To check out how IE9 compares to its competitors, I installed it (which, unlike other browsers, required me to restart my machine) and ran it through a few different benchmarking tools.

Acid3

Acid3 is a benchmark which checks how well a  browser follows selected web standards. The browser is marked out of 100.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

Microsoft has made an effort to improve the standards support in IE in this release, and as you can see, IE9 scores a creditable 95 (much better than IE8 which scored a paltry 21), but it still can’t match Opera and Chrome’s perfect scores.

The HTML5 Test

Acid3 doesn’t test for HTML5, as it’s a newer web standard, so I also ran the browsers through The HTML5 Test, which provides an indication of how well they support the upcoming HTML5 standard and its related specifications.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

HTML5 support is important, because as more browsers are able to handle its advanced features, developers will be able to build much more powerful apps (see Why HTML5 Web Apps Are Going to Rock Your World). As you can see, although Microsoft has made a bit of fuss about IE9 supporting newer standards like HTML5 (even providing some online demos to show off the browser’s HTML5 chops), it’s actually lagging behind its competitors here, although none of them scores perfectly. However, I’d take this benchmark with a pinch of salt, as the standard isn’t finalized yet.

Kraken

Kraken is Mozilla’s JavaScript benchmark, primarily based on the SunSpider suite. It tests how well a browser handles JavaScript and is supposed to simulate a number of different “real world” scenarios.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

JavaScript performance is vital, because we’re all increasingly reliant on JavScript-heavy web apps. The Kraken score above is a the time in milliseconds it takes for the browser to complete the test runs; a lower score is better. Note that JavaScript benchmarks should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism; it’s incredibly hard to create a realistic benchmark that accurately indicates how fast a browser will be in day-to-day use, so these tests can only give an indication of how fast a browser might be. That said, once again, IE is lagging behind the best here: It took twice as long to complete the tests as Chrome, and nearly three times as long as Firefox (although it’s much better than the beta of IE9, which scored around 50,000 ms).

Overall

IE9 is a great improvement over previous incarnations; it has caught up to the pack and now doesn’t lag so very far behind the other  browsers available. In particular, Microsoft should be applauded for its efforts to support web standards in this release. However, unless you really want some of its novel features, like the ability to pin websites to the taskbar, or your choice is restricted by your employer to Microsoft’s browser, I still can’t recommend it over Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Internet Explorer 9 can be downloaded from microsoft.com; it requires Vista or Windows 7.

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Tab stacking is a good idea that’s been implemented well. It works in a very intuitive way: just drag one tab on top of another to build a stack. Hovering your mouse over a tab will cause the stack to expand in a visual preview (as shown in  the screenshot above), while clicking an arrow icon expands the current stack across the tab bar. Tabs can also be dragged from the stack back to the tab bar. Here’s a video of it in action:

In addition to the new tab stacking feature, Opera 11 introduces browser extensions, visual mouse gestures, better HTML5 support and greater performance. Extensions are a very welcome addition, although I find it somewhat surprising that it’s taken Opera this long to include them. Obviously, it will be some time before opera can come anywhere near matching the huge extension ecosystems of Firefox and Chrome that make those browsers so useful. Extensions can be downloaded here.

To test the claims of better performance, I ran the new beta through Mozilla’s Kraken JavaScript benchmark and compared it with 10.63, the current version. Opera 11 beta scored 15227.0ms on my Mac, compared with 10.63′s 15488.2ms. That’s only a fairly small improvement, but Opera is already one of the fastest browsers currently available, so it’s good to see that Opera is continuing to squeeze even more performance out of it.

You can download the beta of Opera 11 here. It’s available for both Windows and Mac.

Let us know what you think of Opera 11 beta in the comments.

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The final release of 10.60 feels very snappy in use; running it through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark on my Mac shows that its performance is pretty much unchanged from the beta release, which was slightly faster than the impressively quick 10.5. The browser speed war raging between Opera, Apple and Google is resulting in some exceptionally fast browsers — good news for users who are increasingly reliant on JavaScript-heavy web apps.

You can download Opera 10.60 from opera.com. Unlike 10.5 (which was released on Windows first),  the 10.60 version of Opera browser is being released for Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously.

Share your thoughts on Opera 10.60 in the comments.

Running the new beta through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark shows that 10.6 is slightly faster, though not massively so: It scores 389 ms, while 10.5 scored 396 ms (a lower score is better).

You can download the 10.6 beta from Opera. Unlike 10.5 (which was released on Windows first), 10.6 is being released for Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously. As always, beta software shouldn’t be relied upon — there might still be some gremlins for the developers to iron out.

In other browser news, Flock, the open-source web browser that’s designed around social networking and used to be based on Mozilla’s Firefox architecture, has released a beta built on Google’s Chromium codebase. Using Chrome’s code rather than Firefox’s promises to make the Flock experience much snappier (Firefox is lagging way behind the other browsers in my recent benchmark tests). The new Flock will also support Chrome extensions. You can download the new beta (currently only available for Windows) from the Flock website.

