Wednesday 14 August 2013

Browser speed dial page comparison

Compared to how other browsers handle it, Internet Explorer is pretty bad on the "speed dial" page. Firefox shows a full-page, 3x3 grid of your most frequent visited sites, and usually including thumbnail previews. Sometimes it doubles up on sites.
Chrome has 2 rows of thumbnails, titles below each one, with favicons in their bottom left corners, which looks pretty good.
IE, on the other hand, has 2 rows of 5 tiles, all white, and only seems to manage a favicon in the top left corner some of the time, plus a weird coloured bar at the bottom which I guess represents how frequently the site is visited. If they're already arranged in order of visit frequency, why have the bar at all? The text usually seems to be URLs rather than page titles.
I only use IE for work, and it does have all my most frequently-visited work-related sites listed, but because it's only text and the titles are rarely helpful, I find it much easier to bookmark them and use the menu instead. I think Microsoft have overestimated the usability of text vs pictures. Even their own IE add-ons gallery doesn't come up with a real title, just a URL.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If I had to award a prize, it would go to Chrome.
PPS - I've just found it the most usable and consistent implementation of the feature.

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