Leaving the cheesy stuff out, I think it would be a good idea if people would have a short but healthy comparison between the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari) coming from a front-end developer who won’t make funny statements but explain the truth. Along with that page fader and the ajax content loader (a custom page) that back-end developers could integrate in their products, it would be enough to start a massive campaign against the old and really crappy browsers.

I’m not a good front-end developer so just as the graphic below states, if I HAVE TO work on the front-end and I fail with CSS, I just go back to the sleazy tables. I just don’t have the energy to go in-depth and find out the details of what I’m doing wrong and how to fix it because this is mostly a hobby to me. However, I would enjoy spending some energy promoting the browser comparison while encouraging people to (at least) upgrade their browsers. Can you help?

Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/60/172883694_4f72df1a70.jpg

Seriously, IE developer toolbar is a joke, compared to Firebug. FF has private browsing mode, in case you want to look up porn and you don’t want your wife to find out, especially when she starts typing something like “www.skinny…” and “skinnymilf.com” becomes the first suggestion from your history

I think MS aim to developer as well. Otherwise they didn’t include webdeveloper toolbar .

I just realized that I skipped a point: compatibility. C’mon, that’s plain stupid! You really CAN’T claim that something is “the most compatible” when you include “compatible mode”. Following this idea, IETester is the most compatible browser in the world, because he include several IE versions.

Yesterday, when i was debug a site (btw, that debugger is even dumber than i thought in first place; F5 will start debugger instead of refreshing page), I saw the tie between IE8 and other browsers. A poor js code was really slowing down browsers. Opera, Chrome and Safari was the fastest (i didn’t wait at all). On Firefox i had to wait around half a second and IE8 around a whole second. Ofcourse, you may say that IE is fast with well written code, right? Well… not quite. Let’s not forget that some sites are written by newbies so we can’t expect too much

Overall, i explained why MS LIES on half of those points

So, while you do make a few good points, as it stands, I still haven’t seen an overwhelmingly great argument in favor of Chrome or FF.

They are faster, can be customized (at least FF can, I don’t know about Chrome), they have better developer tools and they respect web standards, without needing for “compatibility mode”

Thanks for pointing me to this article (From James Padolsey’s blog post). The problem is, you are not really explaining anything here. Most of the stuff Microsoft claims, you have just skipped over, which is understandable, because it doesn’t concern you.

So, while you do make a few good points, as it stands, I still haven’t seen an overwhelmingly great argument in favor of Chrome or FF.

Don’t forget that as developers we’re going to be extremely biased towards particular features. Microsoft does not have developers in mind as their target. Their target is users first, then developers. So, while you and I may be justified in skipping over stuff about “privacy and security”, Microsoft views those things as very important, and for good reason.

Thank you for your post, though.