Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

It’s hard out there for a netbook. You think it’s easy, being ultraportable and Internet-ready 24/7? You think it’s easy, cramming the entirety of the Internet into 614400 pixels? Well, it’s not. Not one bit.

Take the ASUS EEE 1000H, for example. A rock solid 5 hours of battery life, a decent keyboard, and 10.1 inches of matte LCD made for peerin’ into the world wide web. Sounds decent, right?

Wrong. But it’s not all the computer’s fault. The 1000H is like the little netbook that could. It’s a 3 pound featherweight anticipating that first-round KO from a better faster stronger competitor like the HP Mini 311. But it’s still going to tighten its gloves, bite down on that mouth guard, and put up its dukes. And with the right web browser in its corner, it might even hold its own.

But that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? On a weak processor like the Atom, on a screen that doesn’t even hit 720p, how do you balance performance and usability for the perfect web experience? It’s all about finding the right web browser. Trouble is, none of them get it quite right. It’s tough out there for a netbook — let’s take a look at how Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera help and hinder our exploration of the 10.1″ web.

Firefox has been my go-to browser for years, ever since I jumped ship from the drowning Netscape Navigator. Ah, Netscape 7; what good times we had together in our youth. You may have been a bit slow. To be honest, I don’t even remember if you were a good browser or not. But you led me to Mozilla, and the glory of themes, extensions, tabbed browsing, and, above all, Adblock. I never looked back…

…until I installed Windows 7 on my netbook, and decided it might be time for a change.  I was still perfectly happy with Firefox on my desktop, but for quick web sessions on-the-go I wanted to find something a bit snappier and more space-efficient.  At first, Chrome seemed like the answer, but now I’m not so sure.

Performance

These days, Mozilla is up to Firefox 3.6, but it’s no longer the only dominant competitor for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Chrome is the new hotness on the block, but Firefox is still chugging along, slowly gaining market share. But that’s not the only way it’s chugging; in speed tests comparing Chrome and Firefox, Mozilla is lagging behind.

Comparing startup speeds on the 1000H reveals a major discrepancy. Firefox turtles along at a startup speed of 7.2 seconds, while Chrome boots to its opening screen in 2.6. But all is not dark in the world of Firefox. After extensive use of both browsers, Firefox seems to provide a far more consistent user experience, with reliably speedy page loads.

Chrome, for all its startup horsepower and touted blazing fast rendering speed, delivers wildly inconsistent performance over all the wireless connections I’ve tried. At times it simply fails to load web pages, and no amount of refreshing will convince it that the server is, in fact, just fine. It frequently times out or fails to load a page’s CSS, resulting in an ugly unformatted mess.

Opera comes in somewhere between Firefox and Chrome, starting up in under 4 seconds. Overall, it performs fine, although nothing strongly differentiates it from the competition. Even if Opera boasts some of the fastest Java load times on the block, some websites that work in Firefox and Chrome still won’t work in Opera.

Visual

Firefox was sounding pretty good before, right? If performance was everything, I’d most likely stick with Firefox in a second and not give Chrome a backwards glance. But Google nailed the design of Chrome, making it sleek and capitalizing screen space. Firefox looks downright bulky in comparison, even with small icons enabled and the menu bar hidden away. Granted, doing away with the bookmarks toolbar and relying on the Awesomebar is an option. But I like my bookmarks, okay?

With only 600 pixels of vertical resolution at the 1000H’s disposal, every pixel is sacred. With Firefox, that means ditching something useful. Chrome, on the other hand, diverged from the norm, integrating the title and tab bar and relegating the menu bar to a couple dropdown buttons. It saves a ton of space and brings tabbed browsing to the fore.

But Chrome is not without its own aesthetic issues. Google’s browser never plays nice with the taskbar’s auto-hide, frequently extending over the top of the taskbar and making it impossible to access. It’s an annoying bug, and a bizarre oversight for the development team.

Opera takes after Chrome, and easily bests Firefox in the looks department. It’s sleek, shiny and thin, but everything goes awry when you add the tab bar. Opera’s “Personal Bar” sits between its tab bar and the top of the screen, which mysteriously causes the title bar to separate from the tab bar. What was once a clean, integrated layout becomes bizarrely, unnecessarily bloated.

Conclusion

So nobody’s perfect. Firefox delivers acceptable performance, but takes up more screen real estate than is ideal for a netbook. Chrome alternates between speedy loading and frustrating time outs. In the end, the visual experience isn’t worth the performance headache. And Opera…well, it doesn’t offer much to make it worth switching to.

The future looks a little brighter, at least. The mockup for Firefox 4, scheduled for release near the end 2010, leans closer to Chrome’s design sense. With the bookmarks toolbar nowhere in sight, though, the browser could end up faster and prettier, but just as space-inefficient. Maybe it’s…time to try out Internet Explorer 9.