What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera 542
prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""
Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Informative)
Heh. Hah. HA HAHA HAHAHA!
*ahem*
Sorry about that.
"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser. Why? A compliant website uses only features defined in the W3C specs, or only uses other features in ways that will gracefully degrade in compliant browsers (though some purists will object to the latter definition).
For a browser, does it mean something that implements every part of a W3C standard? Or one that implements part of a standard but makes sure not to contradict it anywhere? Is it OK if it implements nonstandard features like those used in AJAX? And which standards? HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript are a good start, but what about SVG? XHTML? XForms?
The specs are complex enough that there still is no web browser that implements all of even the current versions of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At best, you can measure relative compliance, in which case Firefox and company, Opera, and Safari are all well ahead of even IE7. But waiting for a "W3C Compliant" browser is going to take a while.
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Informative)
ECMAScript is an ECMA standard, not a W3C standard.
DOM and Javascript DOM bindings, on the other hand, are W3C standards.
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Insightful)
So true. That's true actually for any standard. Furthermore, it's incredible how many small spots are left uncovered by specifics, and result in browsers implementing their own interpretation. Quite often, you've guessed it, they turn out different behavior.
Take the HTTP header that specifies the name of the file to be downloaded. The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF, Explorer treats it as garbage, Mozilla et al. interprets it as UTF. That's one case. I urlencode it, Explorer decodes it and shows the UTF chars, Mozilla et al. presents it with the % codes still in place. Again, bummer.
Both cases, one of them did something wrong and the other something good. Actually, it's not even a case of absolute "good or bad", it's more about taking the liberty to expand upon the specs. What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Informative)
In both cases you did something wrong, and the browsers either did something to try and salvage things, or followed the spec and gave you garbage. If anything, I'd expect non-ASCII text in headers to be encoded as per RFC-2047, but I doubt any browsers implement that.
What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?
Non-ASCII text in headers is explicitly forbidden.
what we need for compliant browsers (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.
Re:what we need for compliant browsers (Score:3, Interesting)
13.16 Alpha channel processing
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most wi
Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.
Anybody see standards as having a different purpose?
Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages?
Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?
Re:Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:5, Funny)
You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?
Re:Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.
We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).
Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.
Re:Shouldn't be that complicated (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Interesting)
-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)
-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...
Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:3, Interesting)
You touch upon your problems with high memory usage in FF. Other people around here have complained about this as well, including stories about memory leakage
When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:5, Interesting)
is that just too hard for a multiplatform? bitmap scaling in software is trivial btw, go google it FF-devs.
Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea is that the layout changes to suit the viewer. If I view a page on a 200 inch screen at a resolution of 102400x76800 I expect that it's not going to look the same as when I view it on a 6 inch screen at 400x400. The point is not to write the page so that it forces the client to show it in one particular way, it's to design a layout that can stand to be streched and skewed and still be readable.
There is no right way to view a standards compliant web page, however viewing it in a non-stan
Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Regardless of which..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
It is only recently that the renewed competition, and the addition of more complex web apps, that has brought IE back into the MS managers sights, and thus back as a commercial interest. I think we will see over the next year, just how much commercial interest in IE will speed up it's development.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, Microsoft has a lot of commercial interest in the Win32-platform (Windows-licenses, MSDN-subscriptions, courses, etc.) which is of course endangered by the Web.
That is why they wanted to establish their own network (MSN) with their own proprietary protocols and their own proprietary formats. They failed miserably and now MSN is just a normal ISP and uses Unix protocols and formats like anybody else. Microsoft did not "win" the Browser war, the whole Internet Explorer thing was damage control. After Netscape was dead, Microsoft was stuck with something they didn't really want. (An IE that was dominating but was running with open protocols and formats.) The better IE is, the more attractive the web becomes in comparison to Win32. So of course they let it rot, making IE better would have been counterproductive.
After Firefox started to destroy domination by becoming so big that it can no longer be ignored (over 10% and rising is too much to ignore, even if it's still a minority) therefore Microsoft fell back to damage control mode.
However, there are several reasons why IE will NEVER regain total domination:
All these factors combined will prevent IE from regaining significant marketshare and will cause further decline for IE in the long term that might be slowed but not stopped by Microsoft.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
One word: Flashblock [mozdev.org]
Here endeth the lesson.
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
IE is more stable than FireFox.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.
I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.
*Burn karma burn baby*
PS. Image/flash processing mostly.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!"
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.
Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.
Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.
Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Funny)
MS DOS is more stable than DR DOS.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, MS DOS crashes once per day while DR DOS crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to MS DOS, where Windows 3.11 loads perfectly on it, DR DOS takes forever to load it _and still reqiuires config.sys gymnastics_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my machine.
I have to restart DR DOS once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.
Yes this is a rant, so please, Digital Research, do something about your horrible WFW incompatibilities that existed for as long as I could remember.
*Burn karma burn baby*
PS. Use a non-shit OS, retard.
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.
But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?
Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.
And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.
If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.
Re:Whatever (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.
I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.
Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.
And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).
It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.
Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.
r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it
It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.
The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.
It's not worth it anymore.
Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.
Re:Whatever (Score:5, Informative)
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 10240);
Re:Whatever (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, I hate it when post like the parent and grand-parent get modded insightful, because well, they are not. Since when has it been the browser's fault when 3rd party plugins fail to work?
Not only is Flash a 3rd party plugin, so it has nothing to do with the Firefox team, but it is also Proprietary and close source, which means even if the Firefox developer wanted to fix it, they couldn't.
Quite frankly your arguments sound alot like those people who blame windows for running slowly and having adverts
I use FF under XP Pro, Mandrake and NT 4.0.. (Score:2)
Sounds like maybe you need a good clean-up. Thats where I usually start when programs start acting erratically.
Agreed - major performance problems with Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong Methods (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that's the reason. I think the FF devs would love to fix these issues, but haven't been able to. Furthermore, I think that this is because they built the beast the wrong way.
In the early days of the Mozilla project, they were building one big Communicator with lots of features and workarounds for broken sites and dog knows what else, all built upon a cross-platform framework with lots of abstractions and all. It
I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox doesn't support text-shadow (or, totally apropos nothing, display: inline-block for that matter), but Safari does, and tastefully applied, it's great to have around. Why IE doesn't pair its proprieta
Opera (Score:3, Interesting)
But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue. There are problems. I hope these problems will be fixed quickly because this is getting annoying, and even though I told DarkSin here [mozilla.org] that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.
Re:Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Opera (Score:2)
Re:Opera (Score:4, Informative)
That's like saying "I don't like Firefox because I don't like it".
Re:Opera (Score:5, Funny)
Okay. Fair enough. Let's see what "LeetKey" is...
LeetKey is similar to Russ Key... this extension allows typing and transliterating English into 1337 and other encoding schemes such as ROT13, Base64, HEX, URL etc. For some encodings this extension will translate the text back into English
Wow. What a blow it will be to Firefox if you drop active development of that. Christ.
Re:Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
A more useful extension: Ghostzilla? (Score:3, Insightful)
Please? Someone?
It seems to me, (Score:3, Funny)
Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG (Score:5, Informative)
http://svg.codebot.org/ [codebot.org]
Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG (Score:2)
Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG (Score:3, Informative)
So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.
Completely non-informative article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Completely non-informative article (Score:3, Interesting)
I've tried IE7 Beta 1 and let me tell you. They fucked up the UI in every single way possible. Rearranged everything known, and basicly implemented tabs in the poorest way I've ever seen it implemented.
Even people complaining about Opera's "untraditional" default UI, would praise Opera after seeing this mess. The best part? It can't be configured to work in a sane or usable way.
In short, from top and down: Tabs on top. Then the URL-bar. Then the toolbar and finally the menu-bar. In all honesty, you c
what about galeon? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what about galeon? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm getting tired of this (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm getting tired of this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm getting tired of this (Score:3, Informative)
What percentage of your time using a computer is spent using a browser? For most of us, it's a pretty significant percentage. That's what makes it important.
The Article is a Bit Misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside of the above, it is a pretty good article. Kudos to my fav. browser maker
Opera beats out Gecko (Score:5, Informative)
A few months ago I started using Opera again (I've used it since Windows 3.1 days, but not seriously since then) full time, it took some configuring, I changed some keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-T to open a new tab for a start), added a web developer type toolbar, rearranged some stuff, and got a nice skin for it. But man, it's just so much faster and more responsive than Firefox.
There are only three things I miss.. the abundance of plugins (some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee), Venkman, and a designMode/contentEditable API (rich text (html) editing in the browser). Opera 9 implements designMode now, so that just leaves 2 before Gecko browsers earn the "browser of 2nd to last resort" badge from me.
People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.
Re:Opera beats out Gecko (Score:3, Informative)
Try this [userjs.org].
