages to combine stable, fast performance with the widest range of user-customizable features of any browser. None of Firefox’s newer features are astounding (TraceMonkey is its biggest tech advantage) it’s the ability to tweak every component of the browser that is its main technical appeal. If you don’t love tinkering with settings and plug-ins and scripts, it’s difficult to make a case for Firefox over Safari on a Mac.

Camino: So you like Firefox, but wish it was more Mac-like? Download Camino and you’ll have a 100% open source browser, built on the Gecko engine and optimized for use on Macs. You can access native Mac OS X features such as the services menu and system Keychain. Camino 1.6.9 offers Firefox’s uber-customability, built-in Flashblock and “Annoyance Control” pop-up stopper, Session Restore and other Firefox-like features for a solid but bloat-free browser that often delivers better performance on Macs than the Fox. (Camino 2.0 Beta 3 is already reasonably stable and includes some great features: enhanced AppleScript capabilities, Growl notifications for completed downloads, drag and drop tabs, and the ability to disable "Block Flash animation" on a per-site basis). The only thing that’s missing: Camino doesn’t have a built-in RSS feed reader, it hands off feeds to the reader of your choice.

Safari: If you’re running Leopard on your Mac, you’ll likely get the best overall performance from Safari or Camino. Among Safari’s recently introduced features, you’ll either love Cover Flow, a 3D view of your most frequently accessed web pages or dismiss it as eye candy. In general, we find the starred indications of new content useful, but would prefer to choose the sites displayed in Cover Flow rather than have them automatically populated. Safari’s full history search (look on the lower right-hand corner of the Top Sites window) makes it easy to find sites you’ve visited before, even if you only remember a word or two that appeared on the page. Private browsing keeps your strolls through the Web’s less brightly lit neighborhoods off the grid. Safari supports plug-ins, but is less customizable than Firefox.

Opera: Poor little Opera really doesn’t get the attention it deserves, possibly because some people still think you have to pay to get a copy and it doesn’t appeal to geeky early adopters as it isn’t open source. It’s a shame because Opera 10 boasts super-snappy performance and is packed with great features including Speed Dial, which serves the same purpose as Safari’s Top Sites but is far more configurable, built-in page compression to speed page downloads over slow or cruddy connections, a nice-looking tab bar that suits wide screen monitors and displays pretty thumbnails of each tab’s contents and a great email client, etc. Try Opera 10 with Opera Unite, which adds a streamlined web server to Opera for media sharing. We just wish that it had a privacy mode.

Flock: Flock is for the extroverts among us, as well as introverts who are pretending to be the sort of people that need people. It’s a tad sluggish compared to Safari, Opera and Firefox/Camino, but it excels at social networking. To share content you drag and drop photos, videos, URLs, chunks of text or whatever else onto a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar. You can update your own Facebook newsfeed in a similar fashion, and drag content right into Facebook chats. Twitter Search is baked in, and FlockCast lets you post to multiple locations simultaneously, type a URL in a Twitter message and Flock automatically shortens it, and etc. It really is a well-thought out browser for its target audience. But unless you make a living doing social media, you might want to boot up another browser for the days when you actually have to get work done.

Your Next Browser

Google Chrome: Chrome for OS X comes with a stern warning that it’s not at all suitable for daily use from stability and functionality standpoints. And while we’re used to Google’s offerings being Beta forever, this one really is in its early days. It’s impossible to predict how the final version will measure up to existing browsers, but it looks very promising -- the speediest browser we’ve seen so far, in fact. Each tab runs as an independent process, so if one page crashes the browser won’t throw a hissy fit. If you can set aside your bitterness over Google making us wait so long for Chrome, this browser may be your favorite once it hits version 1.0 -- maybe in a few months. Meanwhile the brave can preview it here.

Cruz: Cruz was created for OS X 10.5 Leopard and later, by Todd Ditchendorf, who also created Fluid. Todd bills it as a social networking browser but it’s also great for multi-taskers, you can create panels along each side of the central browser window and fully load websites in each panel, and you can configure links in the panels to open in the main window (or within a new tab in the main window). Fluid underpinnings provides a lot of potential options here, and the tech savvy can use scripting and plugins to make Cruz their own. It also supports session saving as well as site screenshot thumbnails, which may become more useful as more sites implement it. Cruz is a very early beta but it’s already reasonably stable.

Stainless: Stainless started life as a proof-of-concept, quickly gained fans and is slowly becoming a real browser. Now at version 0.6.5, Stainless offers features sure to delight people who thrill to the idea of things like parallel sessions -- thanks to Stainless’ use of multiprocessing, you can log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time -- a boon for those of us who have multiple accounts that we can’t log into in one tab without being logged out in the other. Like Chrome, each tab runs as an independent process. Stainless also boasts a porn private browsing mode, a 'Bookmark Shelf' that lets you park favicon links on the sides of the browser window, and session aware bookmarking. Its developers freely admit this is not a browser for everyday use yet (and in testing Stainless did create a lockup that required a hard boot to clear) but it looks promising and is a little speed demon on multi-core machines.

