Beaconfire Survey: New Browsers
Posted Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:33 am by Beaconfire Bloggers (25 posts)
Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. With Firefox 3 and Google Chrome just out, and IE8 and Safari 4 on the way, we asked our staff: What feature do you want most in your browser?
Michael, Principal Consultant: What I want? A mobile browser for the palm phone that works like the iPhone or better.
Miro, Software Engineer: I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again: the browser cores need to support many more objects natively. This includes tabbing/panels (in-page versions, not tabbing the way it exists to switch between documents), trees, native dragging and dropping between web elements, contextual menus, just to name a few. Make them fully supported, cross-browser compatible from day one.
The web developers are wasting too much time writing javascript and performing magic hacks to get the browsers to behave more like the desktop applications. Instead, raise the browser capability: do it rapidly, across the board, and soon.
Erika, Operations Manager: I want stability and compatibility. It seems to me that every time there’s a new browser something gets lost or something changes so drastically that Web sites which aren’t even really that old don’t work anymore. Or the new browser isn’t compatible with all of the other browsers and suddenly you find yourself having to do a lot of extra work to make sure your site works in yet another browser.
With our nonprofit clients, this means more money spent just trying to get the site to work. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere, and that often means leaving out a certain percentage of the population because you can’t afford to make your site work with the browser they’ve chosen to use. Choice is a great thing, as is innovation. But if someone gets frustrated enough with your new browser because none of the web sites they go to will work, they’ll go back to what they were using before.
Tim, Functional Consultant: Everything I want a browser to do, Firefox (with addons) does. The Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug are indispensible and add functionality to the browser that makes coding HTML much easier. I like the lean speed of Chrome, especially how it works with Google online applications, but I see it more as a window into those applications than as a general purpose browser since it can’t to a 10th of what Firefox can. If IE eventually includes the ability to easily install addons like Firefox does, it would be a toss-up as to which I’d prefer.
Mark, Functional Consultant: Feature-wise, I want tools that make browsing quicker and easier like mouse gesturing, tabbing, quick bookmarking, built in searching and lookups against sites I’ve been to. I also want developer analysis tools so I can look at and test changes to the underlying code, and get extended error information when problems occur. Firefox 3 is meeting these features for me.
From a design standpoint, I want a quick, secure and light core that doesn’t crash, or gives me ways to mitigate crashing. And one that lets me bolt on just the features I want and need. I feel like Chrome is that quick, secure and light core (so far) but doesn’t yet have the additional features available.
John Brian, Marketing Consultant: As much as I’d like to say stability, given the frequency with which Netvibes crashes my browser, in the end, the most important feature for me is compatibility with most websites. I’d rather not have to have IE open to work in a CMS, then open Firefox to read Digg, and keep opening different browsers for different purposes. This is why I never use Opera: the strict HTML reading seems designed to break things, rather than make them work.
Beyond that, I like a browser that gives me plenty of ability to customize features – Firefox and Internet Explorer are good about this, and Chrome has made some promises in this direction as well.
