A Cheat Sheet To All the Browser Betas 188
Harry writes "I can't remember another time when there were so many Web browsers in prerelease form — 2009 should be a really, really good year for final browser versions. I have posted a quick recap of the state of the upcoming versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari." It is nice to see a healthy market of competition driving innovation in a market that has been largely stagnant in recent history. What do other folks see on the scorecard?
Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9122719&intsrc=news_ts_head [computerworld.com]
Opera 10 alpha aces Acid3 browser test
Newest preview boosts browsing performance by 30%, claims Norwegian company
Re:Opera CSS3 let-down (Score:2)
As I mentioned in another posting regarding Opera 10 alpha:
No border-radius? *sniff*
Is it specified in some stupid way like Mozilla & Webkit do it?
Still no replies, so I dunno...that's not promising. I wants me some border-radius, multiple background image, and border image support! (among other things) A small subset of the major CSS3 features would go a LONG way.
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Isn't CSS 3 not officially out yet? I think that's why mozilla and webkit have weird ways to do it.
I believe border-radius has been in the CSS3 spec since the working draft from 2002. Should be time to standardize on 'border-radius' instead of 'moz-border-radius' or at least alias it to -moz-border-radius or something. As it is, one has to use -moz-border-radius and repeat with -webkit-border-radius to get it working in both, plus they each do individual corner specifications differently. Very irritating, b
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No, Opera, and every other browser, failed Acid 3*, then the developers made changes to try and pass the test, without any work at all in fixing the underlying problems that caused it to fail. If you want to be impressive, work on passing Acid 4.
*Opera was the least shitty iirc.
galeon? (Score:2)
Yet still galeon is my favorite browser. I have like 200 tabs in it, while in opera I have just about 30 tabs and in firefox just one window with 8 tabs...
Re:galeon? (Score:5, Funny)
Yet still galeon is my favorite browser. I have like 200 tabs in it, while in opera I have just about 30 tabs...
If you like tabs, you may be interested in another feature a lot of browsers have. Depending on the browser, it goes by various names -- "bookmarks," "favorites," et al. Check it out sometime!
Re:galeon? (Score:5, Funny)
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are you serious? I have right now 11 galeon windows with about 15 tabs in each.
Of course I'm using bookmarks, galeon has a nice feature "bookmark all tabs in a window into subfolder...". And I'm using galeon more than firefox or opera, just because it's damn so good at handling hundreds of tabs open. And still uses less memory than firefox 3.0.3 with only 15 tabs open.
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Well it's just a matter of browsing habits. I tend to keep good stuff forever until I finally am in the mood to go through it (and read/hack/implement/apprecieate/whatever) then bookmark it and close. So they usually wait few months. If I bookmarked it immediately and closed I'd never remember to go back to it, because I have just so many goddamn bookmarks. Although really very well organized I think :) Bookmarks are to remember old useful stuff. Non-closed tabs are to remember new useful stuff.
And of cours
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A bookmark is just a reference to something you've looked at and might be interested in in the future. Your browsing experience would become far too cluttered if everything was always kept open. As much as the desktop paradigm has limits to its power as an analogy, I think it's applicable in this situation. You don't keep 20 books lying open at the pages you care about-- you put stickies on them and put them away-- to keep clutter manageable. the same goes for browser bookmarks. even if the contents of the
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The Firefox "smart bookmarks" feature is quite nice too, but honestly, I want to tag my own bookmarks, and share or not share them with others (del.icio.us) explicitly, and not have my browser 'helpfully' remember all the annoying pop-unders a Poker site happens to display.
See, I have additional knowledge the computer doesn't have -- I know what's important, and what's not. Now granted, bookmarking should be MUCH simpler; I'd love a simple true/false box of some form on each tab allowing me to mark it as '
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Actually, if you think about how Microsoft designed their VM system (mapping an app's VM to its EXE file), or how the Apple Newton Soup system worked, it would be possible in many cases to allow all software to be essentially in stasis at the same time, mapped into actual RAM as necessary.
Of course, in practice, it won't work because people like using more software than they have VM to handle such a situation, and software likes to believe its always running and deserves cycles.
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I'm using opera too :) I have 3 opera windows open with roughly 30 tabs total. And it fares quite good. But it doesn't have the features which made me to use galeon, so I'm not going to switch.
