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Silly Mozilla!

Sillier Mac IE!

Silly Mozilla! Look!

Silly, bad table bugs
Terrible quality font rendering!
50 megabytes!!!
Ugly browser appearance

Click here to see the table bugs

Question Time!

Which of these browsers has the nicest rendering?

Click here to see the rendering comparison

Spoiler space...

Top: Netpositive
Bottom: Mozilla

Browser site compatibility overview

Key:

Full = Renders perfectly, with only normal browser variance
Okay = Renders with only a few minor problems, or poor quality
Tolerable = Renders with problems, but retains readability and quality
Poor = Renders poorly, although mostly readable. Major sections may be inaccessible
Unusable = Site is unusable

	Netpositive	Opera	Mozilla	Mac IE
Google	Full	Full	Okay	Tolerable
Altavista	Okay	Full	Okay	Okay
Yahoo	Okay	Okay	Full	Full
The Register	Full	Full	Tolerable	Okay
BBCi	Tolerable	Full	Okay	Full
BT	Tolerable	Okay	Tolerable	Full
Xitami.com	Full	Okay	Full	Tolerable
Wotsit's Format	Okay	Full	Full	Full
SSRG	Full	Okay	Okay	Okay
Sonic Server	Full	Tolerable	Tolerable	Poor
TheNoodle	Okay	Okay	Tolerable	Okay
The Underground Zone	Full	Full	Poor	Tolerable
Sonic HQ	Okay	Okay	Okay	Tolerable
The Mine of Lights	Okay	Full	Tolerable	Tolerable
GameFAQs	Okay	Full	Okay	Tolerable

Conclusions

From this study, it is clear that browser rendering in general is not as good as it could be. However, no unusable sites were encountered in this test.
Scoring method: The scoring method used is as follows:

Full = 4 points
Okay = 1 point
Tolerable = no points
Poor = subtract 2 points
Unusable = subtract 6 points

These are then converted into percentages and given a weighting factor of 1.15 to allow for general IE incompatibilities and poor HTML coding.

Opera takes first place, with 72.5%
Netpositive takes second place, with 59.8%
Mozilla takes third place, with a mere 36.8%

NEWS FLASH!!! Mac Internet Exploder, previously thought quite a good product, actually takes last place in this study, with a pathetic 34.5%. In this test, the font rendering was the browser's biggest weakness, with extreme aliasing visible on most sites, and very uneven font size interpretation, which has become a rather famous feature of the Internet Exploiter range of browsers.

Browser rendering quality comparison chart:

O p e r a

Opera 72.5%

N e t p o s i t i v e

Netpositive 59.8%

M o z i l l a

Mozilla 36.8%

M a c I E

Mac IE 34.5%

Final Conclusions

From observing these results, we can conclude several key facts:

One browser is never enough
Mozilla and MacIE are a very similar class of browser
Big corporate sites prefer big bloated browsers
Smaller browsers actually render sites surprisingly well; better than they're given credit for
It is possible to survive the web using a selection of smaller, nicer browsers

Last updated: 23/05/02