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PC Magazine Reviews Firefox, Opera
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Opera 7.51, noting: 'Security concerns aren't the only reason to seek an alternative [to Internet Explorer]. IE's slow rendering engine and dearth of privacy features may plant the thought in some iconoclastic minds that it may not be the best browser for everyone.' 4 stars for Firefox and 3.5 for Opera, so looks like a Firefox win, although the editors do point out FF's troubles with DHTML as well as Opera issues with JavaScript."
Mozilla rises from the dead (or at least a deep sleep) and goes mainstream rather quickly. Impressive :)
Has anyone been tracking Firefox/Mozilla in the User-Agent stats for a large site to see if it is truly pulling browsershare from IE? The last mention we had from the Slashdot admins was that Slashdot was 90% Internet Explorer, is this on the decline? Are these stats publicly available?
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
I use Firefox on my system. My wife uses IE. I recently ran a spyware scan on both. Can you guess which computer was infected?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Now that the Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)3 organization I think I may have to insist that the family/friends make a little donation.
I was not touched there by an angel.
I'm curious; Microsoft has really given up on IE development over the past few years. The last major release was version 6, and that was well over 3 years ago to the best of my recollection. Could it be that MS no longer sees web browsers as a viable resource for their future strategy? I really have no speculation on what they might have up their sleave, but MS hasn't been one to necessarily drop the ball like this. From a security standpoint, one could say they really screwed the pooch, but as far as releasing a snazzy new version or anything to gloss over the problems under the hood, they've kept their hands off.
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Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
Linux might not be ready for general public acceptance on their desktop, but using Open Source software such as Firefox, Open Office etc is the first step towards that acceptance. If you don't NEED Windows to run a program, it becomes alot easier to switch the underlying OS.
this is the one thing i MISS about IE. firefox is definately slower at rendernig, and before you say it, yes ive done all the speed tweaks. anyone saying this hasnt done tests and is just spewing anti ms fud. other than rendering speed firefox is better in almost all other aspects i find.
the only downside to firefox I've found are problems with web sites designed ONLY to work with IE. I've only had the problem with a few web sites and hopfully as firefox gets more well known and excepted people will stop that kind of stupidity.
Actually, you almost hit on what I think really needs to be done next to really get Mozilla into critical mass area. And that is to do current reviews of IE. For every new review and push towards Mozilla and/or Opera, we need to give everyone the reasons why this is beneficial.
OTOH, if an unbiased review of IE can produce comparable results, then at the very least, it gives the Mozilla and Opera folks a good idea of where to go next in developing the Uber-browsers. However, I have a hard time believing that IE can compare anymore, save for the annoying habit of web developers coding for IE only.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Before FireFox becomes the target off major exploits. Hopefully Firefox will stand up against it, and the Open source world will respond as fast as expected.
Also used Opera for a while. I really liked Opera, but it did have problems with javascript. Interesting to see that they are still working on that.
As for Firefox, I still like plain old Mozilla better but looking forward to version 1.0.
For me, as things stand right now. I like Mozilla the best with Konqueror coming in second.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
For one, IE does rendering many times VERY BAD.
CSS is nearly non-existant.
PNG, whats that? Alpha colors, we dont do em!
And then there's just plain rendering inconsistencies. What you see is NOT what you get!!
Mozila hopes to implement the STANDARDS, not be super-fast. After all, computers will just get faster as time goes on. Why not do it correct and not as fast. Its the Unix Way.
Twice now, I've made the mistake of letting IE users check out a web site on my computer. Both times, I had Mozilla running with about 6 tabs loaded, so I opened another tab for them to use.
They load up their web site, read it for about 5 minutes then close the browser.. then wonder why I'm upset that they closed the application. I was still using that damnitt!!
I recently installed Mozilla, but I still need my hotmail account... Even if Mozilla is set as my main browser and main emailware, when I click a link from an email in my Hotmail inbox, it opens IE... and when I click the "email" button in MSN Messenger, it opens Outlook.
Is it possible to castrate this annoyance?
This is actually a big issue in the development "community". Although the organization itself has resolved its position -- that non-compliant feature support is a slippery slope -- marking bugs as "WONTFIX" or "INVALID" in Bugzilla ends in dozens of duplicate bugs. The fourth most-reported bug (bug 25537) is in fact requests for a non-compliant (and MSIE-originating) feature -- alt tags as tooltips.
This isn't the only one, either. Backslashes in URLs (bug 93197) is another one that comes to mind where Mozilla is between a rock and a hard place. Either Mozilla looks broken if you try to visit a moderately complex page created by Word, or it will effectively send the message that "buggy HTML is okay". Arguably, Mozilla's voice is still a small one in the fight, but say they become big. Do they keep doing things The Wrong Way? Or do they fix it, and then all of the developers who learned coding on Microsoft products and thought it was the right way file bugs?
I support them sticking to their principles. Poor HTML markup (and non-standard DHTML) should be scorned. That's what "Tech Evangelism" bugs are for.
I've been using Firefox for a few months now and I absolutely love it. The popup blocking is great, tabbed browsing makes working with multiple open web sites easy, find as you type is a real time saver and so is the built in Google search bar. The compact UI is cool as well because more screen realistate is devoted to the website I'm lookking at.
I can't recommend Firefox highly enough. If you enable Automatic Updates in Windows, there's really no reason to use IE. I've only come across a site or two that required IE in order to display correctly and when it happened I fired off a note to the webmaster.
If you haven't tried Firefox and are using IE what in the world are you waiting for? The worst that can happen is that you decided you don't like it and uninstall it. When you compare that to just some of the annoying things that can and do happen when running IE (spyware, malware, constant pop-ups, constant security issues, etc) trying Firefox becomes a no brainer.
You of course are forgetting to realize that many of us are FORCED to use Windows and IE in our work environments. And how could one let the day go by without catching up on the latest slashdot news at least several times during your 8 hours of hell? :)
:)
PS - I'm posting this from work
Joseph?
I do this also, but after a few days of leaving firefox open, it tends to use a lot of ram. This isn't a problem for me though recently because I upgraded to 1280MB. Here is an example with an uptime of less than three days (I just added ram then):
Anyone that still completely disables cookies is a tinfoil-hat nutjob.
I've known otherwise smart people that disable them, thinking they were an invasion of privacy. Because, as we all know, cookies (which are by definition set by the server) transmit your SSN, credit card information, birth date, and mother's maiden name directly to leethackers.com, as they are psychic masters, able to read thoughts directly out of your brain.
Opera is a non-free browser which managed to survive the MS domination of the market. I have been using (purchasing) Opera since version 3.60.
A shareware surviving the browser war is something by itself irrespective of anyone's review.
A slow computer will not work with the other browsers as good as it works with Opera. The newer versions became more buggy compared to the older versions, but from my experience, it still better than the other alternatives; furthermore, you get a browser, email, chatting, ect in under 4 MB.
If there's one thing that I couldn't fault IE on is the fact that it actually displays pages pretty fast.
For me it's far slower than Firefox. And every modern browser has gone backwards in my opinion from the original browsers which had progressive table rendering. I'm sick of waiting for ages for a page to render just because the designer put the whole page in one large table. It's not too difficult, even 10 years ago I've seen complex deeply nested tables rendering progressively in real-time... and this is on 10 year old hardware.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France