BTW: switch? Switch? I'm using all those three browsers (galeon 150 - 200 tabs, 290MB of RAM; opera 30 tabs, 160 MB of RAM; firefox 8 tabs, 160 MB of RAM) for different kind of stuff. It's just another way to organize things on my desktop. Sometimes I fire up dillo, seamonkey, konqueror or epiphany if I need even more
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I have like 200 tabs in it,
The slightest bit bored at work, are we?
Acid (Score:3, Funny)
Google Chrome browser (Score:5, Funny)
Reasons not to download it: ...you can't get the Google Toolbar for it.
Surely this should have been in the "Reasons to download it" it section!
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IMO, if it becomes part of Chrome and you cannot remove it from Chrome, it become a reason NOT to use it.
Re:Google Chrome browser (Score:5, Funny)
Is anyone expecting Google to ever leave beta?
Speedy Chrome (Score:2)
I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don
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I'm not a big fan of add-ons either, but I find some sort of anti-flashiness blocker absolutely essential. No flash, no animated gifs, no dancing javascriptiness unless I say it should go.
Get that into Chrome and I'm all over it. I keep it around for certain pages that I know don't suck but which need a performance boost.
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I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.
On a 2.5 year old $600 box running Vista, Firefox loads along with my home page (a my yahoo page with a lot of stuff going on) within 2 seconds after a cold boot. You're really short on RAM, running a computer from the 90s, or you need to reinstall Firefox. The browser itself opens with no detectable lag (meaning no more than 150 ms or so) after I run it, and the content fully loads 1-1.5 seconds later.
Firefox will soon make up the difference (Score:2)
...by removing all the crap from web pages.
All that flash+advertising isn't free to download.
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"My OS is slow and broken, so thats why I think Chrome is better than Firefox."
Huh? I don't get it. While I can see why this is a good thing, how often are you rebooting your computer for this to really matter? Oh, and it shouldn't matter even then, because your OS shouldn't be so broken that this would even be a consideration!
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I wasn't specifically referring to the vendor OS, as much as I was the OS configuration. However, I have found that regardless of the configuration, Windows seems to have bigger problems with this out of the box (even with a clean installation). Yet, Linux certainly isn't immune, its customizable enough that it can be as bad as you want it to be.
Slashdot Disagree Posting (Score:2)
I disagree with the summary. These days, having a ton of browsers in beta/prerelease probably means they're all buggy, but they'll be released as betas anyway, and if you'll pardon the pun, we may never see polish on the Chrome! But, perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic - we may not have to suffer through the betas if the rolling blackouts take down our computers.
what the deuce? (Score:2)
Overall, how promising is it? Iâ(TM)d never argue that improving support for Web standards or souping up performance is insignificant, but overall, it looks like this is Opera 10.0 not because itâ(TM)s a huge deal but because the last version was 9.6. In other words, itâ(TM)s only .4 of a great big upgrade. If that.
What the hell is "it's only .4 of a great big upgrade" supposed to mean?
What about Opera 10 using a totally different engine? And since when are we back on measuring software by its version number?
The rest of the article is just as pitiful, if not entirely wrong.
Opera's mail client could always delete old mail, the new thing here is that it can automatically delete after n days.
OWB always missing from the list?? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://strohmayer.org/owb/ [strohmayer.org]
It gets 100/100 on ACID3, check the screen shots on the site.
Geez!!
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It got 100/100, but still failed the test on a number of small points...
http://amigaowb.googlepages.com/screenshot2.png [googlepages.com]
Opera can block adverts if you want it to (Score:4, Informative)
This may be off-topic; if so....sorry.
I've liked Opera each time I tried it although the interface is different it's a damn good browser. The reason it never grabbed me was the lack of any useful (Chuck Norris trivia anyone???....I'm serious, they have one so I guess at least one person on the planet has a use for it) plugins, specially for blocking adverts. In the settings you can disable JavaScript etc but there's no way to block adverts. Well I found one....and it works.
http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/index.dml/tag/urlfilter.ini [opera.com]
The above link explains how to create a blank urlfilter.ini file in your Opera profile directory, copy and paste some urls to filter out and restart Opera. Every site I tried before and after, it was like surfing in Firefox with AdBlock.....bliss. I don't think it's perfect, it depends on the site and the type of advert but it's a damn good start. It's also easy to add a new line to the text file if you come across an adserver not on the list.
Having said all that, I'm still blown away by how fast Opera is, even WITH adverts. Being able to block them helps speed that up further. I've been a Firefox user for so long that I don't think I could switch but Opera is a damn good second browser for site testing.
