User:Adys/News/Items/Today's web browsers

I'm annoyed at people who keep going on about how you need firefox to have a "better web browsing experience". Annoyed, because it is not true.

Let's get it done right now: Internet Explorer SUCKS. The world would be a better place without it. Now, don't get me wrong either, I love Firefox and I've made a small bunch of patches for it. That said, Firefox is not the best browser out here.

For those who don't know the basics of web browsers technical details, the code of browsers is split into two parts: The browser itself, and the rendering engine (often called the Core). To make it simple, the rendering engine takes care of everything that is inside the "content window". IE's rendering engine is called Trident (MSHTML), Firefox's is called Gecko. But lets put it that way: Gecko sucks. Not as much as Trident, but it still sucks.

Gecko is now an old engine, that has never been entirely rewritten but been patched over and over. It's slow and still has bugs from 1997 which might be fixed in version 2.0. That's over ten years! Firefox, itself, is a great browser. Firefox 3 has incredible performance optimizations. "Places" management is great, and most of all it has a great community building addons which I wouldn't be able to live without. However, I'm a linux user, and I don't have much choice. Epiphany sucks (well, no, it's a great browser for a lightweight one but its just not for me). Konqueror is awful for web browsing. Opera and Safari? Don't make me say anything about them. And really, if I'm going for something that will embed Gecko, I might aswell stay with Firefox because it's the best of all of them.

A young rendering engine called WebKit was born around 2003; originally a fork of KHTML (Konqueror's rendering engine) developped by Apple, it grew into something solid, lightweight and blazing fast and was open-sourced later on. Today, only very few browsers run WebKit (Apple runs a very slightly modified version of it, Epiphany will dump Gecko in 2.24... those are the "major" ones).

What a shame! It currently is by far the most actively developed of them all, with the least bugs and most performance. On top of that, it is the easiest to embed into a browser.

Maybe someone will hack it into Firefox (hoping it'll happen, since Mozilla so far understandably doesn't want to abandon Gecko). Meanwhile, don't believe what they all say, use the browser you prefer. But for the sake of anything decent left in this world, do NOT use IE. Not IE6. Not IE7. Not IE8. And my words will be the same until Microsoft seriously thinks about improving Trident. And to you all, Web Developers, do your best to ignore IE's flaws, and don't try to fix them, it'll only be that way users (or MS) will finally move on to reality.