Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Browser Wars Are Back?

Posted by michael on from the can't-keep-a-good-browser-down dept.

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'."

8 of 634 comments (clear)

  1. Re:opera by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    yeah, ok.

  2. Three Words by cryptochrome · · Score: 5, Informative

    Opera's Not Free

    --

    ---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

  3. Re:opera by hype7 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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
  4. Re:opera by Jens_UK · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. Re:opera by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  6. Re:Protecting the Monopoly by salvorHardin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Not Opera-specific? by aed · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Three more (more accurate) words... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.