I recently tried Epiphany with Webkit, it may be one to watch for the future but it's a bit early yet.
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http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/
You are welcome.
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You don't need to manually edit urlfilter.ini to block ads in Opera!
Ever since version 9.0 (I think), you just right-click anywhere on the page and choose "Block Context" from the menu, then click on all ads on the page you want to be gone, and click "Save". That's it.
Or, if you want to edit the list directly, it's in Tools -> Preferences -> Content -> Blocked Content.
The main remaining use for urlfilter.ini - which is still there - is to get premade blacklists from other sources.
Yeah, Right (Score:2)
Yeah, lots and lots of versions as they fix lots and lots of bugs due to everyone trying to beat everyone else to market.
on the scorecard? (Score:2)
Bit's of my brain as I try to deal with cross browser Javascript incompatibilities. I think it will go something like this...
aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - BOOOOM
for the ignorant anti-microsoft bloviating: (Score:2)
onhashchange
http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/03/ie8-html5-and-a/ [pathf.com]
msie8 is the first to implement this event. don't know what that is? ajax is the most important technological development in browsers in recent history (invented with microsoft's xmlhttprequest object, btw). however, ajax breaks history and bookmarking (can't go forward/ back, can't bookmark deep into an ajax session)
a way around this has been to hijack the hash part of anchor links, since they stay on the same page, but create a history. initia
dear firefox: (Score:5, Insightful)
fucking support disable-output-escaping already
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168 [mozilla.org]
your reason for not supporting it is arrogance:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XSL_Transformations_in_Mozilla_FAQ_(external) [mozilla.org]
really? a desperately needed piece of functionality is bad xml?
you had pretty much the same holier-than-thou attitude behind your resistance to supporting innerHTML, and you reversed yourself, for good reason: its what programmers need and want. programmers are your friends. keep us as your friends
we shouldn't have to spend time coding special scenarios to support your browser, for the most stubborn and shortsighted of reasons
leave that kind of hatred for msie, ok? thanks
oh, i see you share their arrogance (Score:3, Insightful)
so i write a comment board. someone wants to put < > & " ' < > & " ' in their comments. rather than just disable-output-escaping, now i have to (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString the content, and then tediously work through all of the markup, then turn it back into a node tree
in javascript. or on the server. everytime i want to display the fucking content. special, for firefox. not opera, not safari, not chrome, not msie. those browsers have s
its your fault (Score:2)
for not understanding that messiness is an aspect of dealing with real life constraints, not simply bad code
why? (Score:2)
what's wrong with client side transformations?
except for firefox, that is
Stop modding comments with browser summaries up (Score:2)
And just read the artcile, which is OK, and certainly better than most of the user-submitted comments with their own insightful (ahem) judgements.
Ah yes, I know this is /. and no I'm not new here...
Mind you, nothing in the article that most people here will not already know... /end grumpy rant
Prerelease Forever (Score:2)
For most of human history, all browsers were in prerelease. Until 1995, only a few weren't in prerelease, like www and w3.
In fact, almost all browsers are still in prerelease. As they always are, except momentarily when they are released.
And this isn't just pedantry. All these browsers have the low quality that prerelease versions of software used to have before browsers were released, in the mid 1990s. They've lowered the quality of released software of all types down to what rarely would have been release
Stagnation? (Score:2)
Whereinthefuck have you been for the last five years?
Chrome built-in stealth (Score:2)
Firefox has stealther, but its an add-on and so obvious that you've installed it to look at porn. (Obviously you could always set and reset privacy settings everytime, but that could be a pain)
But Chrome has a stealth feature built in, so you're not a fiend just for having it. Although you're still a fiend. But a fiend with some shame at least!
Webkit nightlies (Score:2)
Re:Whom is the better? (Score:5, Insightful)
There really aren't any clear winners. Opera has acid compliance in its favor. Firefox is extremely popular, easy to use and has plenty of features.
IE, while it may still lack acid compliance is making progress on the features front and security is supposedly improving. In the long run, the increase in popularity for alternative browsers will hopefully steer them all towards greater standards compliance leading to a big win for end users and content developers.
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IE also lacks a supported OSX version. So it's a non-starter for a growing segment of the market.
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There really aren't any clear winners. Opera has acid compliance in its favor. Firefox is extremely popular, easy to use and has plenty of features.
