PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera

prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Opera 7.51, noting: 'Security concerns aren't the only reason to seek an alternative [to Internet Explorer]. IE's slow rendering engine and dearth of privacy features may plant the thought in some iconoclastic minds that it may not be the best browser for everyone.' 4 stars for Firefox and 3.5 for Opera, so looks like a Firefox win, although the editors do point out FF's troubles with DHTML as well as Opera issues with JavaScript."

Alright Mozilla

[bigberk]

Mozilla [mozilla.org] rises from the dead (or at least a deep sleep) and goes mainstream rather quickly. Impressive :)

User-Agent stats?

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

Has anyone been tracking Firefox/Mozilla in the User-Agent stats for a large site to see if it is truly pulling browsershare from IE? The last mention we had from the Slashdot admins was that Slashdot was 90% Internet Explorer, is this on the decline? Are these stats publicly available?

Re:User-Agent stats?

[Em Adespoton]

User-Agent stats are pretty much meaningless for Firefox, unless you include pages that say "This page only supports Mozilla Firefox" in the statistic -- many people browse using firefox with the UA set to IE so they can access the sites that would otherwise lock them out.

Re:Last Straw

[Anita Coney]

I use Firefox on my system. My wife uses IE. I recently ran a spyware scan on both. Can you guess which computer was infected?

Go Firefox Go

[ErikRed1488]

Being the resident tech guy in my family and circle of friends, I'm tasked with supporting all their computers. I do it free of charge for my family and work for beer when it comes to friends. With all the malware that infects Windows PCs through Internet Explorer I've been quite busy. I finally decided to install Firefox on all their PCs. As a condition of ongoing support, they must continue to use Firefox. Since I've institued this policy, they far happier with their online experience, no pop-ups, almost no ads (Adblocker rules!), and it's faster. Not only that, but my time supporting their PCs has gone down to almost nothing.

Now that the Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)3 organization I think I may have to insist that the family/friends make a little donation.

Re:Alright Mozilla

[TastyWords]

If they're going to chop away a few stars for those things, then they're going to have to knock IE to ** because of security and constant patches. That is, until the Microsoft people send Guido to proofread the newsprint before it's sent and strongarms them into changing it.
Seriously, I'd be interested to see how they'd rate IE is against them, head-to-head-to-head...

Does MS really care anymore?

[Mitleid]

I'm curious; Microsoft has really given up on IE development over the past few years. The last major release was version 6, and that was well over 3 years ago to the best of my recollection. Could it be that MS no longer sees web browsers as a viable resource for their future strategy? I really have no speculation on what they might have up their sleave, but MS hasn't been one to necessarily drop the ball like this. From a security standpoint, one could say they really screwed the pooch, but as far as releasing a snazzy new version or anything to gloss over the problems under the hood, they've kept their hands off.

Faster and More secure

[dhartman]

I have a few clients who had previously insisted on remaining with IE because "it works best with the other Microsoft programs". However, when I removed the latest pile of spyware/adware and insisted that they at least TRY Firefox they had nothing but good things to say. Their 13 year old even says that "Hey dad, this is like waayy faster than IE". There have only been a few sites which 'require' IE (some due to incompetent web page coders who determine on their own that "this page won't render correctly with Mozilla", then block access using Javascript).

Linux might not be ready for general public acceptance on their desktop, but using Open Source software such as Firefox, Open Office etc is the first step towards that acceptance. If you don't NEED Windows to run a program, it becomes alot easier to switch the underlying OS.

Re:User-Agent stats?

[Grey Ninja]

Just from one website catering to web developers of course, but here's some stats [w3schools.com]. It shows general trends at the very least. There was also a poll about it on gamefaqs.com a while ago, and about 20% of people claimed to be using Mozilla, or a variant of it.

slow rendering engine?

[VoiceOfRaisin]

this is the one thing i MISS about IE. firefox is definately slower at rendernig, and before you say it, yes ive done all the speed tweaks. anyone saying this hasnt done tests and is just spewing anti ms fud. other than rendering speed firefox is better in almost all other aspects i find.

my only problems with firefox

[spacerodent]

the only downside to firefox I've found are problems with web sites designed ONLY to work with IE. I've only had the problem with a few web sites and hopfully as firefox gets more well known and excepted people will stop that kind of stupidity.

Re:User-Agent stats?

[SLot]

While not a large site (5000-10000 hits per month) , I'm seeing 1.6, 1.4 & 1.7 mozilla references in the top ten user-agents for the first time in two years. To go from no instances to three of the top 10 in one month made me happy.

Re:Last Straw

[southpolesammy]

Actually, you almost hit on what I think really needs to be done next to really get Mozilla into critical mass area. And that is to do current reviews of IE. For every new review and push towards Mozilla and/or Opera, we need to give everyone the reasons why this is beneficial.

OTOH, if an unbiased review of IE can produce comparable results, then at the very least, it gives the Mozilla and Opera folks a good idea of where to go next in developing the Uber-browsers. However, I have a hard time believing that IE can compare anymore, save for the annoying habit of web developers coding for IE only.

It's only a matter of time...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Before FireFox becomes the target off major exploits. Hopefully Firefox will stand up against it, and the Open source world will respond as fast as expected.

Recently played with Firefox...

[StressGuy]

Also used Opera for a while. I really liked Opera, but it did have problems with javascript. Interesting to see that they are still working on that.

As for Firefox, I still like plain old Mozilla better but looking forward to version 1.0.

For me, as things stand right now. I like Mozilla the best with Konqueror coming in second.

Re:Does MS really care anymore?

[leperkuhn]

Well they worked on it till they had a browser monopoly, then due to simple economics, stopped working on it. I believe that is one of the fundamental problems with monopolies, sort of like communism.

Re:"IE's slow rendering engine" WTF?

[Creepy Crawler]

For one, IE does rendering many times VERY BAD.

CSS is nearly non-existant.
PNG, whats that? Alpha colors, we dont do em!
And then there's just plain rendering inconsistencies. What you see is NOT what you get!!

Mozila hopes to implement the STANDARDS, not be super-fast. After all, computers will just get faster as time goes on. Why not do it correct and not as fast. Its the Unix Way.

Re:Does MS really care anymore?

[globalar]

1) Microsoft wants to give users an incentive to upgrade in the future. Mozilla Firefox, for example, has a majority of the functionality endusers actually need. There is little incentive to upgrade Mozilla (I'm speaking of the nontechnical majority) apart from things users typically do not understand (security, bugfixes, etc.). If IE were a real competitor for Mozilla, there would be less incentive to upgrade Windows in the future.

2) Microsoft doesn't want to appear to copy or compete with an open source, free product. How can something free compete with something from Microsoft? That's the last question they want to hear from users, shareholders, etc. In fact, once a browser war started, Mozilla would not only be on top but would call the shots. That's not a position Microsoft wants to be in. Perhaps, that is a position Microsoft refuses to be in.

I have not seen XP SP2 releases so I can't speak to changes made there.

Re:Mozilla, Opera and Firefox...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Twice now, I've made the mistake of letting IE users check out a web site on my computer. Both times, I had Mozilla running with about 6 tabs loaded, so I opened another tab for them to use.

They load up their web site, read it for about 5 minutes then close the browser.. then wonder why I'm upset that they closed the application. I was still using that damnitt!!

Mozilla and Hotmail

[WormholeFiend]

I recently installed Mozilla, but I still need my hotmail account... Even if Mozilla is set as my main browser and main emailware, when I click a link from an email in my Hotmail inbox, it opens IE... and when I click the "email" button in MSN Messenger, it opens Outlook.

Is it possible to castrate this annoyance?

Re:User-Agent stats?

[kannibal_klown]

Unfortunately, Opera can EASILY change it's ID to make it appear to be another browser (it's an option in the main menu). I currently have it set to "Opera," but I THINK by default it might even be "IE". Besides, many people just leave it at that because some sites won't work right without it (particularly sites some sites with shitty login authentication). But while I think Opera is personally the best out there, I understand it has a very low usage count compared to IE and mozilla, and just about every psuedo-modern Mac uses Safari. So, I'm not that surprised it doesn't rank on the list.

Re:Best Quote

[Plutor]

This is actually a big issue in the development "community". Although the organization itself has resolved its position -- that non-compliant feature support is a slippery slope -- marking bugs as "WONTFIX" or "INVALID" in Bugzilla ends in dozens of duplicate bugs. The fourth most-reported bug [mozilla.org] (bug 25537) is in fact requests for a non-compliant (and MSIE-originating) feature -- alt tags as tooltips.

This isn't the only one, either. Backslashes in URLs (bug 93197) is another one that comes to mind where Mozilla is between a rock and a hard place. Either Mozilla looks broken if you try to visit a moderately complex page created by Word, or it will effectively send the message that "buggy HTML is okay". Arguably, Mozilla's voice is still a small one in the fight, but say they become big. Do they keep doing things The Wrong Way? Or do they fix it, and then all of the developers who learned coding on Microsoft products and thought it was the right way file bugs?

I support them sticking to their principles. Poor HTML markup (and non-standard DHTML) should be scorned. That's what "Tech Evangelism" bugs are for.

