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the premier Linux browsers are Galeon 1.0.3, Mozilla 0.9.8 and Opera 6.0 TP3

For all of you who are getting a 404 error, it's because he is blocking any requests from people browsing with IE (and possibly Netscape..) I used Opera and it worked just fine... This guy is made a damn nice case but he sure takes that whole Microsoft sucks thing a little too far.

Has anyone seen the newest version of opera?

http://www.opera.com/

I use the Opera 6 beta in Linux at home and under Windows at work and IT WORKS GREAT. I normally wouldn't use anything other than IE5 (generously provided by The Beast) except that the Opera 6 beta gives me ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING I LOVED ABOUT IE...

They have a version for the MAC OS, and I recommend trying it today.

• Myth: KDE is more integrated than GNOME
  Reality: The oft-heard cry of the noisiest KDE advocates. No explanation is given - the reader is expected to simply grok the wholesomeness of KDE, and the lack of this mystical quality in GNOME. It's nonsense of course. Neither desktop is particularly "integrated" compared to Windows XP, and certainly not compared to any version of the Apple Mac. Whatever "integrated" really means.

• Myth: KDE is easier to use
  Reality: Again, such nebulous arguments are never explained, and the reader is expected to simply understand the truth of the zealots statement. Both KDE and GNOME have user-interface irritations (indeed, all systems do) - but "ease of use" is not a simple thing to measure. KDE has never been subjected to detailed user testing, unlike GNOME [gnome.org], and the claims of user-friendliness are from crazed supporters and not average users. Furthermore, the KDE faithful rarely look beyond simple-minded copying of Windows, and forget that administering a desktop system is just as important as having widgets in the correct place on the toolbar. For example: What about application installation and removal? GNOME has the excellent RedCarpet [ximian.com] by Ximian [ximian.com], which makes the installation, removal and updating of applications trivial. KDE users are expected to fend for themselves with brutal command line driven systems. GNOME also has the excellent Ximian setup tools to handle various very tricky cross-platform and potentially risky system configuration operations - KDE offers none of this, only a few small half-assed Linux-only tools, which make no attempt at check-pointing to return to known working configurations.

• Myth: KDE is more popular
  Reality: In what sense? Arguably more people use KDE - but it is a close run thing. Most KDE zealots claim the results of online polls as proof of their superior userbase - which is, quite frankly, complete and utter nonsense. Online polls are the joke of the century; it doesn't even require a motivated script kiddie to render then worthless. A single post alerting the faithful on a zealot-ridden site can skew the result so much it makes American presidential elections look fair and well organised. Popularity is also difficult to measure when both GNOME and KDE are frequently installed on the same system. Indeed, the systems can co-exist and even run at the same time, except for certain applications such as panels. Many KDE users actually run GNOME applications for their superior features and stability, not realising that by doing so they are barely running KDE at all.

  One of the few solid measures of popularity is the adoption in commercial use - and here, GNOME is far ahead, with both Hewlett-Packard [hp.com] and Sun Microsystems [sun.com] committing to using GNOME as the desktop for their Unix systems. This also ties in with the previously mentioned ease of use - Sun's major contribution to the GNOME project is in the areas of user/developer documentation, testing, accessiblity and user-testing. Three of the less glamourous parts of desktop development. The arrival of the GNOME 2.x series will see these contributions reach fruitition and allow GNOME to make a quantum leap ahead of KDE in most of the basic computer/user issues.

• Myth: Konqueror is the best Linux browser
  Reality: Oh for a penny every time this lie is told in any KDE story! Konqueror [konqueror.org] is not a bad piece of software - its authors deserve praise for the work done in it. However, the sheer amount of orgasmic praise lavished by the KDE faithful is completely out of proportion to its actual quality. It is quite unreliable and even simple standards compliant pages can crash it quite comprehensively. It is also lax in its support of basic web standards compared to either Mozilla [mozilla.org] or Opera [opera.com]. It is also extremely slow - much slower than the latest incarnations of the GNOME Nautilus [eazel.com] filemanager/browser (a target of much KDE FUD during its development).
  .

• Myth: KDE applications are better/more advanced than GNOME ones due to the ease of developing in C++ using the Qt toolkit
  Reality: Easily the most common wail heard by KDE developers, and yet it is easily disproved by looking at the actual applications for GNOME/GTK [gtk.org] and KDE/Qt [trolltech.com]. KDE applications often have larger version numbers than GNOME ones... an old trick played by commerical software developers. Most KDE apps seem to jump for 1.x releases long before they are ready - KOffice [koffice.org] being the best example. None of the components in Koffice are worthy of a 1.0 release, let alone 1.1 or 1.2.

  GNOME applications [gnome.org] wait longer and get more testing in their 0.x stages and despite shorter development phases mature more quickly and reach stable featureful release states more quickly. Some examples of this are the superb Evolution [ximian.com] (groupware/email), Gnumeric [gnome.org] (spreadsheet), Pan [rebelbase.com] (newsreader), The GIMP [gimp.org] (image manipulation), Abiword [abisource.com] (word processing), RedCarpet [ximian.com], X-Chat [xchat.org] (IRC client), XMMS [xmms.org] (media player), Galeon [sourceforge.net] (web browser), and for developers: Glade [gnome.org] and Anjuta [sourceforge.net]. All of these packages ooze quality, and far outclass the KDE counterparts. It is no understatement to say that GNOME is at least 18 months ahead of KDE in applications, and pulling still further ahead.

  It's not only in the area of user applications that GNOME is lightyears ahead. With the forthcoming 2.x a number of impressive behind the scenes technology will finally mature: component technology (bonobo [gnome.org]), media (Gstreamer [gstreamer.net]), internationalisation (pango [pango.org]). As a developement platform, GNOME 2.x is, conservatively, 2-3 years ahead of KDE. And what's more, because it is not tied to a lowest common denominator cross-platform bloat-fest like the Qt toolkit, the lead (as with applications) can only increase further.

  Yet despite all this, we are still regularly fed the lie that Qt and C++ makes application and desktop development easier. Judge for yourself.

• Myth: KDE is faster and takes less memory than GNOME
  Reality: KDE is written in C++. While this is not necessarily a problem, it can be when Visual Basic reject programmers (which the KDE project is overrun with) do not know enough to avoid important pitfalls that plague C++ software projects. Stupid use of autoincrementing operators and iteration with C++ objects, and masses of unnecessary allocations and deallocations of memory, are two of the most common. KDE suffers badly from both problems.

  Perhaps the most cretinous of all problems is blaming the extremely slow startup times of KDE apps on GCC. The GNOME 1.x releases were hardly svelt (2.x fixes many of these issues), but GNOME is a fashion cat-walk superwaif when compared to KDE's 500lb fat-momma cheese-burger scoffing trailer trash. One need only look at the recent fuss over ugly KDE hacks (such as prelinking) to see the problem inherent in the poor KDE architecture and basic design flaws.

• Myth: GNOME development is slower. KDE releases faster.
  Reality: Fundamental misunderstanding. KDE releases as one big lump of code due to its use of C++ and the many problems this causes with libraries. The project bumps the version number of the entire KDE system for the smallest modifications. GNOME, on the other hand is componentized and each component releases on a (almost) separate schedule, bumping it's own version number but not the main GNOME version (1.4, for example). Occasional releases of the entire GNOME system happen, and that's when the GNOME version number is bumped (currently it is at 1.4). To see this in action, use RedCarpet and you will see regular updates to GNOME components. GNOME development is not slower, it is in fact faster and more advanced. Lamers and newbies, however, fail to understand the advantages of this method and just see KDE 1.1.1 followed a few weeks later by KDE 1.1.2. Wow! KDE roolz.

• Myth: TrollTech is a friend of Free software.
  Reality: TO BE WROTE -- IDEAS Qt started out as non-Free. KDE developers knew this violated the GPL, didn't care, stole others' GPL code by porting it to link (in violation of the license) with Qt and are therefore untrustworthy. KDE core developers work for TrollTech. Expensive per developer licensing for writing closed-source with Qt. Trolltech only moved towards the GPL because of the success of GNOME. Labyrinthine licensing nightmare. Gradual migration of features into Qt (and so into TrollTech's IP portfolio), allowing easy porting of apps to the revenue generating Windows world (see TheKompany for a perfect example), thereby making KDE irrelevant.

• Myth: Most good GNOME apps are actually GTK applications.
  Reality: TO BE WROTE -- IDEAS Most KDE apps, such as those from The Kompany [thekompany.com] are actually Qt apps because they want to port to the more lucrative Windows/Qt market.

  Myth: KDE is more than attractive - GNOME/GTK is ugly
  Reality: Mosfet liquid theme is an ugly and unstable hack. GNOME GTk icons are of a far higher quality than the cartoonish and confusing KDE ones. Qt is basically a Windows-look on a Unix platform.

This troll was reposted from the Troll Library without permission of the original author. If you object to this post, or if you wish to add your troll to the Troll Library, please reply to this message.

Just a quick suggestion, try Opera. Very small, very fast browser that is available on alot of platforms with lots of features including the ability to shut off all of the pop-up ads. Quite useful.

I think the "go" button on MSIE 6 is much more attractive than the one on Opera 6. Don't you agree?

Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web.

This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:

• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Konqueror
• SkipStone

There are also some proprietary browsers:

• Netscape. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
• Opera

- Sam

Even if Opera were tons slower, I'd use it just for the mouse gestures. Being able to move forward, back, up a directory level, etc. just by holding the right mouse button and sliding the mouse has become so intuitive I keep catching myself doing it in other browsers, spreadsheets, in PowerPoint... everywhere. I wonder what it would take to make them part of an operating system?

hell, since we're being offtopic ;)

This is one of the reasons i prefer opera. As many browser windows as you like, one taskbar icon.

in general though, wouldn't it be possible to hack together a little right-click extension to "close all instances of this" ?

From the sounds of it, Opera 6.0 TP3 is a much more stable browser than Moz 0.9.8. It's also *much* faster. Jason

"Is Opera Spyware?"

Face it: Mozilla is an ok kind of buggy web browser.

Opera is freakin great! It is faster, more stable, and blocks popup ads. Also, for those that run Windows, unlike IE or Netscape, it does not support spyware and adware. It tests, it beats all other browsers in speed and stability. You can also get great skins with it! (^:
Opera is available for Linux/Solaris, BeOS, Symbian, Mac, QNX, and of course Windoze. Download it here

I am also a developer and I also favor IE greatly. Netscape has a problems with some standard tags and some widly accepted tags. (try {td background="image.jpg"} in netscape and see what you get with 2 {tr}s). The only thing I have not heard spoken about at all is Opera. This is my favorite browser.

