Which browser is best for business?

Until recently, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated the web, with as much as 90 per cent of web pages viewed through the software. But there has been a resurgence in browser development, which has peaked with the release of three new products in the past few months. We take a look at the newcomers and assess their suitability for business use.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
While still a pre-release version, IE8 Beta 2 shows how Microsoft is trying to regain ground. The major focus is compatibility with web standards and enhanced security, but Microsoft has added features to serve content in different ways.

IE8 has greater compliance with standards such as HTML and CSS, but this could cause problems for business users. Many corporate intranets and web-based applications have been coded to work with earlier versions of IE.

To address this, Microsoft provides a “compatibility view” that lets users switch to rendering pages the same way as IE7. We found at least one web application that refused to run in IE8’s default mode, but worked perfectly in compatibility view.

Security is enhanced with a cross-site scripting filter that detects and blocks attacks designed to steal information keyed into legitimate web sites.

Microsoft said IE8 should be more stable due to greater isolation between browser tabs, preventing a crash in one tab affecting all the others.

IE8 also introduces the InPrivate mode, which does not store cookies or browsing history. While primarily a privacy feature, this might allow business travellers to access their email from a public web kiosk without leaving behind login or other information in the browser cache.

A major feature for large organisations is that some of these functions can be centrally managed using group policy settings to control IE8 defaults.

www.microsoft.com/ie8

Google Chrome
Google’s first browser is also a beta release, but like IE8 appears stable and polished. However, it does have compatibility problems.

Chrome is designed to provide better performance when handling web-based applications such as Google Mail and Google Docs. It has a powerful custom-built JavaScript engine, and like IE8 implements each browser tab as a separate process to prevent unstable code affecting other tabs.

Chrome has a simple, clean user interface that makes it easy to get up and running, and it handles many commonly-accessed internet sites without difficulty. Like IE8, Chrome has a privacy mode called incognito browsing.

But Chrome has its drawbacks. The application has been coded using components from Apple’s WebKit ­ which the Safari browser is based on ­ as well as Mozilla’s Firefox. Security researchers have already uncovered at least one flaw that Apple had earlier fixed in Safari, but where the first release of Chrome remained vulnerable.

Another problem that Chrome shares with Safari is that some web-based applications detect it as an unsupported browser and refuse to run, while some sites do not display pages correctly.

www.google.com/chrome

FireFox 3
FireFox is the most successful rival to Internet Explorer, accounting for about 20 per cent of pages viewed globally, according to web monitoring firm Net Applications. It was an early adopter of tabbed browsing, which has since become a standard feature.

FireFox 3.0.1 is the current release, although version 3.1 is expected by the end of the year. It uses less memory than earlier versions, and adds usability and security enhancements.

To protect users, FireFox 3 adds new malware and anti-phishing protection to the existing pop-up blocker. It also adds an icon next to the address bar to show information about the current site. We found this to be of little use, however, as few sites supply this information.

To protect privacy, this release inherits the “clear private data” function of earlier versions, which lets users wipe browsing history, form data, cookies and forms, either at the click of a button or automatically when the browser is closed.

One of the major features of FireFox is the ease with which it can be customised with third-party add-ons, such as tools for blocking adverts and Flash-based animations. In version 3, a new add-on manager helps users to find and install these tools.

Because of the popularity of FireFox, we found no compatibility issues, although some sites do look slightly different when compared with Internet Explorer.

www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox