Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers 291
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.
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Goodbye eWorld -- Hello web!
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You can pry cyberdog from my cold, dead hands
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Meh.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I ever use Lynx for is Googling how to configure X.org.
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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.
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if [ $# -ge 1 ]; then<br/>
F=`mktemp`<br/>
wget "$1" -O "$F"<br/>
ed "$F"<br/>
fi</code>
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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.
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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.
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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".
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.
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Well, the Nintendo DSi just launched a few weeks ago and for now it's only available in Japan.
I don't know if it will be enough to change global stats (even by 1%) once the DSi is released world-wide, but the fact is, Opera is available on a lot more platforms than anything else at the moment.
So you're right that, on paper at least, Opera doesn't have a huge marketshare. But then again I wonder how many of those Safari users are on Windows/OS X vs iPhone/iPod touch.
All I'm saying is, it's not that much trou
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Internet Explorer is bundled with windows and integrated to NT operating system.
Safari is bundled with Mac OS X but not integrated to Darwin operating system
Firefox is preinstalled on most of Linux distributions but not integrated to Linux operating system.
Opera is preinstalled and bundled on many software platoforms on telephones and handheld machines (or even game consoles). Question is, is it integrated any of the devices?
Konqueror is integrated to KDE desktop environment but not integrated to Linux oper
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Safari (well, WebKit) is just as integrated into Aqua as IE (Trident) is into the Windows GDI.
Both OS X and Windows use their respective rendering engines for a LOT of stuff in the OS.
And, any distro with GNOME has Gecko integrated with the desktop environment.
Opera isn't integrated with much of anything, other than set top boxes, IIRC.
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About time Mobile Safari [blogspot.com] started getting the respect it deserves...
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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]
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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.
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)
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I was interested to see that Adobe's help program is now based on bits of Opera
Are you sure? Since Adobe did the original port of WebKit to Windows, I'm amazed that they'd use Opera instead of it.
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Also, for some reason that I don't fully understand, OSX seems to be a good platform right now for small applications. I remember in the 90s there were tons and tons of little Windows shareware apps all over the place, and all of those dwindled down to a handful of actually good/useful applications. Right now, OSX seems to be in a shareware/freeware/FOSS boom.
I myself have a handful of $50 applications on my Mac that I've bought and that are pretty good. I never buy those sorts of little applications fo
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I find it interesting that they checked out 4 for the Mac and only 2 for the PC.
Does anyone else find it annoying that Mac users have a tendancy to use the term 'PC' as if it were a synonym for 'Windows'?
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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.
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I think it's also just assumed that people have a Windows computer at home, so to differentiate without getting into full-on discussions, people just say Mac instead of PC.
Note: I have both OS X and Windows running at home, and I don't really
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Yes, PC used to mean "Personal Computer", but with all the marketing from Microsoft and Apple, PC might as well be as generic as "computer running Windows". Regular people are now using computers, so a lot of the "technical details" are lost on the masses.
If you ask someone what they use to drive around, I guess most of them will not say "a car/a truck", but the brand/model of their car/truck. I suppose the same is now true of computers. You either have a Mac, a Dell, an HP (or "something you built yourself
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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
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100% IBM-PC Compatible (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Funny)
About $500
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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.
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At my work, I'm forced to use a SLOT-A Athlon running XP with 32mb RAM. K-Meleon allows the machine to function. All other graphical browsers bring it down to its knees.
How does that work? I couldn't even get Win2K to boot within the same day with 64 megs.
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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.
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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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-
Re:aren't there only 4 engines? (Score:4, Informative)
I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...
Handy for Gentoo installs tho.
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elinks2 is much better though - it can even render CSS colors in text mode!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Layout_engines [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_layout_engines [wikipedia.org]
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iCab 3.x [www.icab.de] used its own rendering engine back in the day. I guess 4.x has been rewritten to use Webkit.
Back in the day it was a great browser when your only alternatives under OS 9 (and 8) were Netscape or IE.
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
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As I understand, this circle came around already, and Konqueror has been ported from KHTML to WebKit in KDE4 (or is it still being ported?). So GP is correct, it's Trident/Gecko/WebKit/Presto.
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)
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Don't forget about Dillo.
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Just because they use the same engine doesn't mean they are the same. That's like saying why compare a Corvette to a GTO since they have the same engine;
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200280846198 [ebay.com]
I have both Camino and Firefox on my Mac. Camino gives me a more Aqua like feel, whereas Firefox 3 has more recent versions of the engine and some menu options not found in Camino.
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.
Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
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Yep. An "alternative" browser is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem.
Last time I checked, I was pretty darn happy with Safari on my Mac and Firefox on everything else.
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Says you. I say IE is the alternative, and a poor one at that.
(Also, IE is Windows-only. I said I use it on "everything else", which include Linux boxen.)
IE has gotten better (Score:2)
Says you. I say IE is the alternative, and a poor one at that.
I see people switching from Firefox to IE nowadays and with a bit more polish on the UI I could see myself switching to IE8 from Firefox.
Opera, Chrome, etc, aren't vastly superior to IE7 for the common fool anyway,
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IE is still the main browser.
Only to the Luddites dear. IE is for people that say things like "The other day I sent an internet and it never showed up".
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How about: "Find a browser that's not ever going to be mainstream enough to be a viable target for trojan writers, but still allows doing home banking?"
I'm all for Opera never making it into the top three.
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Yes, but features usually appear first in "alternative" browsers and then get implemented in the mainstream ones. (Tabs, mouse gestures, etc.)
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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.
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.
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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Opera has built-in image/plug-in blocking, so it's a good number two in that respect.
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There is also Safari (on OS X) and Opera (on everything) in case you don't want your browser to run like a drugged quadruple amputee and leak memory like a sieve.
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6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
Ah, but when you use these browsers, you can exercise a sense of superiority over your friends, for you have have chosen to walk a different path. A path that has fewer add-ons and support, but a different path, none the less.
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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.
Internet Explorer (Score:2, Funny)
I wouldn't really call ... (Score:2)
Maxthon, Camino or Epiphany browsers in their own right.
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Camino, however, was really the first modern, native OSX browser.
Back in the 10.1/10.2 days, you only had a few unappealing choices: IE for Mac with its terminal brokenness, truly horrible non-native Mozilla/Netscape (which was an absolute performance dog on a 350Mhz G3 with 256MB), the then expensive (like $50, iirc) OmniWeb with its ancient rendering engine, etc. etc.
Camino (Cameleon, I think it was called back then?) was a godsend.
I switched to Safari once 10.3 came out, as it performed better on the ha
Props to Opera (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Yes, who would ever use a browser like Firefox when it's just the Mozilla browser and Gecko engine with reduced functionality.
Also... (Score:2)
Let's talk about extensions (Score:2)
I'd rather talk about Chromium's nascent plans for extensions [chromium.org], which will hopefully bring AdBlock and NoScript (or at least similar functionality) to Chrome.
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
Pfft. (Score:2, Insightful)
Useless.
No linux coverage at all.
I just wish there was a linux browser besides firefox that supported extensions. With the design decisions being made by the firefox team lately, I'd love to switch. :P
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.
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Please don't use the term "PC" when you mean to say "Windows."
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.
Nonsense, you think it would have confused people if it said:
"They chose six candidates: Camino (for Mac), Maxthon (for Windows), OmniWeb (for Mac), Opera (both Mac and Windows versions) and Shiira (for Mac). Which is the best? It all depends on what you need from a browser."
???
Note I changed it from "the Mac" as Mac is the operating system primarily used on Apple computers and so "the Mac" sounds the lame to me.
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"They chose six candidates: Camino (for Mac), Maxthon (PC), OmniWeb (for Mac), Opera (both Mac and PC versions) and Shiira (for Mac). Which is the best? It all depends on what you need from a browser."
That version is shorter and it doesn't call for the ban of a term that's been in use for 10 or so years.
Re:Windows != PC (Score:4, Funny)
Please don't use the term "CSMatt" when you mean to say "pedant".
in other words (Score:2)
you want people to be more PC about using the term PC
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Apples have only been PC-compatible for, what, 3 years now? GOD FORBID you use a term a whole 3 years out-of-date! (Frankly you'll be lucky if people aren't still saying "PC" in 20 years, it's so established.)
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We must be using different Operas here. To be more prone to troyans that IE you need at least support ActiveX, you know. And yes, I'm from Russia.
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