Now on-topic
Windows is an OS. Office is your basic programs for word processing, spread shees... (what ever hapened to Corel Word Perfect?). To me it would make much more sense for IE to be a part of Office because it is not necessary for Windows to run. Netscape is an indivitual program as in Opera. Personally I do not know of any other browsers commonly used. Why then should IE be integrated into the purchase of windows. It is a seperate program and should be sold that way.

If you had read the review, you would have known that the Voyager web browser supports a pluggable HTML engine, for which Opera has made a plugin. So yes, it renders HTML at least as well as Opera 5. :)

If you had read the review, you would have known that the Voyager web browser supports a pluggable HTML engine, for which Opera has made a plugin. So yes, it renders HTML at least as well as Opera 5. :)

You can always get Opera if you want.

Download Opera here before Prostentic Vogon Jeltz blows up the Earth!

You missed one of the nicest features of using HTML/XML for documention: the fact that with CSS you can get basic content transformation.

What does it mean? It means that you can have rules for online display (that we're most familiar with), different style rules that kick in only when you print (implemented in Mozilla and Opera), and different rules only when you are projecting a presentation (implemented in Opera). This lets you make it accessible on the WWW, yet write your documentation only once without futzing with a nicer "print friendly" copy. If you do a presentation, you can point your audience to the very URL you're using for their later reference. Less chance for confusion.

Your question is similar to one that I have been researching for some time, in my role as an adjunct professor of E-Commerce. What is the impact of the Internet on governments?

There is a rich history of how governments have confronted new technologies in the past. It's the sort of history that I wish high schools would teach: some of the laws passed in response to new technologies are extremely funny. The introduction of steam engines, canals, railroads, the telegraph, repeating arms, the automobile--even the safety razor--emboldened legions of pompous politicians eager to satiate their constituents' desire to Put A Stop To This. And Put A Stop To This they did--until they realized that the next town over was benefiting from all the jobs building the railroad line, or manufacturers were locating plants across the state line to avoid their jurisdiction, or (the worst possible fate for a pol) people were just laughing at them and ignoring the law. (Through 1976, at least, it was illegal for a man in the State of Illinois to shave himself unless he was a licensed barber.)

There typically has been a pattern to how governments (the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the judiciary) come to grips with a new technology. The initial response typically is "Put A Stop To This". The next response is "Regulate It!"--generally meaning "slow it down," as the original cast of pompous pols is replaced by wannabe-graybeards urging "caution" and "restraint." As bureaucrats and politicians see wider acceptance of the technology the next step is natural: "How Can We Tax It?" The rules and requirements tend to get relaxed as the bureaucrats, etc., become comfortable with the technology, in a phase I call "Hey! This Could Be Useful." Ultimately, for extremely disruptive technologies, there is a phase we might call "We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon."

Railroads are a perfect example: in the 1830s and 1840s every politician was in the Put A Stop To This camp; by the later 1840s and early 1850s there was grudging acceptance, but still "restraint" and "caution". (There were, for instance, repeated debates about whether it was safe for the Post Office should use trains to move mail.) By the 1850s railroads were confronting a bevy of tax proposals: taxes on rights-of-way, taxes on locomotives, taxes on rail cars, and taxes on revenue. When the U.S. Army used railroads to bring fresh troops to Gettysburg--and won the battle--the utility of railroads was made manifest. Suddenly every politician was a closet railfan, and the pols fell over one another in their rush to champion, sponsor, or even subsidize the building of Yet Another Railway Line. By the late 1860s, up until the economic collapse of 1873, and then again in the later 1870s, the We'd Better Get On The Bandwagon phase was at its peak: rather than regulating or taxing railroads, politicians were working fiendishly to ensure that the railroad didn't pass them by. Towns with railroads lived, towns without railroads died.

The technology has changed--politicians have not. What has also changed--and what makes this process seem so much more contentious--is that the Internet has appeared in the public consciousness, and in your living room, at an extremely rapid pace. And the pace of change is only increasing. Meanwhile, the pace at which politicians (and bureaucrats and judges) move through the Put A Stop To This/Regulate It To Death/How Can We Tax It/Hey This Could Be Useful framework hasn't changed much.

Which phase are we in?
I think we're definitely in the Put A Stop To This phase, and we're going to stay there for a long time--partly because the pace of change means that there is always something new to put a stop to, but also because the growing reach of the Internet means that there is always a fresh crop of less-than-clueful politicians just a router hop away. When the Internet finally got to Afghanistan, the Taliban...Put A Stop To It.

The Next Phases
As some officials begin to comprehend the impact of the Internet, we begin to see the phase of "caution" and "restraint." In the U.S., for instance, we have federal programs to wire every school and public library for Internet access--but politicians still fuss and fume about "Net Nanny" programs and how to write laws that meticulously prevent librarians from just using a little common sense. State tax officials are hard at work trying to harmonize state sales tax laws in order to implement sales taxes on e-commerce purchases. In some places--a very few places--politicians and bureaucrats are even talking (NB: talking, not acting) about using community development funds to wire downtowns with fiber optic. These few--these very few--understand that this is the railroad question all over again: if you have cheap bandwidth, you will prosper; if you have little or no bandwidth, your town will die.

