The Differences in the Safari, Firefox & IE7 Web Browsers

Find the best web browser.

Of all the Internet web browsers available in 2007, the three most popular were Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. As of March 2011, at least two upgrade iterations have been introduced for these brands. The present version of IE7 is IE9, an entirely different browser from IE7. Looking at this outdated 2007 browser technology, several significant differences may be found.

Aesthetics

The IE7 graphical user interface was typical of the Microsoft style, appearing very similar to the Windows Vista operating system GUI and the Microsoft Office 2007 Suite, as well as earlier versions of both. Safari, the browser produced by Apple, used a simple multiple website thumbnail presentation later copied by Google's Chrome browser introduced little more than a year later. The Mozilla Firefox browser, in some ways reminiscent of its grandfather, the Netscape Navigator, eschewed most menu and iconic graphics for a straightforward, somewhat sparse control interface.

Speed

Internet browser benchmarker Ross Dargahi says IE6 is plagued by problems, including its ability to leak memory.Dargahi says Microsoft's next release of IE7, does little to fix the problem. Raja Rao of the Zimbra evaluation team benchmarked Firefox 2.0 as three to four times faster than IE7 in every category. Maximum PC testing revealed Apple's Safari to be 42 times faster than IE7, beating Mozilla Firefox 2.0 as well. In 2007, Safari won the browser speed contest.

Memory Usage

How much random access memory and buffered hard drive memory a browser consumes can drastically affect the performance of a computer. Of the three browsers being evaluated, IE7 by far used the most memory. Benchmarks often revealed that much of the RAM consumed by the Microsoft browser went to naught, simply being stored for possible future use but never actually deployed. Firefox came in a distant second in the RAM consumption benchmark, coming very close to matching Safari.

Available, Scalable, and Secure

IE7 finished well in front of Firefox and Safari in a single category: security. IE7 offered variable user-set levels of firewalling, website accessing and general cautionary blocking such as pop-up denial, with the highest being the default setting. IE7's lowest security settings, which required some expertise to access the appropriate dialog boxes to change, were almost exactly the same as both Firefox's and Safari's default settings. Proffering such a high level of security had its cost. It made registering and logging into forums and other venues extremely slow in relation to the Firefox and Safari interfaces. It was, however, one of the major reasons IE7 was so often recommended for use in libraries and educational institutions of all kinds.

References

• DotNetWizard.net: Most Secure: Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft IE7 and Opera
• Drupal; Differences between IE6 and other browsers (IE7, Firefox, Safari); June 2009
• Bright Hub: 5 Free Web Browsers For You To Choose From
• You Tube; Browser Test: IE vs Chrome vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari; Aug. 2009
• Maximum PC; New Browser Benchmarks: Safari 42 Times Faster Than IE7; Feb. 2009

Resources

• Giants Island: CSS Fix for Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer
• Web Performance; Safari 3 Windows Performance Analysis; Michael Czeiszperger; Oct. 2007
• Brown University; Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) for Windows XP -- Introduction; Mary Salvas; May 2007
• Hen Design Studio: Google Chrome vs Safari vs FireFox, who are the RAM killer?