Take Your Bookmarks Anywhere

Joe Rybicki — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:03:46 -0600

If you're anything like us, chances are good you use bookmarks as a memory aid. Researching stories, digging through recipes, planning vacations -- it's easy to amass substantial collections of fairly important links that you might want to refer back to at any moment.

Trouble is, most of us don’t spend all day in front of just one Web browser. And the more we switch between devices, the more important it becomes to keep all those bookmark lists in sync.

Difficulty level:
Easy

What you need:
> Open-source Web browser Firefox (free, www.mozilla.com)
> Foxmarks extension for Firefox (free, addons.mozilla.org)
> Safari (free, www.apple.com)
> Bookdog for Safari (free 14-day trial, $19.95 to buy, www.sheepsystems.com)

METHOD ONE: FIREFOX

1. Get Foxy

If you don't already have a copy of Firefox, you'll want to download the latest version and install it. We're starting with Firefox because of its amazing library of useful add-ons -- bookmark syncing is just one of the many nifty things you can do with this flexible piece of software. Anyway, if this is your first time using Firefox, choose File > Import to import all your Safari bookmarks and such.

Step 1: We think Firefox (especially considering all the add-ons) does make the Web better, but your mileage may vary.

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2. Bolt It On

Once you've got Firefox installed and running, choose Tools > Add-ons to bring up the Extensions window. Select the Get Add-ons tab and type "foxmarks" in the search bar. Select Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer and click the Add To Firefox button, then the Install Now button once it becomes available. Restart Firefox, and a Foxmarks window will pop up. Follow the instructions to sign up for a new account and upload your bookmarks.

Step 2: Find Foxmarks Bookmark Syncronizer in Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons.

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3. Go About Your Business

From now on, Foxmarks will sync your bookmarks with the server's on a regular schedule, transparently and smoothly. So all you need to do is add bookmarks as you normally do, and they'll be updated on the server automatically. Or you can Control-click on the Foxmarks icon in the lower-right corner of your Firefox screen to sync manually.

Step 3: Force a Foxmarks sync by clicking the little icon at the bottom-right. (Click to embiggen!)

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4. Spread the Love

Now that all your bookmarks are stored in a nice central location, you can keep your various machines in sync by installing Foxmarks on any machine you use on a regular basis. But maybe you only want to share some of your bookmarks. No problem. Go to Tools > Foxmarks > Foxmarks Settings and choose the Profiles tab. Click the My.Foxmarks.Com button to set up different profiles and associated bookmarks, then click the Change button to choose which profile you want to sync with which location.

Step 4: If you don't want your strictly work-related bookmarks synced to your home machine, tweak the Profiles settings.

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5. Take This Show on the Road

But what if you don't have the ability to install Firefox and Foxmarks on a machine? Maybe you're on a locked-down work PC, or a portable device. No problem! Just head to my.foxmarks.com from any browser, log in, and you'll have access to your full bookmark selection. The page even formats itself like an iPhone App if it detects Safari Mobile as the browser; if that's your setup, we recommend tapping the Plus sign and adding a direct link to your home screen.

Step 5: When you log in to my.foxmarks.com from your iPhone, your bookmarks are easy to navigate.

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METHOD TWO: SAFARI

1. Delicious is Golden

Bookmark syncing is definitely a breeze with Firefox. But if you simply can't bear to leave Safari behind, you're not completely out of luck. First, download and install bookmark manager Bookdog. Fire it up and choose File > Web Service > del.icio.us. Assuming you don't have a Delicious account, click New to sign up and follow the directions in Safari.

Now switch back to Bookdog, enter your account name and password, and click Log In. Once login is complete, choose File > New Migration/Synchronization. Make sure Safari is selected on the left, and your Delicious account on the right. Choose Bilaterally as the sync type, and make sure to check the box to translate Safari folder names into Delicious tags.

Step 1: Bookdog can keep Safari synced with Delicious, an online social-bookmarking service. (Click to embiggen!)

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2. All Access

Now you can access all your current Safari bookmarks by visiting Delicious from any browser and logging in. Mobile phone users can access their bookmarks through www.mobilicio.us, and iPhone owners can download an App called Bookmarks (iTunes Store link) to gain full access to Delicious. There's just one problem: Any new bookmarks you create in Safari won't transfer to Delicious automatically.

Step 2: Once your Safari bookmarks are synced with Delicious, you can access them from any Web browser on any machine.

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3. Get Regular

Fortunately, the developer of Bookdog has written an AppleScript that lets you schedule a daily sync. Head back to the Bookdog page and grab the ZIP file of sample AppleScripts (link is to a ZIP file) the developer has put together. Unzip it and start up the Bookdog Migration Scheduler. Click Schedule, then OK. This will open up a synchronization window in Bookdog. Verify that the settings are the same as in Step 1. Now switch back to the AppleScript, click OK, verify the location of your Bookdog installation, and select the time to run the synchronization. Now comes the best part: wondering how you ever got by without instant access to all your bookmarks.