That Said, Let's Make Some Distinctions
Several people posting on this topic have brought up the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as an example of draconian law similar to the examples you mentioned. There are certainly aspects of the DMCA that fall into the Put A Stop To This phase--particularly issues like rules on defeating encryption, whereby "decrypting" something protected by ROT13 becomes a federal crime. (The best response to that, as with safety razors in Illinois, is publicity and ridicule.) But one of the major challenges facing governments--the bureaus, the courts, and the representatives--is the development of intangible property. Note that I'm explicitly not using the term "intellectual property"--the issue is broader, and different, than intellectual property laws. The Internet enables the instantaneous transfer of valuable merchandise across borders--municipal borders, state borders, and national borders. If I buy a copy of Opera 6.0 for example, I am "importing" software from Norway. Except--I actually import nothing. If I go to a website and pay $16 for MP3 files of eight of my favorite songs, I get something valuable (Econ 1A--it's valuable because I'm willing to pay for it). But I do not have even one more molecule than I owned before I started that download. That presents all kinds of problems: a huge portion of tax receipts depend upon various forms of excise taxes, and excise taxes depending upon physical property crossing physical boundaries. (Quiz: if I buy $34,000 worth of map data from a provider in Europe and retrieve the data by FTP, does the transaction get included in balance of payment statistics reported by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce? Nope.) As more and more commerce consists of file transfers and other forms of distributing intangible property, oodles of legal, financial, and tax issues appear. The DMCA has some dumb aspects--but it is at least a first attempt to come to grips with some of this issues.

Moving forward
As the world and the Internet community forge ahead, there will be ample opportunities to learn from other people's mistakes. When a judge in, say, Ohio prepares to issue a decision banning "hate speech" there may be an assistant who will point out that the speech in question is a fatwa issued in Iran, and the ruling might make the judge look as silly as that bozo judge in France.

There is another dimension
Regardless of whether, when, or how politicians around the world finally come to grips with the Internet, there will always be someone, somewhere, who wants to prevent it. With good reason: there are lots of cultures around the world that feel threatened by American movies, American music, American literature, and American attitudes about all sorts of things. And they--rightly--see the Internet as a conduit for all things American, and fear the consequences for their cultures. And that's an entirely legitimate fear--even with millions of users from other countries, the Internet culture is a mirror image of the American "frontier experience" in its wildest and wooliest. I think that's a good thing--but I'm an American. The Saudis, the Chinese, the Taliban, and a fool of a judge in Paris all disagree. There's an irony in the fact that a tool developed by the U.S. Defense Department will become the ultimate weapon of American cultural hegemony. And eventually the bureaucrats, courts, and politicians will have to come to grips with that.

In sum...
When pundits or pols in Austria, Australia, or Austin are fussing and fulminating about this Internet-based Crisis! or that, remember: this is just a phase. Pat them on the head, and tell that someday they will grow out of it.

I remember when caller id first rolled out and many were concerned with the fact that someone could easily get your phone number simply by placing a call to them. As the use and features available of caller id expanded we found that many of us use it to filter out unsolicted phone calls on a daily basis, or to identify secific calls we want to take. Initially it was used by government agencices, then commerical business, then individuals. This may very well have much the same cycle of use.

I expect that we will see browsers that will be able to be from an "anonymous" country just as there are browsers (such as Opera) that can identify themselves as a different browser. Of course as the software develops and evolves, there will tweaks and adjustments to the "gatekeeper" software that will allow the operator to reject "anonymous country", or as now, specific countries. And the browsers will adapt as well. Net shattering? I don't think so, but like most things in life it will have advantages as well as disadvantages.

You raise some very good points but I think that you are looking too specifically at the OS, and not seeing the broad picture. Indeed, you are right, people want money, that is why we work. However, who is to say that commercial, even (eghad!) closed-source projects will never make it to linux? Oh, wait, they already have..
The notion of other applications -- ones that people pay for -- is what (IMHO) drives many of we "linux zealots" to say Windbloze sucks! Use Linux, it r0x0r5!
Stay with me, you'll soon understand...

If we get people to migrate to linux, and by people I mean a LOT of people (like half the desktop market share) then the people that develop games, the people that develop office apps, screensavers, etc etc etc and insert your own windows-like app -- will develop these apps for linux.

That is what drives us. That is why we want the global domination. Not for status, but for the recognition that, yes, Veronica there IS another OS, and YES there ARE apps for it and most importanly, There are companies that pay hackers to develop apps for it
The kernel will forever be free, because linux is the kernel. And anything else will stay free because of the GPL, but new apps don't have to adapt to the GPL if they don't want to.

What Slashdot needs is a mode like Kuro5hin where you can set it to display nested for a few comments
Agreed. Configurability is good.

It might not be possible to submit the form to article.pl; check the source, does article.pl support all the parameters
Thanks for enlightening me, I'll check this out!

Several of the date formats do have the year embedded in them. I use the "%Y.%m.%d %H:%M" format, which does
Amen. Either the date format ISO8601 should be used (e.g. 2002-01-01) or something like "01 January 2002".

Another nice feature would be valid XHTML output, but I think we shouldn't expect that anytime soon!

So use a decent browser that actually follows W3C standards and closes any open tags at the beginning of each new paragraph.

There is an easy way to fix your problem with what you refer to as "the little spinny icon that is animated when a page is loading". Jayenkai's site has a piece of software which you can use to edit the Spinning Internet Explorer Logo Thingy, or SIELT for short. (I'm assuming here that you're using IE.)