Firefox's simplicity and robust features are all that matter in the real world for most people. Most people aren't going to use a browser because it's standards-compliant - they'll use it for one or more of the following reasons:
1) It's easy to use.
2) It has a lot of add-ons and customization capabilities.
3) It's safer through a combination of good security practices in the programming and continually updating anti-phishing features.
4) It's not IE - a lot of people use Firefox, Opera, etc. as a big "fuck
Re:Whom is the better? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course there is. (Score:3, Informative)
I know you're trolling, but: http://www.ieaddons.com/ [ieaddons.com]. (Mostly crap, but then, so is https://addons.mozilla.org/. [mozilla.org])
Even better: http://www.bhelpuri.net/Trixie/ [bhelpuri.net]. Trixie enables user scripts (ala Greasemonkey) in IE.
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I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.
Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom f
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Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser. If the website is designed in some dumbass way so that all the boxes are absolutely positioned, fixed width/height, because the designer is naively assuming that "surely all the text on my precious creation must be in this fabulous font that I've chosen at this specific size" then funnily enough things will break if the font is not just so, or if the size is not just so, or if the window is not the right size. It's not the browser's fau
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Misplaced blame, methinks. Blame the website designer, not the browser.
The trouble is that this isn't an isolated problem, it affects pretty much all webpages that have a non-trivial layout, some fall apart later then others and some have worse errors then other, but pretty much all of fall apart when you increase the font enough, the Firefox homepage, Slashdot, just to name a few. In fact I don't even know if you can achieve some of those effects (round corners, gradients as background in boxes, etc.) in a way that doesn't break when the font size changes a lot.
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A lot of site problems are down to a lack of skill or laziness.
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I wish it where. What I find annoying these days is how bad pretty much all browsers are at producing readable webpages. Do a simple change from the defaults settings, like increase the font size, and lots of webpages will become unusable, text will overflow boxes, overlap with other text and all kinds of mess, its ridiculous and yet I have never seen it mentioned in any browser review.
Another thing that I find highly annoying is Firefox image scaling algorithm or better lack there of. What good is a zoom function when it will make all images look like crap? Bilinear filtering isn't all that complicated, yet Firefox doesn't have it and goes the ugliest possible route in making an image larger. I just don't get how such a basic feature is still not in there after over a decade.
Firefox 3, Opera, and IE all zoom without changing the layout, and reviewers praised them for adding those features. Firefox 3 does bilinear filtering on image scaling, and has been stable for 6 months now.
It's kind of ridiculous to say something "still isn't there" when it's been in the latest stable for six months.
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Firefox 3 does bilinear filtering on image scaling
Not on Linux, which of course makes the zooming rather useless, since it would causes all webpages to look rather ugly.
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Parent is very nearly correct: the Acid test series purposely test CSS edge cases in order to catch rendering bugs. The CSS they use to do so looks very little like any CSS you would be likely to find in a production web site. That doesn't invalidate Acid, but it should be recognized that the tests are essentially synthetic, and any results should be evaluated with that understanding.
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I did not read TFA entirely, but which browser is the better browser?
The one I use, but I am not telling you which one that is ;)
Re:Whom is the better? (Score:5, Funny)
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"If you like leather and ball gags, try IE."
They added a newsreader?
Re:Won't Work with Hundreds of Favorite Sites. (Score:5, Informative)
You're joking, right? "M$" is making IE8 standards-compatible by default, and it's telling web site operators (especially high-volume ones) to add a tag to make the browser drop down to "compatibility mode" or "quirks mode" that allow the site to be viewed if it was designed for the lower standards of IE7 and IE6. They're also giving you an UI to add sites that you know are *not* standards-compliant so that IE8 can degrade gracefully in those cases and let you use the site, as opposed to just displaying garbage.
The end result is that people don't have to rush to update their sites that were already proven to work with older versions of IE just because of the next release.
This is a mess Microsoft got themselves into, undoubtedly, but your ignorance isn't helping much here. I'm sure that will make the front page though, since you seem to have that little game down [slashdot.org], all ScuttleMonkey would have to do is remove all the dollar signs and we'll be all set.
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Microsoft has stated a number of times (I don't have any citations to hand; sorry) that their priority for IE8 is good support for CSS2 and other "current" standards; they've explicitly declared CSS3 (where most if not all of the things you listed are from) as being out of scope for this release.
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If you like leather and ball gags, try IE.
And guess where the ball-gag goes...
