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The Browser Wars Are Back?
jpkunst writes "ZDNet UK reports and PCWorld.com report that, according to Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, whose comments came during a discussion with Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, 'the browser wars are back', thanks to the emerging popularity of products such as Apple's Safari and the open-source Firefox. Andreessen warned that 'competition could compel the company [Microsoft] to use aggressive tactics to protect its Windows operating system monopoly'."
yeah, ok.
Opera's Not Free
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
there's nothing opera-specific about mouse enabled gestures.
here it is for OS X, supporting all major browsers and many other apps:
http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.html
Cocoa Gestures adds mouse gestures to any Cocoa program such as Mail, Address Book, iCal, TextEdit, Safari, Chimera, OmniWeb, Path Finder, Stone Design's great suite of applications like Create, and many others.
-- james
Well, they are not enabled by default, but gestures can be added to Firefox: http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php? category=Mouse%20Gestures
Give life
Opera is one of the FEW pay for Web Browsers, AND it is the most horrible browser *I* have ever used. Especially its crippled javascript implementation is enough to drive a geek to burn villages and blow up trains
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
whats so hard about loading a transparent PNG anyway?
What's even worse is that IE does support transparent PNGs, if you apply a filter to it. Why can that be the default action for PNGs?
Against safari? They'll probably just employ the same kind of dirty tricks they did against Opera, where they detect the user agent string, and send back broken CSS files.
Yes it is.
There's a Google ads-supported free version of Opera and a paid for ad-free version. Either way, you've got a damn good browser, arguably the best one around.
A great deal of the features that FireFox users rave about came from Opera, and every version brings even more innovation. It's even smaller and faster than FireFox too (IIRC.)
And, before someone starts saying that its UI takes up too much screen space, let me just say that the default interface in the latest version is tiny (and, of course, Opera can be skinned and customised to your taste). While I'm on the subject of dispelling myths and inaccuracies, Opera renders virtually every web page out there as well as MSIE or FireFox: there were problems with some JavaScript-heavy pages in the past, but that's been fixed for a long time too.
About the only website that the current version Opera has a problem with is Gmail, because of all its weird code, and even then there are simple workarounds for that. The issue is fixed in the latest beta, which means that even that problem is only temporary.
So, to recap, Opera is a smaller, faster, more feature-packed browser that's on the cutting edge. And there's a free version and a paid-for version. What more did you want from a commercially-developed application?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Just who do you think came up with mouse gestures? Opera did, that's who. Everyone else's mouse gestures are "me too" additions.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Again, more FUD. Opera's JavaScript hasn't been an issue for sometime now.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Using your example:
Person A buys a new computer, and uses the IE browser because they could care less what they use.
Person A then gets a crap load of spyware on there computer, and then bugs that one geek that they know to fix there computer. Then the geek says.... I don't need to fix your computer, just download and install Firefox. Don't use that IE piece of crap.
Boom, there we go, problem fixed. This is exactly how I've gotten firefox on people's computers. I haven't heard of one story of a lamen user who has been tired of IE, so they searched out a better brower, and picked up firefox or opera.
It's always been because there geek friend telling them to use it. Geeks are what are powering this new browser war. If Microsoft fixes there brower, we are in trouble.
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
I was a die-hard IE guy. But what with CERT recommending using an alternate browser for security purposes.. and Microsoft's own recommendations for security all but disabling many sites (I believe their recommendation was to turn off active scripting).. that was when I switched browsers.
But, alas, because "Set program access and defaults" doesn't actually do $hit.. last weekend I was infected by spyware using IE. Nasty, nasty stuff that just won't die.
So IE is out for me.. I don't blame Microsoft for the malware (although I DO blame them for a link opening with IE when I had FF set as the default..).. but enough is enough.
The sites that don't work properly with FF are few.. and I can easily decide if the site is worthy of really browsing by using the open in IE extension.
My criticism of FF is that extensions break with each release, and that security updates are not available as patches (I could tolerate ONE of them.. but combined it's really a nuisance).
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Netscape didn't turn into Mozilla, Mozilla is based on the original Netscape gecko code and went its own way. Netscape continued on to the POS that it is today.