I remember changing the 'provided by whoever' on Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to a more personalised "Provided by JonnySoft", though I can't for the life of me tell you what registry entries I changed. It's been a long time since I used OE... ;)

My personal preference is to use the Opera browser with Windows, instead of Netscape or IE. Although there is a fee if you want to use it without the banner ads, this is no big deal. It's got none of this 'provided by ComCast' crap, and it has no spinny thing, so to speak, for them to change.

As for the 'spyware' support tool, I suggest that you start logging everything that it sends out, if that's possible. I'm pretty sure that something like that could be illegal. Finally, if you're still annoyed at Comcast taking over your Windows box... use Linux instead, man. It's good for you ;)

And the new Opera is gorgeous, especially with dynamically loaded Qt-libs and anti-aliasing turned on. (I'm a gnome-man, but it blends very good into my desktop.)

In fact, it's the first browser I've ever bought and I do not regret it.

The bookmark system is sane, and the possibility for "user-mode" (hit CTRL-g) is really handy for those awful designer-monkey-sites.

User-mode allows you to specify your own fonts, turn off tables, use your own stylesheet which will override the author's etc. When you want to switch back to the "design", just hit CTRL-g once more.

Also, it supports Netscape plugins, so you can have Flash, Java etc.

The browser is rather quick at rendering pages, and if you find something it doesn't render "properly" (a rare case for me, YMMV), you can file that as a bug.

The tech-support is excellent and the deveopers frequent their news-server.

The only thing I really miss on Linux is to be able to choose between MDI/SDI, but that will hopefully be implemented.

Check it out:

Opera on Linux

For you Debian-users who wants anti-aliasing:

$ apt-get install anti-aliasing-howto

Read it. (Heh, I even managed to get anti-aliasing
for GTK. Whooaa. :)

Be sure to download the dynamically linked version of Opera. Also, get the "msttcorefonts"-package for those MS-fonts, make sure freetype et al is enabled in XF86Config-4, and set the env-var
QT_XFT=true in the shell before launching Opera.

*Droooool*

(Ståle, if you're stalking me and reading this, thanks for showing me Opera on Linux :-)

OPera has had this feature for awhile, and unlike mozilla, doesn't take 35 seconds to load..

It is sobering to see how much the Microsoft browsers have really taken over on the internet. One thing that does make me rest a litte easier about it though is the Mozilla project, and how AOL basicly forces people to use their gecko-based browser instead of IE, so the web is not in too much immediate danger of falling into a MSIE-only club.

Personally I recently switched to Opera (and I'm hardly anti-Microsoft and have been branded a Redmond operative on here countless times) as my primary browser, and I'm extremely pleased: It does what I want quickly and efficiently, and it has lots of little innovations and features (like mouse gestures) that really are brilliant.

One quality alternative to Netscape and IE is Opera . It is on the larger side, as it is trying to compete with IE, but it is fast and secure. The gestures are especially useful; they make me feel like I'm a kid again painting with my hands. Opera is also available for a number of platforms, including your favourite forms of free Unix (i.e. Linux) and Windows. Could help to make your workspaces consistent, if you work on multiple platforms.

Apart from the well known ones, the only other types of alternatives I can think of are the stripped down Gecko systems (Gecko being the HTML renderer built out of the Mozilla project.) They repackage the core technology, without the rest of the stuff would typically gives Mozilla its reputation for being slow, bloated or inefficient. Gecko, by itself, is a very small, fast and efficient core, comparable to the IE renderer. Most of the ones I've seen are for Linux-type systems, though, like Galeon . And don't forget that Gecko, Mozilla, Netscape 4.7 and Netscape 6 are differnet beasts, but all closely related.

Note! If a moderator would care to help me along in the karma department... I don't know what I did (I don't post often), but every time I post I get can automatic -1. Please see the value of my comments for whatever they are worth! Thank you!

I'm seriously considering swapping to another

A quick rundown of the pros and cons of moving:

Good:

• Not Microsoft -- doesn't have stupid holes, and the ones it does have are fixed quickly.
• Not Microsoft -- they're a nice bunch of intelligent people who go about their business, selling their software through information rather than disinformation.
• The browsing experience is absolutely delectable! For example, I wasn't sure whether 'delectable' was the right word just then... In IE I'd have to open a new window, go to dictionary.com or similar, type in delectable, click submit, read results... In Opera I double click on the word, and click 'Dictionary' from the dropdown menu.
• Customize until you drop dead.
• Built in Pop-up control.
• Standards compliant
• Use (BeOS|Linux/Solaris|Mac|OS/2|QNX|Symbian OS|Windows)? Then learn to use Opera for (BeOS|Linux/Solaris|Mac|OS/2|QNX|Symbian OS|Windows). Then you can switch to (BeOS|Linux/Solaris|Mac|OS/2|QNX|Symbian OS|Windows) and retain your browser UI.

• Not free -- but you get what you pay for afterall, and if you don't want to pay, you can use an advert-ed version (not as painful as you might think).
• Not open-source -- but neither is IE.
• Not as forgiving as IE on bad coding -- but this is really not an issue with Opera at all, just people who don't understand HTML.

I'm seriously considering swapping to another browser.
Give Opera a try. Well worth it and it is nice you can switch between Linux and Windows (plus a ton other incl way cool QNX) and still have the same interface.

