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Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Dec 02, 2008 10:30 AM
from the hit-the-internet-button dept.
from the hit-the-internet-button dept.
bsk_cw writes "With the exception of Google's Chrome (which got attention because it was, after all, Google), most of the alternative browsers out there tend to get lost in the shuffle. Computerworld asked three of their writers to take some lesser-known browsers out for a spin and see how they do. They looked at six candidates: Camino (for the Mac), Maxthon (for the PC), OmniWeb (for the Mac), Opera (both the Mac and the PC versions) and Shiira (for the Mac)." It would have been more interesting if they included some popular open source, Linux-friendly browsers like Konqueror or Epiphany, as well.
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Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Goodbye eWorld -- Hello web!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You can pry cyberdog from my cold, dead hands
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Meh.
Parent
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I ever use Lynx for is Googling how to configure X.org.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Me too. links [sourceforge.net] and w3m [sourceforge.net] are much, much better than lynx. I use w3m all the time, especially for browsing bug-report databases and other text-heavy sites, but I use lynx only when nothing else is yet available, i.e. troubleshooting a tricky install.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
if [ $# -ge 1 ]; then<br/>
F=`mktemp`<br/>
wget "$1" -O "$F"<br/>
ed "$F"<br/>
fi</code>
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Accidentally hit submit. You get the idea, though. Should probably have not have "Submit" and "Preview" appearing in the same area.
Mac over represented? (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it interesting that they checked out 4 for the Mac and only 2 for the PC. Isn't there at least one other PC browser they could have looked at? Maybe not, I'm unsure. Interesting read either way.
Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Mac over represented? (Score:4, Insightful)
No offense, but if you are going to talk about the top three, and only three, browsers, it would have to be Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Explorer is bundled with Windows, Safari with Mac and iPhone, Firefox with many Linux distros. Who was bundling Opera with anything? Embedded devices, some mobile phones... all of which were overshadowed by Mobile Safari.
You might be disappointed, but you shouldn't be surprised.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Informative)
Opera is available as a download for the Wii (and was free for quite a long time), as a cart for the Nintendo DS (discontinued, but still) and as a built-in app/download (not sure which) for the new Nintendo DSi.
If anything, Opera is the fourth on what should be the "top four".
Parent
Not by stats (Score:5, Informative)
It depends somewhat on your geographic location, but these days the breakdown is something like
IE - 70-80 %
Firefox 15-20 %
Safari - 3-7 %
Opera - 1% or less
With some others thrown in.
Opera is a fine and often innovative browser, but its share of the market is negligible. Luckily, it's standards support is good, so it works with the same pages that Firefox and Safari work on.
Being the premier browser on a gaming platform doesn't do much for market penetration.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Safari is probably a few tenths of a percentage point ahead of Opera, but both of their market shares are pretty insignificant compared to the top two.
I didn't realize that 59 tenths a percentage point was "a few".
The usage share of web browsers described in this chart. Source from Net Applications[1] Internet Explorer (71.11%) Mozilla Firefox (20.06%) Safari (6.62%) Opera (0.75%)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think part of it is that building browsers on Trident has fallen out of favor. There used to be quite a few such browsers out there, but most of them have disappeared. Probably because they are unable to compete against the IE == The Internet mentality. Mac users seem to have less of that Safari == The Internet association, so they're more open to alternative browsers.
Personally, I'm not really sure this article adds much. You still have four major browser engines: Trident (IE/Microsoft), Gecko (Mozilla), Webkit (Apple), and Presto (Opera). Nearly all web browsers are based on one of those four engines. Which limits the choice based of better web experience to primarily the user interface. Since the major browser makers are already tussling over the best interface to wrap around their engine, there's not much to differentiate the third party browsers.
Parent
Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't expect non-IE uses of Trident to disappear, since MS makes it fairly easy to embed in programs that could use some basic HTML-fu(though I was interested to see that Adobe's help program is now based on bits of Opera, presumably so they can reuse more of it on the mac side); but the case for the longterm survival of non-IE trident browsers is pitiful. IE is the default, and has a bunch of useful features for corporate type environments, so it gets all the corporate and clueless users; and how many of the people who actually comparison shop for browsers like Trident?(particularly with the existence of IEtab for FF)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Especially since one of the PC entries is Maxthon, which is just IE with a whole bunch of crap added to it. For those looking for alternatives in the Windows realm I would suggest Seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org] for those who want an "all in one" complete with HTML editor, IRC client and Email client. For those looking for speed, especially with older hardware(works well on as little as 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM) or simply want a quick, no frills web browser I would suggest Kmeleon [sourceforge.net]. For those who like social sites such as delicio
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Many mac users think I'm being a bit of a troll when I say they have a nice p(ersonal) c(omputer) in meatspace.
100% IBM-PC Compatible (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Funny)
About $500
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Bingo. There was a deliberate marketing campaign by Microsoft, right about when Windows 3.0 was about to emerge, to push the personal-computer press to stop saying "IBM-Compatable" or "Clone" and start saying "PC" when speaking of the computers that would soon be running Windows.
It was thought at the time that IBM would soon be running a different OS than the so-called clone market, so the old labels didn't apply.
Most Apple & Commodore users (among others) thought it was the stupidest thing ever, but M
No love for k-meleon?! (Score:2, Informative)
At my work, I'm forced to use a SLOT-A Athlon running XP with 32mb RAM. K-Meleon [sourceforge.net] allows the machine to function. All other graphical browsers bring it down to its knees.
