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'."

Comments

Re:opera

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, ok.

Three Words

[cryptochrome]

Opera's Not Free

Re:opera

[hype7]

Firefox, Safari? What about Opera! I'm sick of
being left out of the browser wars. I like my
mouse gesture enabled browser thak you very much.

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

Re:opera

[Jens_UK]

Well, they are not enabled by default, but gestures can be added to Firefox: http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php? category=Mouse%20Gestures

Re:opera

[TheRealMindChild]

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

Re:Oh goody.

[mini me]

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?

Re:Protecting the Monopoly

[salvorHardin]

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.

Three more (more accurate) words...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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?

Re:Three more (more accurate) words...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I wouldn't call something with an annoying, distracting animation in the corner of my eye all the time to be a damn good browser.

(And I have a legitimate license for Opera).

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.

It was my understanding that it was because Opera lacked the XMLHTTPRequest object, which isn't "weird" and can't be worked around.

So, to recap, Opera is a smaller, faster, more feature-packed browser that's on the cutting edge.

Smaller and faster? Not in my experience. More feature-packed? You haven't actually listed any features it has that its competitors do not. You've focussed on trying to rebut criticisms against it instead of talking about what it can actually do that other browsers can't.

Re:Not Opera-specific?

[aed]

Just who do you think came up with mouse gestures?

Not Opera, that's for sure :-)

I remember using software which gave me mouse gestures in Windows about 9 years ago, not too long after the first release of Windows 95.

According to their site, Opera released their first Windows browser (version 2.1) in 1996.

Indeed, the browser wars are back

[d_jedi]

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).

Re:Huh?

[davandhol]

Netscape 6 & 7 were based on Mozilla, with added "features."

Re:opera

[TheRaven64]

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).