So you paid for Windows and now you feel like they're all yours and nobody else's, eh? :-)

on my zoomin' fast 700mhz box crapped and I'm sitting here with a copy of windows 2k, xp, rh 7.1, caldera 2.3.. Interesting dilemma.

Well, I can tell you what I would do. But you already know what I would do. This is Slashdot, after all. Answer: Install Debian.

Seriously, I think you'd get a lot more out of RH 7.1 than 2K or XP. Why? I've used Linux as a desktop OS for years now, and I made the complete switch last May. I haven't been to Fry's once. So I've saved lots of money. My machine has been up continuously since then, BTW. And I play Tribes2 and RtCW quite a bit. (But I also use Star Office a lot). Now, I've had to ssh into it from another machine in my office to kill -9 a game or whatever, but I never reboot.

As far as the Caldera - RH argument, it's a matter of choice really. RH might be more "dynamic" maybe. It's certainly being updated more. Quite a few RPMs out there too. Go with what you know. Of course, real men use a Linux with apt-get, yada yada yada... (They make you say good things about Debian on /. regardless of the fact that it's all Linux and all good. :-)

(writing this on my 486 laptop running win95 WOOT!)

Ugh. Maybe Linux there as well? RH 5.0 runs fine on my P100 laptop. XMMS streams to the stereo. I tried WinAMP and Win95 on it and it wouldn't even run.

So... What should I go to? I got a better box for games, and I really don't like playing around with linux on a 200mhz 64mb ram machine with a 2 mb vid card.

Oddly enough, you have a machine which is almost perfect for Linux. It's not powerful enough to run the latest MS (or other) apps, yet you could run a minimal Linux install and get added life out of that box as a word processor. Since the box is old, there should be very little wrestling with drivers. As far as GUIs bringing you down, try Blackbox. It's very minimal (yet very full-featured) and should serve you well.

From those who have - how is koffice compared to the standard MS suite?

Well, I use Star Office 6 even at work now. Guy says he wants "powerpoint", I give him slides. Need to look at Excel sheets, I open scalc. As far as KOffice, I don't know. I've had more than once experience where KWord just quit on me. Vanished. No core file, no syslog error, nothing. Just gone. I save a lot when using either it or KWrite (which is worse; KWrite goes down more than a White House intern). I'm using older versions, sure, but I was not too impressed with the stability. Now Kate... wow. There's an editor. Sure, it's plain text, but it's a real good example of a stable app. At least in my experience these last few months. Does syntax highlighting fo0r Perl, C and SQL, too, so that's a big plus. Of course, I've turned in memos/meeting notes, whatever printed two-to-a-sheet with enscript or with line numbers before, so...

What about file compatibility problems (can I take stuff to school?)

You should be able to move files between home and school. Make sure to save in native format (Star Office will ask what format you want to save it in). I've exchanged Word 2000 docs with Star Office 6 and back again. Every once in a while I get a document that saves to like 8MB (when it should be like 400K). A resave helps sometimes.

I haven't been able to get simple Word or Excel macros running. I haven't tried, though. I don't want to run macros if I can help it.

Speed - how is star offices speed - I'm assuming x is a lot faster on this box than on the 200, but are there any issues?

Star Office 5 is about as fast as a wounded prawn. It will literally suck the life force out through your face. One should be paid to use it. The Star Office Beta 6, however, rocks. Worlds better. It has warts, sure, but it's beta. (Do you really think any software -- which had a ship date -- that came out of either Redmond or Mountain View had anything like the QA it should have had?) I've been using beta 6 since it came out and haven't noticed anything overly weird (except a deep-seated and possibly misguided reliance on Java). Me and a few other gus use it for work, so it's good enough I guess.

Any "major psycotic hatreds"?

Visio. I hate Visio. And sometimes I hate project managers, too.

Any comments / advice from people who have done the switch?

I've been using nothing but Linux for months now -- like I said -- and I wouldn't go back. Hell, I couldn't. Deal with XP and it's sugary GUI and nasty licensing/copy "protection"? Not a chance. Pay for Apple hardware? I'll save for my kids college funds instead and run Linux on older hardware. And why not? Linux runs great for me. I love being able to right-click on the desktop and get an xterm where I can write a shell script that goes into cron. Networking works, I have every compiler I'd ever want, a choice of GUIs, lots of customizing, I use ssh tunnels, scp is fine, samba keeps me and the wife in sync, games are fine and I just don't spend any more time or money on the upgrade mill. And BTW, check out Opera for Linux. I've paid for the Win32 and Linux versions of Opera. Everyone who's taken time to look at Opera has loved it, at least in my experience (which is predominantly IE users).

-B

For years I used Netscape and loved it, up through about 4.0 (4.5-7 are bad, bad, bad). I even used 4.7 for a long time, before finally deciding that I just couldn't live with the shitty rendering, slow reaction time, and general bugginess. So I tried IE, just to see how bad it was.

And it was amazingly fast, clean, and surprisingly not crashy, considering it was Microsoft's. Slowly, I started to accept that IE was the best browser out there. And I used IE, and netscape actually disappeared from my computer.

Sure, I tried Mozilla, and Netscape 6.0 and 6.1. Quite honestly, they're crap. They're slow, not particularly stable, and ugly. But mostly they're just slow, fucking slow. It's not just loading the program, it's also in large part that I open a page and Mozilla takes about three times as long to render as IE.