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Needs a catchier, web 3.0 name. Line seamon-k.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Now it's Core 2 Quad bliss!!!
aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:5, Insightful)
opera
ie
mozilla (firefox/ netscape)
webkit (safarit/ chrome)
am i missing any (competitive, comprehensive) engines?
aren't all of the browsers here variations on these engines?
maxthon, for example, is ie based i believe
Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:4, Informative)
All that is to the good, but there are some problems, mostly because Maxthon uses the same Trident rendering engine used by Internet Explorer.
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Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:4, Interesting)
am i missing any (competitive, comprehensive) engines?
Don't forget Lynx and Amaya.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
hv3 [tkhtml.tcl.tk] uses tkhtml3, and, while it is not as complete as the big four rendering engines, it seems well ahead of the other light alternatives, in that it has Javascript and passes Acid 2 [freesoftwaremagazine.com], it uses little memory and is going to show up in at least one distro's repo [happyassassin.net].
Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:4, Funny)
I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...
Hey, now. There's nothing wrong wi
-more-
Parent
Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...
Handy for Gentoo installs tho.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Layout_engines [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_layout_engines [wikipedia.org]
Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:5, Informative)
That's right, all current browsers use one of four layout engines, or derivitives thereof.
Gecko (Firefox)
Trident (Internet Explorer)
Presto (Opera)
KHTML (Konquerer, Safari via WebKit fork)
Writing a layout engine is, I expect, very difficult so I'd say starting from scratch is only for the brave.
There are other layout engines but they are generally not compliant with the latest standards, with the possible exception of this one (although it is in alpha):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tkhtml [wikipedia.org]
There is more to a browser than the layout engine though.
Dan
Parent
Maxthon == myie2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Maxthon was originally named myie2, and was basically a way to "skin" Internet Explorer. They have added more features, but they're still using IE under the hood. I used to use Maxthon exclusively before tabbed IE7 came out, but now I use Firefox. :0)
Re:Maxthon IE-based (Score:5, Insightful)
Incidentally, the maxthon wikipedia entry -- like so many wikipedia entries for products -- is just a PR piece, clearly written by someone with marketing links to the browser. After all, if wikipedia entries also come within the first 10 results on Google, then making sure your message is in the wikipedia entry is the best and easiest form of SEO there is.
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Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
No they don't (Score:5, Informative)
6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
Unless I've missed it there is one thing that none of them do as well as Firefox and that is block ads. The browser extensions like this are the one thing that, at least for me, puts Firefox head and shoulders above the rest.
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Re:No they don't (Score:4, Informative)
OmniWeb (my browser of choice) has been blocking adds very well for a long time (much longer than other browsers). It even allows you to set per-website preferences for that (and most other preferences). It started out just blocking certain image sizes, then expanded to off-site images, then got regular expressions. And it has held those for a while. The only issues I have are that you can't selectivly block flash images, and that it does not offer the ability to reflow the document as if there was never an image there.
And there are a number of features that OmniWeb has ad for a while that FireFox is just getting around ot copying now: saving the windows that were open when you quit, per-site prefereences, replicating bookmaks/history/etc to a WebDAV server, etc...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Who do you think first implemented tabs?
(Hint: It was on a browser that ran on Windows 3.1 and was written by a company later bought by AOL.)
Mozilla and Opera were VERY late to the game with tabbed browsing.
Comparing related to engines (Score:4, Insightful)
The interface gives bells and whistles mainly, but the engine in the end is what makes a site you need work or not.
more reasons (Score:3, Informative)
True, but not the only reason: it's also a damn slick piece of technology and surprisingly intuitive in its initial phase.
There's a reason they were 'lost in the shuffle' (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, Opera is not a forgotten browser and has quite a big following. Maxthon outlived its usefulness as "IE with tabs" when IE7 came out. Chrome was interesting because of its threaded design (ie individual tabs can't crash the whole thing, in theory), its specially-developed V8 JavaScript engine and its focus on making web apps part of the desktop. Slapping a different GUI on Gecko/WebKit, along with a general lack of support for add-ons and other crucial pieces of the browsing experience, does not persuade a lot of people to switch to something "new." Especially when that "new" thing is just a downgraded version of what they're currently using.
a useful bit of research for you on TEXTAREA: (Score:4, Interesting)
recently i was tasked with upgrading a bit of inhouse web 2.0 data entry software, and i had to add spellcheck, which of course is extremely easy: just use firefox. which floored longtime msie users
but then, upon further research, i found out about dynamic textarea resizing, a useful little feature for lots of data entry, while using chrome. you just click and drag the corner of the textarea to make it bigger (or smaller). very nifty
and upon even more research, i found out safari supports both dynamic resizing and spellchecking, AND a grammar checking feature (underlines green, as well as red for misspelt words like in firefox)
all of the mac users in my office were all smiles when i proposed we switch to safari company wide
so, for data entry with lots of textareas on the webpage, i summarize the following for you:
firefox: spellchecking
chrome: dynamic resize
safari: spellchecking, dynamic resize AND grammar checking
Re:Windows != PC (Score:4, Informative)
Please don't use the term "PC" when you mean to say "Windows." It's bad enough that Apple continues to push this belief that PCs inherently run Windows in their marketing (as well as being inherently different from a hardware standpoint, something that was one true but stopped being so after 2006), but on Slashdot?
It is a commonly accepted term and frankly it's way too late to change it now. Basically all you're going to do is confuse people for the benefit of... wee... being literal to the acronymn.
Parent
Re:Windows != PC (Score:4, Funny)
Please don't use the term "CSMatt" when you mean to say "pedant".
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