Browser Comparisons – Archive

BROWSER COMPARISONS – ARCHIVE

We were unable to continue our browser comparisons because of availability issues with hardware complicated by the Covid-10 pandemic. Several significant changes with browsers have occured with the demise of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and original Edge browser. Flash also reached EoL and is no longer an issue. There should not now be as much difference between the major browsers, but will continue the comparisons in the future and have left this page from February 2018 without updates as it has interesting data some of which may still be relevant.

When developing a web site, it is necessary to check pages with various browsers to see if the layout and styling display as expected. There are variations in the way different browser engines interpret the coding and how they handle issues with different viewports. The SVG (Scalar Vector Graphics) page has many different methods of coding and various scripts, which may present problems with some browsers. For this reason we decided that is would be a good page to choose to evaluate browsers. There is a reluctance of some browser developers to include support for Adobe Flash™. This is a problem with most mobile browsers. One mobile browser that includes Flash™ for Android phones is the Puffin browser, which is included in the browsers tested.  Although its performance was falling behind, the latest version 7 shows a marked improvement and can be recommended for playing Flash™ content on Android devices.

We have observed that several browsers suffered a reduction in the ratings of between 1-3 points, since we checked last year. We assume it may be because of kernel software patches to plug the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in Intel CPU hardware (see the Browser and Web Security page). Although AMD and other processors may not exhibit the vulnerability, the patches appear to have impacted our AMD CPU performance.

BROWSER RECOGNITION OF HTML5 & CSS3

Browser  HTML5 /555  CSS3 %  Results of display of Scalable Vector Graphics page
Firefox logo Firefox 58.0* (Windows 7) 483 67 No issues
Chrome 64.0* (Windows 7) 525 59  No issues
Opera 49.0* (Windows 7) 525 59 No issues
Chrome 63.0 (Android 6.0) 525 59 Flash not supported.
Edge 1.0.0.1563 (Android 6.0) 525 59 Flash not supported.
Vivaldi 1.14* (Windows 7) 523 59 No issues.
Firefox logo Firefox 58.0 (Android 6.0) 480 67  Flash not supported.
Iron 62.0* (Windows 7) 525 58 No issues.
Iron 61.0 (Android 6.0) 523 58  Flash not supported.
Firefox Focus 4.0.2 (Android 6.0) 509 59  Flash not supported.
Puffin 7.0.2 (Android 6.0.1) 503 57 No issues.  N.B.  SVG page Flash™ items displayed on Android.
Chromium 51.0 (Android 6.0.1) 477 48  Flash not supported.
Edge 16 (Windows 10) 471 47  Poor SVG support, CSS issues, no support for Ogg Vorbis audio.
Edge 13 (Windows 10 mobile) 417 41  Poor SVG support, no support for Flash, or Ogg Vorbis audio.
Safari 4.0 iPhone 4 327 47  No Flash, no HTML audio support.
Internet Explorer 11 (Windows 10) 312 45  Limited SVG support, no HTML Ogg Vorbis audio support.
Internet Explorer 11 (Windows 7) 302 39  Limited SVG support, no HTML Ogg Vorbis audio support.

* 32-bit & 64-bit versions on Windows platforms
The overall ranking is based on the mean of the CSS3 percentage and the HTML5 value calculated as a percentage.
Date of testing 14 February, 2018. This page will be updated, when there are significant changes.

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