But when I read that security page the other day, I found a new program to try. So I tried it: Opera. I last used Opera on a mac a couple of years ago, when it was small, shitty, buggy, and lacking features, like security. So I wasn't really expecting anything.

Opera is fucking brilliant. It's fast--it's actually faster both to load and to render pages than IE. It gets rid of a lot of the useless shit that IE throws up--like dialogs to go from secure to insecure. It has security, it has a full feature set (at least, all the stuff I use, like plugins and java and working pages). It lets me use the keyboard more than IE.

And the best part: it lets me block out pop-up windows. You have no idea how amazing a feeling it is to go to a site that throws pop-ups at me like mad and watch them, well, not load. No idea until you try it. It even pretends to be IE for pages that require IE.

I have had one page fail to load correctly--a credit card account page. But considering it loads wrong half the time in IE, it's not too bad. Still, I'm keeping IE around (and patched it) in case I find something glaringly wrong with Opera, but until that time, I'm happy with this.

Oh, did I mention it sits in _half_ the memory footprint of IE, and about a third of Mozilla?

Check it out. Opera. It's not Open Source, but then again, if we're talking about IE, we're talking about windows, so...

Jeff

Why does a fix to a program that nobody here uses, written by a company that everybody here hates matter?

I propose that in response we arrange a boycott of Microsoft products and services. For those of us who use microsoft products such as their Internet Explorer, Outlook Express , etc. it should be relativly easy to switch to alternative products such as the browser Opera. It may be a bit harder for those who use Windows to switch to an alternate OS such as Linux, but if you think you can afford to make the switch, do so at the earliest opportunity. And of course it goes without saying that if you have a Passport account that you should cancel it immediately. We have to draw a line in the sand right here, right now, or this will only get worse!

I think that the abilty to track what you're watching has many possible positive uses. Targeted advertising is one, the ability to suggest programming based on the tastes of similar users is another, a more precise idea of what people like than the Nielsons is something else. All these things are good.

I have always been willing to let my information be collected to statistical analysis, when it is not personally identifiable. If all that is recorded is, "People who like show X are interested in products of type Y and also like shows of type X'," I don't see much of a problem. If, however, what is eventually recorded by the company is my specific viewing habits, that is a bit entrusive. It is true that this happens elsewhere, with shopping cards and cookies on the internet, I guess it depends on what things you think people can collect by those methods and how much you care. But I guess the thing is that any day I can just start paying in cash, or tell Opera not to accept any cookies. If you can likewise turn off these features in MS's set top box any time you want, fine, but I doubt you will be able to.

The bottom line is that in the end, for all of the purposes I stated at the top, you don't really need personalized information to do a decent job. You'd do the best job with personalized information, but you could do ok just recording correlations of shows with specific interests or preferences. The thing is that to do this, often you are sending them personally identifiable information, which is then processed and none of the personal part is kept. It then comes down to, do you trust the company not to keep that personal info? There are some companies I would trust with that...Microsoft is probably not one of them. Some of the things like targeted ads, could be done to some degree in-box. Like it sends the box 4 perspective adds to show and then based on your viewing habbits, it picks the one you're most likely to like. The less info is uploaded the better. Still, I think I'd go with a company I trust more.

...Besides, how long will it be until they hook these things up with some sort of internet connectivity and then there's a worm that will go around sending messages to your Granma showing her the sleezy stuff you like to watch?

"TV sucks!"
"I know you're angry right now, so I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."

But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market.

On AbiWord specifically, $15 would slow down development due to a lack of users. It's several man-years of development away from being worth that much, given the competition of 1) MS Word being installed on almost all new Windows boxes (and under $100 if it isn't there), 2) WordPad being part of Windows, and 3) KWord being installed on a lot of new Linux desktops. They might get a couple hundred dollars, and lose nearly all users and developers, because if a free GTK+ word processor project didn't exist, it would have to be invented. No offense to anyone who works on AbiWord or thinks it does what it needs to do, but the bar is set too high these days.

A word processor, like an OS or a web browser, has become a product you have to give away to get more than a handful of users, and freeing your software is the only way to afford its development if it's in one of those categories. Opera seems to be hanging on as an exception, mostly from a rabid fan base built before browsers fell into that category and a lack of diversity in the free choices.

What kind of steps can people use to protect themselves now

This step and this, for instance :)

I just don't understand it. Why do people use IE still? For a long time I understood them, it used a whole lot less memory than netscape, and rendered webpages a whole lot better than other browsers. But then I found Opera which completely blew me away. Not only does it only use 14 megs of memory, which is a lot, but not nearly as much as IE (25 Megs) or Netscape (35 Megs), and it renders webpages just fine. I will probably get modded down for being a troll, but could someone tell me why they still use Internet Explorer?