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And if you do mind the heavy footprint, get Opera ;)
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Argg, I hate to do this but... "Whom is the better?"? First, a browser is a thing, not a person, so you are correct with your 'which is a better browser?'. Secondly, even you were talking about people it would be 'who is the better?'. Just remember, replace the who/whom with he/him. If you would use he, who is correct. If you would use him, whom is correct.
Moreover, "the better" is only correct if there are only two options. He meant "Which is the best?".
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Press F12 (same hotkey as firebug).
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Opera now as my default browser for about a year now. Why? It's the only browser that will run natively on every platform I use, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. Firefox can't claim that last one, at least not since the 1.x branch. Not in any recent versions. And it's had a bunch of the new "features" that people talk about with chrome, like tabs above the address bar and that dial pad thingy that I never use.
One all the platforms, I've found that it is fast and isn't a memory hog like FF. Opera will also do it all, from block ads to bit torrent, all in one place. Now I can argue that there are better bit torrent clients out there, but in a pinch I have used it to pull down ISO's without any problems.
Opera gets almost no press outside the mobile market. It still has issues with some JS out there, but it's pretty rare these days. And it's a shame, because they probably have the best browser on the market.
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Firefox doesn't compile on BSD anymore? What happened? Isn't it in ports?
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It works just as well on FreeBSD as on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Typing this very comment from Firefox 3 on a FreeBSD machine (no it's not dead yet).
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It's the only browser that will run natively on every platform I use, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. Firefox can't claim that last one, at least not since the 1.x branch
Really? Does 3.0.4 [freshports.org] not count as 'since the 1.x branch'? If you don't like 3.x, 2.0.0.18 [slashdot.org] is also in ports.
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I think your real point should've stuck to the fact that current versions of Firefox do not run on FreeBSD. The other points you make are the same fluff we've been hearing about Opera for years.
I few months back I put Firefox on the sidelines and used Opera for a good solid month. It is a nice browser on many levels (fast, clean UI, etc.), and I would probably use it all the time and be happy if it weren't for Firefox/Firebug/NoScript. I know you can block JS, etc. from running per site w/Opera, but No S
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Are you a moron, or can you not read?
I know Opera still makes their browser, but I thought it was relegated to do-little platforms like the Nintendo DS, the Wii and some smartphones..
If you do count the DS, I use opera at least once a month.. As I only really bought the cartridge for the memory expansion.
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Also, I wouldn't really make judgements based upon the DS/Wii/Smartphone versions of Opera (I've used the Opera-based browser on my phone and the Wii, but I have never seen the DS version).
Give it a try--- a couple suggestions, though. First, get
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Is there any other webkit browser for linux aside from konqueror? I don't want the burden of all the kde libraries when i won't use them for anything else...
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Try arora http://code.google.com/p/arora/ [google.com]
It needs the Qt4 libs but has no KDE dependencies.
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Konqueror isn't a Webkit browser, it's a KHTML browser (and Webkit was forked from KHTML).
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Epiphany can use WebKit to render, and runs well in Gnome.
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Ephiphany/WebKit [gnome.org].
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, I'll say something more constructive, rather than just criticizing browsers I've never used.
Firefox: The only real browser right now. Supports a bunch of anti-crapware plugins (like adblock plus, which gets rid of /. ads) and general power-user scripts for those who want them. Aside from that, its everywhere on every platform that supports any form of graphical manager.
Still starts to lag if it hasn't been restarted in a while, although it's gotten a lot better about it lately. It does have very many good add-ons, and I've only found around three bugs in its rendering engine, ever (and one of them had to do with nested tables, which shouldn't be used, anyway). However, it's much slower than Safari or Opera about passing the Acid tests.
The problem with add-ons is that the more you have, the slower Firefox gets (and the more cluttered the interface gets - I still haven't figured out how to get rid of all the addons adding their logos to the bottom right).
Remember, add-ons (such as GreaseMonkey, Adblock, Tab Mix Plus) are different from plugins (such as Flash, Java, Silverlight).
IE: MS has had to work because they prior have sucked and dragged down most every website that does "IE only" websites. It's a good thing that Firefox and standards are taking a front seat.
Well, it's arguably "not bad" now. Although I don't use it much, my impression is that it can't get you viruses just by accidentally clicking the wrong link these days. And its standards support is steadily improving, although it still has weird bugs crop up, it doesn't support more modern technologies (SVG, canvas, HTML 5's <video> tag...), and I often have to use weird hacks like hasLayout [satzansatz.de] to get it to render correctly. It's also very slow compared to other modern browsers.