Let us know what you think of the new betas in the comments.

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Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web
is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to
be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so
can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00

As usual, I used WebKit’s SunSpider benchmark test, which runs the browser through a series of JavaScript-intensive tasks and measuring how long it takes to complete them.

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds; the lower the score, the better. As with the Windows tests, Opera was the fastest, narrowly beating Chrome. The margin between Opera and Chrome was even more slender on the Mac test, though — Opera scored 395.6ms, while Chrome scored 400.8ms. Still, Opera was slightly faster — perhaps just enough to continue to justify Opera’s claim of being the “fastest browser on Earth,” although I doubt you’d notice any difference between them in real-world usage. Safari was also pretty darn quick at around 500 ms, while Firefox lagged behind the pack at 1000ms. (Note that you can’t directly compare the scores from my Windows and Mac browser benchmarks, as they were carried out on different machines).

JavaScript performance is important because we’re all increasingly reliant on JavaScript-intensive web apps — the better our browser is at handling them, the more productive we’ll be. Raw speed isn’t everything, of course, but Opera’s lightning-fast speed, coupled with an attractive UI, support for the latest web standards like CSS3 and HTML5 video, and a slew of useful features like multitouch trackpad gestures, “speed dial” and “turbo mode,” make it a very compelling option — it may even become my primary work browser. You can download Opera 10.5 Mac for free at opera.com.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 Mac in the comments.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

The Mac version, meanwhile, is still in beta. I hope it makes full release soon, as its speed, coupled with Opera’s impressive feature set, could see it replacing Chrome as my primary work browser.

Have you been using Opera 10.5? Let us know what you think of the new browser below.

As the web apps we rely on get increasingly complex, we need fast browsers, otherwise the web will begin to feel very sluggish. When Opera 10 was released, I pointed out that while its JavaScript performance wasn’t bad, it couldn’t match the speed of Chrome or Firefox — and since then both Chrome and Firefox have got faster.

So how does Opera’s latest release stack up? Running the latest versions of Opera, Chrome and Firefox through the SunSpider benchmark tests on my test laptop produced some interesting results (I’ve also included the previous version of Opera for comparison):

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds, where a lower score is better. Opera’s improvement in this release is staggering — the new beta takes roughly a sixth of the time to complete the tests. Opera 10.5 narrowly beats Chrome, so Opera’s “fastest browser on Earth” claim seems justified. It also scores a perfect 100 on the Acid3 test, which tests for compliance with web standards.

Of course, raw speed and web standards aren’t everything, but Opera comes with a nicely designed UI and some neat features, like “speed dial” (for quickly accessing commonly used web pages) and a “turbo mode” for slow or laggy connections. When Opera 10.5 beta is released for Mac (it’s only in alpha currently), it may just become my new favorite browser.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 below.

So what might the future hold for browsers? In my latest Long View over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro, “What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?“, with comments from Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Chris Blizzard (Mozilla) and Bruce Lawson (Opera), I look at where this new browser war might lead, and the battlefields that it will be fought on: innovative new technologies, browser performance, security and privacy, and the ability to browse from multiple, diverse devices.

How do you think browsers will change over the next five years?

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Despite these choices, I’ve pretty much been locked into either Firefox or Internet Explorer because of my reliance on the RoboForm password manager, which is only compatible with those browsers. The lack of Google Chrome support has been particularly frustrating to me. I’m impressed with the speed and resource management of Chrome, but without the easy access to my passwords that I’ve grown accustomed to, it hasn’t been an option for serious consideration. But a couple of recent announcments by Siber, the maker of Roboform, are changing that.

If you’re an adventurous soul, you may want to take a look at a public release of a Chromium build with an adapter that makes it compatible with the latest versions of RoboForm. Chromium is the open-source project that is the basis for the Google Chrome browser.

It’s an alpha build, and my browser is too important to me to risk using it for my day-to-day work quite yet — but it’s a terribly exciting development and shows the first real movement I’ve seen towards a port.

A more feasible option for most folks is to use the new RoboForm Bookmarklet which, in conjunction with the RoboForm Online service, provides access to your passwords from alternative browsers or on computers without a RoboForm installation. Drag the bookmarklet up to your toolbar and after logging in to your online account you’ll have access to all of your stored passwords.

The functionality of the bookmarklet is good, but isn’t yet a replacement for the full installed product. I find that the login expires quickly, requiring me to log in to my account frequently throughout the day, even after requesting it to remain active. I also miss the ability to create new logins on the fly, an option not available from within the bookmarklet.

On the plus side, one of the things I’ve always appreciated about RoboForm is the ability to maintain multiple password sets for a site and am glad to see that this feature is retained with bookmarklet access.

Both of these projects are still in their early stages, but really represent big steps toward cross-browser, cross-platform availability of a single password set.

How do you manage your passwords?

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