• Copy your current explorer.exe, shell32.dll, comdlg32.dll, notepad.exe and wordpad.exe to a backup location in case things go haywire. (I've done this before on Windows 98 and ME boxes without problems, but it's always good to be safe).
• Insert the Windows 95 CD, and start a dos prompt.
• From the prompt, enter:

  d: (or whatever your CD drive is)
  cd win95
  extract /a /l c:\your\windows\desktop win95_02.cab comdlg32.dll explorer.exe shell32.dll notepad.exe wordpad.exe

• You should have the files listed above appear on your desktop. Now shut down into DOS mode, and copy the new shell32.dll and comdlg32.dll into your Windows SYSTEM directory, and copy explorer.exe, notepad.exe and wordpad.exe into your WINDOWS directory, and reboot Windows. (If you're using ME, you can go into c:\windows\system.ini and change your shell to taskman.exe in order to be able to replace explorer and the other system files)

Of course, after doing this, the next step is to replace your browser, but that goes without saying. :-)

Second, don't just bitch about IE. If you haven't already, check out the alternatives:

• Mozilla, now in Version 0.9.6, is very feature-rich and fast and the most standard-compliant browser in existence, but not for computers with less than 128 MB of memory.
• kmeleon (Windows) and galeon (Linux) are Mozilla derivatives with smaller footprint.
• Opera, which is closed source adware and requires registration, is a very fast browser that is especially recommended for "information surfers" because of its excellent navigation and caching.
• Konqueror is KDE's built-in browser. Thanks to Qt/Embedded and/or KDE-Cygwin, it might be ported to Windows as well.
• Lynx and W3M are up-to-date text mode browsers capable of displaying most pages which do not depend on images or animations.

Opera 6.0 is now available for download. If you tried an older version of this browser and thought it sucked, try it again. It's light, fast, more standards compliant, and its rendering engine is very compatible with the way I.E. and netscape work so it works practically everywhere. You can browse MDI-style, which means you can have all of your browser windows as sub-windows of the main one, OR you can go NS/IE style and have a separate window for everything. Its skinnable (but you don't have to use a skin), it has more privacy and security features than I can count. You can turn off javascript pop-ups (or merely relegate them to popping up in the background). You can spoof the broswer string as being I.E. or netscape for those sites that are browser bigots. I cannot say enough good things about this software. And its available for BeOS, Linux, Solaris, Mac, OS/2, QNX, Symbian OS and of course Windows. Get it here.

It leaves IE for dead in many ways.

& now that MS has dumped Netscape plugins its even more compatible. Plus it has its own mail, news 'n ICQ clients built inside it.

& it gives you the choice of SDI & MDI GUIs

only in a couple of small areas does IE do better.

But a Active X Netscape plugin is being developed as we speak, so soon Opera will be Active X plugin compatible via its netscape plugin vacility.

I admit that Opera 4 was as iffy as hell, but Opera has to be the most improved browser in the last year or so.

Here's the Opera homepage.

This is a great Opera resources FAQs & tips site.

Opera is very configurable, here's how I have it configured


Here's what it looks like without the add

I'm using Opera 5.2(and 6.0 on another comp) and WebWasher 3.0. So far the only way that I've been able to force it to display the adds is by going to the demo page at united virtualities.

I've tried every other posted url and I've been quite unable to get it to display adds :) I think the only reason it displays on the demo page is the whole thing is flash.

Links:
http://www.opera.com
webwasher.com
http://www.unitedvirtualities.com/

Assuming you appreciate that, Opera is compatible with every web site I've visited, it runs on Linux, it is a small download, and it doesn't have all the huge bulk of IE that makes it so slow to do stuff with. It can even check your email and browse usenet!

A good web browser and Linux. Hooray!

Internet Explorer for Unix - it mentions Solaris and HP-UX, so how far away can it be? :)

While you are at it, take a look at the faq, my favourite sentence is: 'Do Java applets run in a "sandbox," or do they rely on UNIX security?' - notice how carefully worded that is to imply something about UNIX secirity. We all know how bad that is, right? Lol.

All in all, quite amusing pages, if you are bored like me.

And actually, I'd like to see IE on Linux too. Opera is starting to get really good, but nothing, and I do mean nothing, beats IE with the Google Toolbar today. If only Opera would implement all that functionality instead of just linking to google. *Sigh*. I'd never use IE again. :)

By the time Windows 2000 becomes obsolete, Linux could gain enough popularity that people can avoid product activation altogether. Companies like Opera and Real are now supporting Linux shows that it's gaining momentum now, and the fact anti-virus companies are pretending Linux will soon become a virus target shows that Linux being on the desktop is very real.

Check this out.

Like WINE, Odin in a Win32 API, so OS2 can be natively Win32 compatible.

Odin has the potential to work much better than WINE, because OS2 & Windows share a bit of the same gene pool.

The OS2 version of Opera is a semi-ported Windows app that utilises Odin libraries, as a shortcut to save on the work involved in a full port.

That's my take.

I assume its similar to the way some Windows games that have been ported to Linux utilise WINE libraries.

On your concern of page fonts being small, have you ever used the Opera web browser?

There's a little pull-down menu in the toolbar that lets you resize pages. It's similar to the zoom pull-down that you'll find in Word or any modern word processor. It's really convenient. Opera also carries many other little features that can make reading poorly-designed pages more pleasant, like buttons to toggle images or page formatting on/off.

Granted, this doesn't fix the problem of dumb webmasters, but it does help in reading poor pages.

I like when I can plug my favorite underused web browser.

-Grant/JimTheta

Nah. Teach a man to use Opera and he'll be happy for the rest of his life. 6.0tp1 also has pop-up refusal.

Although Opera totally uninterests me, I think that you can't discount it. Opera is a slick browser alternative to IE, and I know an awful lot of people who prefer it. Personally, I think IE is the only thing currently worthwhile about Windows, and I agree, it still doesn't hold a candle to galeon, recently discussed here .