Definitive Best Browser Engine 2  

437 members have voted

  1. 1. Which browser engine do you feel is best?

    • Trident (Internet Explorer)
      30
    • Gecko (Mozilla)
      191
    • Presto (Opera)
      90
    • KHTML (Konqueror)
      1
    • Webkit (Safari)
      125


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I'm divided between Safari (Webkit) and Firefox (Gecko) for the Mac, but my ultimate vote goes for Firefox, as I find Flash and other plugins work better in Firefox and some web sites simply will not work on Safari.

As for Konqueror, it's OK, but the web page layouts did not always appear right the last time I used it over 3 years ago. Opera, I don't know it enough in order to give an opinion, but if I were to vote for the worst web browser/engine, I'd say definitely Internet Explorer! On the Mac, it's simply a rebadged version of Netscape and does not work at all on some of the newer websites! And on Windows, it's plagued with security problems (especially with ActiveX), slow, awkward (especially IE 7), not standards-compliant, and relies on too much propietary code.

An objective person would choose Opera or Webkit. Gecko has the best framework (FireFox and its plugin system) but as a sole engine its not as good as those two.

+1

And remember we are talking about rendering engines not the browsers themselves.

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Based on Javascript benchmarking and general performance in usage, FF3.1 by a long mile:

if you are using the FF3.1 with TraceMonkey on, then you should compare it with Safari with latest WebKit and the latest Chromium builds.

http://nightly.webkit.org/

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapsho...ium-rel-xp/?O=D

  • 4 weeks later...

I choose Gecko, but only because I haven't had the chance to use a WebKit-based browser, or Opera (Presto) long enough to compare them. Gecko seems to do the job for me, but others may be better.

Also, I'd like to know why/how 10 people (300+ in the other thread) have chosen Trident!? :o :blink:

There are no explanations in this thread, but surely people realise that the current final version isn't standards compliant and version 8 still has some way to go for Trident to be as good as other browser engines? Internet Explorer breaks many sites, including one I am currently developing which works in every non-Trident-based browser! :angry: I haven't got the time to change my code! If IE was standards compliant enough, it would work!

WebKit. The version with Chrome though, coz it's the fastest thing since a sneeze. :p

As a user, why should it matter to me whether the rendering engine of my browser is open source or not? It's not as if I'm going to rip it apart and start working out the bugs and make improvements myself. I'll still use how the people build it. So, open source or not, it's still closed to me.

As a user, why should it matter to me whether the rendering engine of my browser is open source or not?

Because, as a user, you surely would want the most efficient browser engine possible. With it being open source, the code is available to any of the public to develop off or improve upon. Eventually, with competition of other rendering engines and ideas from many developers out there who take advantage of the open source project, the rendering engine will become more efficient and maybe more effective.

That's why it should matter to you ;)

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Arguments for Gecko based on javascript speed are null as Gecko doesn't actually do anything with the javascript, Tracemonkey is what handles that. Same goes for Webkit, in which case either V8 (Chrome) or Squirrelfish/Squirrelfish Extreme (Safari) handle javascript interpretation. C'mon people.

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