Carbonized Blog

When Internet Explorer 8 came out Microsoft said they had seriously improved security and that it was now one of the safest web browsers to use. Apparently they were wrong. According to the Guardian newspaper here in the UK an exploit in Internet Explorer was used in the recent attack on Google’s systems in China.

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So why keep using it? There are plenty of excellent alternatives these days. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Flock and you could even use Apple’s Safari although it uses a stupid amount of memory on Windows.

I recently posted how Windows 7 in Europe was going to come without a browser. Apparently now it is looking like instead of having no browsers you will be asked to select a browser when you install Windows 7 and it will then install your chosen web browser. No word yet on which browsers will be offered. Personally I think nearly everyone will select to install Internet Explorer anyways as there are still a lot of sites (such as banks) that demand you use IE.

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Well Apple has gone and released the memory hog that is Safari 4. It does look good but given that it uses a ridiculous amount of memory I think I will pass. It has some nice features that only work on a mac. Go figure.

Also Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox 3.5. It is marked as beta 99 but is basically something between a beta and a release candidate. it has improvements to Tracemonkey, the engine used to clean up memory usage but not sure it works that good at removing things from memory it no longer requires.

Now Google Chrome has excellent memory handling it’s just a shame it’s options are sparse, it has no extension support (even IE supports extensions/plug ins) (apparently as of version 2 it does) and the rendering engine, WebKit, is far from perfect. Sites like Facebook can prove a nightmare at times when it’s divs disappear behind it’s ad bar.

I’ve personally decided to give Firefox a break and use Flock for a few weeks.

Mozilla has released a new add on for their Firefox web browser that lets you skin it. By skin it I mean an image wil appear behind the toolbars and behind the status bars with the text colour of the bars changed to match. You can read more about it, view the available skins and install the add on at www.getpersonas.com.

I’m a hobbyist web developer and nothing annoys me more than web sites that have obviously paid for someone to build their sites but whoever has built it has done a half arsed job.

My main gripe at the moment is sites that require you to have cookies enabled but have terrible code in place for if you don’t.

A good example is Game who put you in to an infinite redirect loop if you have cookies disabled. In fact you have to enable cookies on their site to see the page that tells you that you needs cookies enabled to view the site

Another bad one I just found, and this one is really really bad, is download.com. You don’t need cookies to view the site but if you have them disabled and click through to view a programs page your browsers memory usage goes through the roof. I tested this in Firefox 3.1 b3, IE8 and Chrome. With all three browsers I had to use task manager to close them thanks to download.com’s sloppy web code.

So please, if you are going to write a site that requires that visitors accept cookies, make sure you have good code in place to handle people like me who have cookies disabled.

Just found out that Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 8 for public consumption. Now whilst IE 8 is a step in the right direction it is far from perfect. A good example of a typical Microsoft cock up can be seen here. So do you update? The decision is yours but just remember there are many alternatives these days such as Firefox, Flock, Opera, Chrome, Safari and many more.

OK thanks to Google’s Chrome and Apple now making Safari a serious browser for Windows the browser war is getting ridiculous. They all seem obsessed with how fast their Javascript engines run with Google now saying the V8 engine in Chrome 2 is 25% faster than in Chrome 1. Who cares? The speed of the Javascript engines is now so fast few people if any would be able to notice a difference in everyday use. The only people who are are Geeks who think the extra milliseconds make all the difference.

I’m not interested in how fast their Javascript engines run I just want a browser that is configurable and doesn’t eat up resources. I’m sticking with Firefox at present as it lets me configure cookies exactly how I want and has some sweet extensions. I am impressed with the WebKit engine as used in Chrome and Safari. To me Opera fell to the wayside with version 7. So at some point I may switch from Firefox to Safari or Chrome but can’t see it anytime soon. Safari 4 beta looks good but is all eye candy and eats memory. Chrome is to basic with very limited options and no black/white list for cookies. Safari also has neither a whitelist nor blacklist.