Back in June I tried out Opera 10 and nine other browsers, eventually coming to rest back on my favorite, Firefox, despite the fact that Opera performed much better on the Acid3 test. Yesterday, after finding Fedora packages (repod, no less!) of Chromium, I had to try it. Just for fun, I also pulled Fedora’s package of Arora, an ad-blocking browser recently reviewed by Lifehacker.
Chromium, which I’ve been waiting to try out, is definitely the best
browser of the three. It
renders fastest (runs way
fastest), gets 100/100 on the Acid3 test with a couple of small
errors, and is generally pretty sweet. However, I have two big
issues. First, extensions. See my treatment of Firefox below.
Second, the “Other Bookmarks” button that’s ridiculously huge and
can’t be removed. Google, what are you people thinking?! Everything
else in Chrome’s interface is beautiful - small, icon-type
functional buttons placed well. But you have a text button that’s
more than an inch long on my small screen, and I can’t change the
name, hide the button, or replace it with an icon. Stupid.
Arora is pretty much what it says it is. It’s a browser that
includes Adblock Plus functionality without an extension. Not really
sure why Lifehacker even worked it in, except that they like having
twenty posts per day. Arora isn’t any faster than Firefox, and even
though it uses the WebKit rendering engine of
Chrome/Safari
fame (which I think Firefox should just hurry up and use already),
it doesn’t get 100 on the Acid3 test. Nothing to see here, move
along.
Yep, I’m once again sticking to Firefox. Adblock
Plus,
AutoPager,
Delicious Bookmarks,
Download
Statusbar,
Fission,
Flagfox,
Ghostery,
Greasemonkey, Tiny
Menu, and
Wishpot (all
extensions) are too much to give up when Chrome’s UI isn’t fixable.
When I last tested it, Firefox got 73/100 on Acid3; now it gets 93.
I do wish they’d hurry up and just adopt WebKit… but that might be
one browser to rule them all, and then they’d get drunk with power
and become completely
evil….
