The Features That Make Each Web Browser Unique 132
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a look at 13 promising features unique to one browser. From Chrome's support for SPDY, to IE9's emphasis on energy efficiency, to Firefox Sync, browser vendors are working hard to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. And while speed and HTML5 compatibility remain key in the battle of the Web browsers, unique features often point the way forward. 'Given the pace of browser updates these days, don't be surprised to find the best of the bunch being copied by competitors soon,' Wayner writes. 'After all, yesterday's browser bells and whistles are today's must-have features.'"
IE8 the first? Don't make me laugh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiprocess was standard on early unix browsers - you opened a link in a new window it spawned a new process. It was only later that netscape switched to multithreaded presumably so the codebase was easier to port to Windows which as everyone knows has a piss poor process model and still can't even do fork() never mind sophisticated parent-child process interaction.
print page links not needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank you for linking to print page It made me find the actual article and that is apparently 4 pages.
This is interesting in an article about unique browser features. Maybe a better article would go through features rarely known about. Like in Safari you can click the "reader" button in the URL bar and it consolidates multi-page articles in to a single page including the images. There is a Firefox extension called "repagination" to do the same thing. Given how much I see people complaining about multi-page articles, it would have been nice for this article to have covered this.
Similarly, Safari and some Firefox plug-ins allow the user to grab the corner of text input boxes and resize them, which is an indispensable feature once you've used it, but was also overlooked in this article.
Re:IE9's Energy Efficiency (Score:4, Interesting)
The entire article is garbage. It lists Songbird as a browser (when its really a media player using firefox's Gecko), it implies that other browsers dont have Jumplists on Win7 (hint, Chrome and--i think-- firefox both do), lists "email" as a unique feature of Opera, when Firefox came out of a project that had email et al, Firefox 4s sync is HARDLY unique in an arena with Chrome (and I assume safari and Opera have it as well), and Im pretty sure IE9 has a separate process per tab-- not just chrome.
Seriously, none of these are unique, except perhaps Opera's turbo caching and Chrome's SPDY-- and its a bit too early to tell if SPDY is going to take off.