The Perfect Computer and Web Browser Updates

Abstract

WHEN IT comes to computers, I am a minimalist. I have only two peripherals on my office computer: a fast, portable external hard drive and a printer. For software, I greatly prefer a program like Microsoft Works or Apple-Works over the Microsoft Office suite. I am extremely happy with Apple's Safari RSS Web browser, and I like Apple's OS X mail reader. But, even though I am a minimalist, I have what many technology columnists call the perfect computer, a 20-inch iMac. This iMac is a wide-screen LCD with 1344 x 840 resolution. My iMac has the Intel dual core processor and can boot up in either Windows or Mac OS X--although I never use the Windows boot feature. The only option I added to the computer when I ordered it was an additional one gigabyte of memory. The wide screen monitor is handy, because you can easily do things like open two word-processor pages side-by-side. If you are still using an old tube type monitor, give your eyes a break and buy an LCD monitor; your eyes won't get nearly as tired. I do like to keep up on software updates, especially updates of Web browsers. Since January, most popular browsers have been updated, including Mac OS X's Safari 2 RSS, Opera 8, Firefox 1.5, and Internet Explorer (IE) 7 Beta for Windows XP with Service Pack 2. Microsoft quit developing IE for Macs several years ago, and IE 7B requires XP to run. Because I use a Mac that can run only an older version of IE, I will not be discussing this version at any length. I should mention that Microsoft seems to be doing a lot to add security features to make IE 7 safer for users. This is a necessary fix, and most experts have advised against using IE because it is riddled with security problems. Of course, every browser maker claims that its browser is the fastest. Thanks to Mark Wilton-Jones of the U.K., we have some precise comparisons, which are displayed in Table 1. The cells with boldface numbers indicate the fastest browser for a given task. (The fastest Cold Start and Warm Start times were obtained by niche browsers not included in the table.) The third column reports on rendering Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which are commonly used to build websites. Rendering Tables means drawing them on the screen, and Script Speed refers to how fast a browser can decode Web-programming languages. Multiple Images refers to a page full of thumbnail-sized photos. Wilton-Jones compared about 20 browsers altogether, but I have reported on only the most popular ones. The times reported are for these browsers when they are running on a Mac with OS X. Wilton-Jones' website also has separate tables for browsers running on Windows and Linux. As I mentioned above, I am happy with Safari, but seeing this table prompted me to download and install Opera 8. Notice the difference between Opera 8 and Safari 2 on the test. Opera is substantially faster than Safari when going back to a page that was previously visited. The history speed of Opera 8 shows up dramatically when you are on a website that has a main or home page that you need to get back to from a sub-page. In short, Opera moves in reverse at lightning speed! Most newer browsers have a host of features, including tabbed and an RSS (really simple syndication) news reader. Tabbed browsing allows you to set up a single button that simultaneously opens several websites. Opera 8 goes one step further and has an e-mail application that will also read RSS news headlines. Opera calls this feature an aggregator. Another feature unique to Opera is its widescreen mode. This feature allows Opera to fill the widescreen monitor on my Mac. You can do something similar in Safari, but you have to grab a corner of a Web page and drag it to the right. Even then, Safari does not recenter the Web page image the way that Opera does. …