Webupon

Browsers used in this articles are all running on Windows XP and they are:
IE        – Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
Firefox  – Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3
Chrome – Google Chrome 3.0.195.25

Speed
In terms of speed, Chrome is by far the faster browser among the three browser compared here.   In most cases, Firefox is faster than IE.  IE is fast once the page has been cached – so if we regular go to a website and only use IE, the speed is not too bad.  With poor connection, IE and Firefox are more forgiving compared to Chrome. 

Image loading
However, the speed comes with a price.  If you have poor connection, a lot of the images will not be loaded, which also happens with IE.  In this case, Firefox shines in terms of the images that are loaded.

Compatibility
For most sites, IE is the most compatible browser, followed by Firefox.  Many sites such as Confluence Wiki does not recognize Chrome, so does allow you rich text editing when you compose or edit in that mode.  Needless to say, sites that use ActiveX components will only work with IE.  There is a plugin for Firefox – IE Tab will allow you to run IE within Firefox.  As a side note, when you are running IE tab, I noticed that double posting is done in the back-end (i.e. Firefox and IE will both send a post to the server) but this does not pose any problems for most sites.

Private Browsing
When private browsing mode is used, all history of the browsing session will be flushed when the browser is closed.  All three browsers compared here support this feature.  Both IE and Chrome will launch a new window when this option is selected.  Firefox save all the tabs (of the non-Private mode) and hide them before switching to private mode, those tabs will be restored when you exit private browsing mode. 

When in private browsing mode, you will see

• an icon next to the tab in Chrome
• the word “[Private Browsing]” will be added on the title bar of the browser window
• the word “InPrivate” at the front of the address bar.

Personally, I prefer the approach used by IE and Chrome.

Misc Features
With IE, you can copy tables from a website and then paste it into MS Excel and still maintain the format.
With Firefox, if you copy a table from Excel (using Excel 2007, you need to convert the range to a table 1st before you copy), and paste into Gmail, the format is maintained.

Image by nDevilTV via Flickr

Others

Chrome will only install on Windows XP or higher.