Re:Alright Mozilla

[gmack]

In all fairness there is one other site that makes good use of ActiveX: housecall.antivirus.com.

It's great when you need to quickly scan a customer machine without installing anything or running updates on whatever happens to be there already.

I don't think 2 useful sites justify that travasty of a feature though.

One happy Firefox user!

[Luscious868]

I've been using Firefox for a few months now and I absolutely love it. The popup blocking is great, tabbed browsing makes working with multiple open web sites easy, find as you type is a real time saver and so is the built in Google search bar. The compact UI is cool as well because more screen realistate is devoted to the website I'm lookking at.

I can't recommend Firefox highly enough. If you enable Automatic Updates in Windows, there's really no reason to use IE. I've only come across a site or two that required IE in order to display correctly and when it happened I fired off a note to the webmaster.

If you haven't tried Firefox and are using IE what in the world are you waiting for? The worst that can happen is that you decided you don't like it and uninstall it. When you compare that to just some of the annoying things that can and do happen when running IE (spyware, malware, constant pop-ups, constant security issues, etc) trying Firefox becomes a no brainer.

Work computers

[billybob]

You of course are forgetting to realize that many of us are FORCED to use Windows and IE in our work environments. And how could one let the day go by without catching up on the latest slashdot news at least several times during your 8 hours of hell? :)

PS - I'm posting this from work :)

Re:User-Agent stats?

[slashflood]

Check out Googles Zeitgeist [google.com] (scroll down a bit). It's very odd that the statistics of Google are so very different to everything else I've seen so far. Our website (not at all OSS related) has about 600k visits a month and I can see "alternative" browsers rising. IE looses 1 percent every month.

Re:Mozilla, Opera and Firefox...

[timmyd]

Why don't people just realize that once you open your web browser you should just leave it open?! Why are you even on your computer? :P

I do this also, but after a few days of leaving firefox open, it tends to use a lot of ram. This isn't a problem for me though recently because I upgraded to 1280MB. Here is an example with an uptime of less than three days (I just added ram then):

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6452 timmy 15 0 161m 139m 40m S 0.0 11.1 35:17.66 firefox-bin
6456 timmy 16 0 161m 139m 40m S 0.0 11.1 0:00.16 firefox-bin
6457 timmy 16 0 161m 139m 40m S 0.0 11.1 0:06.82 firefox-bin
6461 timmy 16 0 161m 139m 40m S 0.0 11.1 0:12.63 firefox-bin
6286 root 15 0 182m 68m 119m S 10.6 5.4 45:36.18 X
7355 timmy 15 0 86000 28m 69m S 0.0 2.2 2:58.07 stardict
25376 timmy 15 0 31116 23m 13m S 0.0 1.8 0:14.31 emacs
6425 timmy 15 0 78636 21m 67m S 0.0 1.7 6:28.32 gaim

Re:Dearth of Privacy Features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that still completely disables cookies is a tinfoil-hat nutjob.

I've known otherwise smart people that disable them, thinking they were an invasion of privacy. Because, as we all know, cookies (which are by definition set by the server) transmit your SSN, credit card information, birth date, and mother's maiden name directly to leethackers.com, as they are psychic masters, able to read thoughts directly out of your brain.

Non-Free Browser Still Alive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is a non-free browser which managed to survive the MS domination of the market. I have been using (purchasing) Opera since version 3.60.

A shareware surviving the browser war is something by itself irrespective of anyone's review.

A slow computer will not work with the other browsers as good as it works with Opera. The newer versions became more buggy compared to the older versions, but from my experience, it still better than the other alternatives; furthermore, you get a browser, email, chatting, ect in under 4 MB.

Re:Proof is in the Pudding

[horza]

If there's one thing that I couldn't fault IE on is the fact that it actually displays pages pretty fast.

For me it's far slower than Firefox. And every modern browser has gone backwards in my opinion from the original browsers which had progressive table rendering. I'm sick of waiting for ages for a page to render just because the designer put the whole page in one large table. It's not too difficult, even 10 years ago I've seen complex deeply nested tables rendering progressively in real-time... and this is on 10 year old hardware.

Phillip.

Re:Alright Mozilla

[PommeFritz]

ActiveX is good for one purpose -- Windows Update.

I beg to differ. I see no reason why Windows Update should be done from within a web browser, with some javascript and ActiveX stuff thrown in the mix. Why, why is there not a standalone program to fetch the windows updates?
If the automatic update installer service can do this for you, (probably without using the windowsupdate web site at all), why do we still have to have IE around for the manual Windows Update? I want to get rid of it! (IE that is)