Still, it's on par with last-generation browsers, which means it's come a long way from the mess that was IE6.
Opera: They're still around on X86 platforms? I thought they died out and only did DS and Wii browsers and diddled with X86 adware. Havent looked at them since their software didnt fit on a floppy.
It's a pretty good browser, and still as fast as ever. Its benefits include coming with most of the functionality built-in that Firefox requires plug-ins for, as well as support for GreaseMonkey scripts to add the rest of the functionality. The benefit is that its interface is nowhere near as slow as Firefox with all those plugins.
Notably, it's the only browser here that doesn't have inline find with Ctrl+F (even IE does these days), but inline find can be brought up with the / button.
It's also one of the few browsers resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing [guyrutenberg.com].
Chrome: eh? Its alpha buggyware with none of the plugins we're used to. Im not going to even look at it until it has more what I would consider basic features.
For "alpha buggyware", it doesn't have very many bugs, and is as stable as any other browser. In addition, its interface is very well done, and arguably much easier to use than any other browser currently available. What would you consider basic features? Nightlies even have GreaseMonkey support.
It's also the only other browser on this list resistant to JavaScript alert DoSing.
Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.
Safari on a Mac is a very good browser. It lacks Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs, GreaseMonkey-like functionality, or ad blocking. Aside from these, it's the fastest browser around, especially in nightlies.
Safari on Windows works fairly well. Aside from the debatably ugly color scheme
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Adblock for Safari: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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I probably should've clarified that, but I realize that. I often criticize browsers for not having the standard keyboard shortcuts - for instance, IE is the only browser that doesn't go to the location bar with Ctrl+L - it's Alt+D instead, and that throws me off.
Same with Safari's Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] - not only is it different from every other browser, but it's also a really awkward key combination that can't be remapped (strange, too, since most other key combinations can be remapped just fine, and
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Ctrl+F works just fine [photobucket.com], in addition to "." and "/".
It's not inline find (i.e. it doesn't find while you type). Compare it to the Ctrl+F functionality of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or IE.
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iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.
Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in renderi
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iTunes and Quicktime are horrendous on Windows; they noticeably slow my computer down after installation - even when they aren't running!
There are much leaner and quicker alternatives to both, so I refuse to install them on my Windows computers.
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Exactly. I've used a mac (dont want to buy one though) and have used Safari and Itunes on Windows and Mac. The Mac itunes is well done, but Windows one is cobbled together as some sort of crashing software heap.
On Linux (the only host OS installed - ubuntu) I use Amarok as it only categorizes my 100K + songs. When I ran Windows on a prior laptop and installed Itunes, it crashed on a subset of my library.
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iTunes and Quicktime, along with the major anti-virus (McAfee, Norton), are the source of a large chunk of the complains you'll get about Windows. The difference in the stability of the OS and the experience are major before and after. Quicktime STILL tries to hijack PNG rendering in IE, and it totally ignores when you tell it to return things to normal (the option is THERE, it just ignores it). iTunes install some system
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Foxmarks and ABP are two critical plugins that chrome needs to either duplicate or be compatible with. I imagine google would allow something like ABP since their ads are text based.... hmmmm....
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Still around, and doubled their user base from 2006 to 2008. 53% revenue increase from the desktop version last quarter. 1/4 of Opera's total revenue comes from the desktop browser.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that Opera has been free for ages, right? Even without ads?
I'm not saying it's the browser for you; I use Firefox. But Opera is a very good contender nonetheless.
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When I said that (under a previous account), it was not free. It was ad-ware or pay-ware.
Yeah, but you brought up your old post as if the point was still valid.
Opera 5 (Score:2)
I remember back in 2002 when I bought the Linux version of Opera 5 because at the time Mozilla was a bloated resource whore and I needed a fast graphical web browser on a poor old 233MHz Pentium 2 box. I'm not exactly sure how much I paid for it, some where around $20 bucks I believe. I think still got the email receipt when I purchased it in one of my ancient email archives. I'll have to find it and post it sometime.
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And I also posted this [slashdot.org] post so long ago. And I still stand by it.
I don't use Opera myself, but you are aware that it hasn't had ads for quite a long time now. You don't have to buy it any more, so that old post is almost meaningless in today's context.
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Great! What could possibly go wrong with uploading one's complete bookmarks, history and search queries to some corporate entity?