Consumer is the king they say; and that is very much evident from a plethora of choices which are available to the people world-wide. The bad point of this abundance however; is, that a person generally finds himself at loggerheads with his heart and mind, eventually ending up confused with all the options available. It’s no hidden fact that Internet is no more restricted to the research agencies, student bodies and libraries; it now is accessible by millions of people from the comfort of their homes and offices. A prerequisite for that is a web browser which enables a person to access the World Wide Web.

The most commonly available browsers are Microsoft’s Internet explorer 9, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari by Apple, etc.  A perpetual endeavor to bring out innovations has brought out a competitive edge among these browsers. The Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has always held a dominant share in the web browser market but it had started to fade against a strong competition from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome owing to its lack of support for web standards. However, with the latest entrant IE9 from its side, Microsoft has placed a heavy focus on web standards and speeds by embracing HTML5 and CSS3 and has made its presence unfaltering again.

The company launched IE9 Platform review 3 recently. What came out as the most prominent observation was; how IE9 makes a far better use of the hardware. The HTML5 operations like zoom and scroll now run at 60 frames per second or more even with notebooks with decent GPU’s. All this leaves you with a richer experience attributable to quicker page loading, faster and smoother animation and high quality images. Apple worked on something similar but its browser, Safari still lags behind the IE p3. Firefox and Chrome haven’t worked on hardware acceleration as yet. So, when it comes to graphic performance, IE9 leaves behind Firefox and Chrome behind. For Microsoft, it’s a great way of differentiating IE9 and Windows from other browsers and platforms because it’s the only major company that has the advantage of focusing all its energies and resources on making its software run well on one operating system which it happens to control.

However, if an HTML5 speed test is conducted between IE9, Firefox 3.7, Chrome 6, and opera; IE9 p3 is only narrowly beaten by Firefox. IE9 and Firefox not only outperform the other browsers manifold but both of them also use the least amount of CPU. Chrome6 is far left behind in HTML5 speed but when it comes to running javascript, Chrome is many times faster.

Hardware acceleration doesn’t seem to be the only route to improve the browser performance, but it proves to grant an edge to Microsoft as it happens to control both the software and the platform. Microsoft still has to work on things like sync, upgrade mechanism and plug-ins. Luckily, Google and Mozilla do not have a reason to panic yet as many applications and documents on the web, don’t use HTML5 heavily, and if they may; developers will only start slow.

Like the saying goes "Nothing comes in complete packages"; all the web browsers so discussed have their own share of hits and misses. It eventually; like always comes onto the shoulders of a consumer to choose the best amongst all.

Ritika Kharbanda/ ITVoir Network