Re:Opera beats out Gecko (Score:3, Informative)
take what you can get (Score:5, Funny)
good to see microsoft is upgrading the internet soon, we get to read about firefox and opera in a mainstream rag
Firefox 1.5 comes out today. (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox unfriendly to European languages (Score:5, Interesting)
German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.
Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.
We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.
A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.
Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?
Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages (Score:3, Informative)
A plea to Firefox developers... (Score:3, Insightful)
FF vs Fx (Score:4, Interesting)
My theory? (Score:2)
Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company! (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree.
Opera has done well by selling browsers. It's a company, after all, so they have to make money and can't rely on donations from others.
Today the company is growing at an incredible pace, and rather than losing that momentum on the desktop because they could have been huge and losing users, they are now tiny instead, and are gaining users. Firefox was there at the right time and people started switching. All Opera has t
Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company! (Score:3, Insightful)
What is "much profit", and what does this have to do with your initial claims that "Opera has messed up" and that they have never made money on the desktop? They've been expanding a lot the last few years to keep up with demand, and that costs money of course. That doesn't mean that the income has been going up too.
Opera has made plenty enough profit to survive and experience constant growth for many years.
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
I quite like using Opera as a browser, and as a mail client. Mouse gestures, tabbed browsing. I find it to be a nice browsing experience. I had used Firefox and Mozilla, but I have settled on using Opera as my browser of choice. Too each there own but I am quite happy that Opera keeps getting press, I think it is a quality browser.
Re:Opera? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)
So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera gets a lot of (undeserved) flak arround here because it's not open source. They gave away a free, ad supported, 100% functional version and it wasn't enough. Now they gave away registration keys, and i guess that's isn't enough either.
Stupid mods (Score:2, Interesting)
Perfectly valid point, Opera is one of the smallest browsers. I would rather use seamonkey than opera for several reasons:
* it's free and Free (FSF)
* it looks better
* runs better on linux
* XUL
* etc.
Re:Stupid mods (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.
Re:Stupid mods (Score:3, Insightful)
I really like Firefox, but i find Opera to be a much more polished browser (like i said earlier, specially in the UI department). Their Linux support is excellent aswell. It's cool, and it's free. No OSS, but *free*. What's to hate here? And this is from
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)
It sends a user-agent string that is enough to persuade most browser detection that it's IE, but it includes the word Opera -- and web log analysis tools are designed to recognize that.
This is Opera's default user-agent (from the page you linked):
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; OS) Opera X.Y
People do, in fact, understand that this user-agent refers to Opera, and they develop their log analysis tools to report that fact. I have never seen a web log analysis tool that didn't understand Opera's user-agent.
The traffic on the webservers I maintain shows Opera at around 0.09% of total hits, just behind Lynx.
Re:Opera? (Score:2, Interesting)
In all seriousness the percentage of people using Opera compaired to IE or even Firefox is trivial. Why not start talking about iCab or winamp's built in browser? Opera is and probably always will have a trivial userbase..
Re:Opera? (Score:2)
Any particular reasons for that?
Re:Avant Browser (Score:2, Informative)
If you are however content to use a IE based browser that fails in all the same ways that IE fails (security and standards compliant rendering being my main to beefs) then by all means go right ahead. But be forewarned your avant browser, is nothing but an IE skin, and in my opinion
Re:Avant Browser (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Avant Browser (Score:2, Funny)
You're wrong there. Avant has some features only available in IE, which makes it pretty special. From their FAQ [avantbrowser.com]:
Is Avant Browser a secure browser?
Yes, Avant Browser is secure. Since it's based on Internet Explorer, Avant Browser is as secure as Internet Explorer.
Re:Avant Browser (Score:2)
Re:Opera UI (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you can. Look under Tools / Preferences / Advanced.
can't change the layout to be what I like.
Ah, this is interesting. You see, I can't get FF to make it the layout I like (one of my main reasons for using Opera.) I have the address bar and the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, and no File Edit etc menus at the top. Last time I checked, it was either impossible or nearly so to get FF to do this. So, I understand what you mean about interface bei
Re:Opera UI (Score:3, Informative)
You mean like the option, "minimum font size (in pixels)"? Or the options that allow you (in the same part of preferences, "fonts") to define the default fonts and sizes for websites? Or perhaps do you mean the option to zoom in on any webpage (although that increases the size of images too...)
You've gotta check out IE Tab! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is old (Score:2)
Re:What competition? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:safari!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Mac. Just say NO(tm).
Re:Has firefox fixed updates? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shut FF down once a day (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.
The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...