Step 3: Schedule a daily sync by downloading and running an AppleScript.

Firefox Getting Multi-Touch Gestures?

David W. Martin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:20:25 -0500

According to a post on Edward Lee's blog, Firefox may be getting multi-touch gestures in one of it's future releases. Edward recently upgraded to a new MacBook. However, much to his dismay, his new notebook with the fancy glass trackpad and all those gestures would not work in his favorite browser - Firefox. So not to be discouraged, he sought to submit some bug reports to Mozilla and discovered that some of these had already been submitted and even resolved - months ago in fact. Reports were filed for Camino and Firefox. So where the heck are these changes?

We downloaded the current official 3.1 beta version of Firefox from Mozilla. Nope, no multi-touch gestures there. Fortunately, there is a beta version of Firefox that does support multi-touch. if you are interested in trying a version out the multi-touch Firefox you can download the beta browser here.

Give it a try if your interested, but like all Beta software, you should try it on a machine that you do not rely on for daily use. It's a good example of the future possible uses for multi-touch. Hopefully, the developers of Firefox will activate or add these features to a future official Firefox release. Hopefully, other developers will follow suit and we'll all be swiping tapping and multi-touching the day away.

Mozilla Firefox 3

Susie Ochs — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:35:00 -0500

Set one master password to keep the rest of your saved passwords locked up tight.

Apple’s Safari is a fine Web browser, but many prefer the open-source, cross-platform Firefox, which lets you customize it to heaven and back with themes and add-ons, called extensions, that give more functionality. And the brand-new Firefox 3 packs a ton of improvements, boosts performance, and still comes in for the low, low price of nothing. (What a country!)

Interface changes jump out first. The Back button is extra-large (to shrink it, right-click the toolbar, choose Customize, and select Use Small Icons), and the new Smart Address Bar has a blue star button that instantly bookmarks the current page.

Speaking of bookmarks, Firefox 3 changes for the better what you can do with them. Click the Bookmark star again (or press Command-D) for a semitransparent floating window where you can add tags and/or file the bookmark in a folder or the Bookmarks Toolbar. You can add a dedicated keyword to go directly to a specific bookmark, but unfortunately, that option is buried in the Bookmarks Organizer. We would’ve loved to see it in the bookmark pane with the tags. When you start typing in the Smart Address Bar, FF3 generates a list of possible results by searching your bookmarks and their tags, as well as the URLs and page names in your browsing history. The letters you type are highlighted in the results list, and you can use the arrow and Return keys to navigate the results and launch pages.

The Downloads window (Tools > Downloads, or Command-J) is also improved, letting you pause and resume downloads, and search for files you downloaded previously. The Add-ons menu (Tools > Add-ons) now lets you find new add-ons (extensions and themes) right in the window, instead of just managing ones you’ve already added. You can zoom images and text, or one or the other, and FF3 remembers your zoom level on pages you’ve visited before. Speaking of remembering, the new browser will still restore your last session after a crash, plus you can now save all your open windows and tabs anytime you quit.

You can set a master password (which you’re prompted to enter once per session) that unlocks your saved passwords. And when you enter a password on a webpage, you won’t see Firefox 2’s obtrusive pop-up dialog, which forced you to click Save Password, Not Now, or Never For This Site before it would let you move on. In Firefox 3, a more subtle gray bar gives the same choices, but below it, the next page in your session loads—which means you can see if that password actually works before you tell Firefox to go ahead and save it. (Or ignore the bar altogether.)

Speed is improved thanks to a new engine and better memory management—we saw zippier performance in our testing, especially in Web 2.0 apps like Google Mail and Zoho Office. (Another cool feature: In Preferences >  Applications, you can set Web apps to handle standard protocols, such as having Google Mail launch when you click a “mailto:” link.) The Gecko 1.9 engine boasts improved rendering of fonts, graphics, and animations. Browser speed and performance vary widely depending on what you view and how many tabs you keep open, but overall we noticed a performance boost on our 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

If your favorite Firefox 2 extension hasn’t been updated to work with Firefox 3 (check Mozilla product manager Alex Polvi’s blog at alex.polvi.net for the latest compatibility report, but as of June 26, 80 percent of FF2 extensions could play nice with FF3), don’t fret. MultiFirefox (free, codecontortionist.com) lets you keep your Firefox 2 profile intact while starting a new one for Firefox 3 and even lets you run both browsers alongside each other. So if your favorite FF2 extensions aren’t compatible with the new browser yet, you can still try out FF3 and decide later which to stick with. (MultiFirefox came in very, very handy when we wrote this review, so a huge thanks to its creator, Dave Martorana.)

Firefox Download Day

Roberto Baldwin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:42:59 -0500

Starting at 10AM PDT, Mozilla wants the entire universe to download the official release of Firefox 3.

Dubbed "Download Day," Mozilla is hoping to break the Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in one day.

If you feel like joining the hip crowd and smashing a made up world record click here and download away. If you have better things to do, like work, you can sit on the sidelines and make snarky remarks about how [insert random browser here] is cooler.