It is one of the most serious contenders for browsers on embedded devices. It also doesn't have an insignificant market share--it is probably higher than Safari, not to mention Konqueror & other popular open source browser. It is also higher than legacy browsers & one reason probably is that, though it will chew up all the RAM you let it, it also has incredible performance on dated hardware.
Netscape 6 & 7 were based on Mozilla, with added "features."
I don't know what version of Opera you used, but the one I used had two JavaScript implementations. One of which conformed to the ECMA specification, and another that is bug-compatible with IE (it switched between them depending on what you told it to identify as). It also included more complete CSS2 support than any other browser I've used (although Safari generally provided nicer looking output from the same CSS, particularly on things like shadows and bevels).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Mozilla's tabbed browsing has completely changed how I research on the internet.
I scroll through the current page, middle clicking on every interesting link, which opens them in background tabs. Then when I've done with the current page, I close its tab to move to the next page.
This ensures that I don't miss anything and I don't have to mess with as many as 50 windows open at once. I just have 50 tabs at once, all preloading so I don't have to wait at all.
That's not how standards work.
Standards are agreements on best practices. They are not there to dictate what happens. Sometimes they are innovative, but seriously. Why do you think C89 was wildly popular but C99 is only sort of supported on some compilers?
Bullshit. I have had 3 friends who, even if they're computer literate, are really hating their windows boxes. I've tried time and again, to get them to install spybot, firefox, etc. But they won't have it. THey're convinced that these are stopgap measures that really won't accomplish much in the long run. One of them refuses to use his PC networked anymore (even afer OS reinstall). He just views his camera images and listens to his music. Another one is trying out Linux (Lindows/Linspire). The last one is dead-set on spending $3000+ to get a new powerbook + ipod.
These people aren't exactly Joe Schmoe, but they're not powerusers either. They're done with windows. I just wish my work would let me bring in a mactop, otherwise I'm stuck with my windoze one :-(
except the british navy was the most powerful navy in the world.
. htm
By who's account? The British Navy was smaller than the US Navy throughout WWII, and was highly dependent on battleships instead of carriers. It was decisively proved in the Pacific theater that a battleship was no match for the range and offensive ability of a carrier.
Here's a link showing Britian's WWII Naval capacity:
http://www.naval-history.net/WW2CampaignRoyalNavy
You'll note that they went into the war with only ONE carrier as opposed to the four or five that the US had. The US also had a comparable number of battleships (many lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor). Once the war got in full gear, however, the US managed to construct dozens of Essex class carriers, and a hundred or so Jeep Carriers. Escorts were not a big problem either. Look at this link for a list of retired aircraft carriers. Just about everything up to CV-45 was either in or built for World War II.
That's an amazing naval force that no country in the world has EVER managed to replicate.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
what? it does. it shows them in the status bar. At least mine does in OS X 10.3 (Safari 1.2.3 (v125.9))
or am I looking at the wrong thing? perhaps I need a link with an alt tag to see your complaint?
You mean like ActiveX controls? I can think of many web services that don't work without ActiveX.. particullary some web conference software. However I think most of those are going to eventually have to change and go under. I know we dropped a few at the company I work for because our Unix users couldn't use them in Mozilla. Instead we went with one that had java-based clients
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, July 1996
Phillip
How many ships did the US have in the 18'th century? :-)
Damn naval upstarts!
Java does use quite a lot of memory, but so does .NET, and - pardon me - mozilla as well. Actually, I was looking for a Java browser just now, but the only hits I get are for HotJava, which is *completely* deprecated, and ICE, which is commercial.
I've seen an implementation of Mozilla in Java, but I could not get it to run. Still I hope that somebody will find the time to create an open source Java browser. The HTTP part is already there (Apache Jakarta project).
Currently I am busy with a USENET client in Java, after that I might switch to the web browser part. Let's create something that is safe, rather fast, ultra portable and looks like a native application (e.g. the SWT of IBM might do just that).
Java has quite a lot of security features including certificate support, classloaders etc. etc. so that would certainly not be the problem. For speed try the new 1.5 version of Java, its quite a starter, since a lot is cached in advance.