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Alternate browsers -- a few observations regarding Firefox, Chrome and Opera
I'm a long-time Firefox user, and several times in the past few months, have also tested Chrome and Opera, for use with Portmonkey and Chimp. These are my observations, primarily in regard to speed and rendering.
First, I still regard Firefox 4 the best because, combined with Greasemonkey, it provides the most power and flexibility for scripting. For example, the new color selection feature of Port Monkey, and the ability to fetch bond adjust info from another website, can not be performed by Chrome and Opera. Eventually, I expect that to change.
On the other hand, Chrome and Opera handle script processing on their own, with no help needed from the likes of Greasemonkey. And, most of the HSX goodness of my scripts does work in these browsers.
I have over 2000 HSX securities, and not-very-fast broadband, so it's important that the browser and script processing be as fast as possible. A bare port reload in Firefox takes about 33 seconds. With Port Monkey running, it goes to about 38 seconds. So, for me, Port Monkey adds about 5 seconds of processing. That's very good! I've had older versions of Firefox adding more than that, even with several hundred fewer securities.
Opera 11 also takes about 33 seconds bare, and 38 seconds with Port Monkey running.
Chrome 10 takes about 34 seconds bare, and 42 seconds with Port Monkey. Not so good.
But, Opera is not done, just yet. It offers a Turbo mode, in which Opera servers cache, filter and compress web material, at the cost of degrading image quality somewhat. For HSX, this mainly amounts to some artifacts in the HSX logo, and autoblocking of Flash. One test session of Turbo mode had it doing bare port loads in 11 seconds, and Port Monkey loads in 16 seconds!
Damn! Anyone with a crap connection or metered billing really needs to check out Opera's Turbo mode. (In a prior test session, Turbo mode had been 5-8 seconds slower. Taking a detour to Opera's server adds another network link, and variability to the results.)
Chrome and Opera both treat the DOM of a web page slightly different from Firefox. Opera 11 will not add column grid lines with code that works fine in Firefox. Chrome 10 adds the column grid lines, but strangely, adds an additional column, while the other two browsers do not. This did not occur in Chrome 9. I'll guess that it will be fixed in a future Chrome revision.
More subjectively, Opera seems exceedingly capable and feature packed, to the point of having a busy interface, and an intimidating array of options. At the other end of the spectrum, Chrome seems too simplified.
You've got 2 and-a-half great browsers here that will run Port Monkey and Chimp. Isn't it about time to kick Internet Explorer to the curb?
Alternate browsers -- a few observations regarding Firefox, Chrome and Opera Apr 14, 17:46
Microwho? {nm} Apr 14, 21:37
