What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera

prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""

Comments

Regardless of which.....

[xystren]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Kelson]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

Heh. Hah. HA HAHA HAHAHA!

*ahem*

Sorry about that.

"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser. Why? A compliant website uses only features defined in the W3C specs, or only uses other features in ways that will gracefully degrade in compliant browsers (though some purists will object to the latter definition).

For a browser, does it mean something that implements every part of a W3C standard? Or one that implements part of a standard but makes sure not to contradict it anywhere? Is it OK if it implements nonstandard features like those used in AJAX? And which standards? HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript are a good start, but what about SVG? XHTML? XForms?

The specs are complex enough that there still is no web browser that implements all of even the current versions of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At best, you can measure relative compliance, in which case Firefox and company, Opera, and Safari are all well ahead of even IE7. But waiting for a "W3C Compliant" browser is going to take a while.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[audi100quattro]

amaya, a web browser which is ONLY w3c compliant, and made by w3c people will crash on 90% of the sites out there on the web, if not more. it crashes on msn.com...

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Nik13]

Being standards compliant is one of the most important factors indeed. However, there can be a little more to it than that.

-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)

-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...

Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[VagaStorm]

You expected msn.com to be w3c compliant? *sight* I can almost remember when I was that young and naive.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[masklinn]

ECMAScript is an ECMA standard, not a W3C standard.

DOM and Javascript DOM bindings, on the other hand, are W3C standards.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[masklinn]

amaya, a web browser which is ONLY w3c compliant, and made by w3c people will crash on 90% of the sites out there on the web, if not more. it crashes on msn.com...

Amaya is a piece of dung, 90% of the CSS specs ain't implemented, it isn't even able to render reliably a perfectly valid HTML4/CSS1 website.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Crayon Kid]

"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser.

So true. That's true actually for any standard. Furthermore, it's incredible how many small spots are left uncovered by specifics, and result in browsers implementing their own interpretation. Quite often, you've guessed it, they turn out different behavior.

Take the HTTP header that specifies the name of the file to be downloaded. The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF, Explorer treats it as garbage, Mozilla et al. interprets it as UTF. That's one case. I urlencode it, Explorer decodes it and shows the UTF chars, Mozilla et al. presents it with the % codes still in place. Again, bummer.

Both cases, one of them did something wrong and the other something good. Actually, it's not even a case of absolute "good or bad", it's more about taking the liberty to expand upon the specs. What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[^me^]

You must:

A.) Be new here.
and/or
B.) Be the only person here that cares about the ad-infested piece of molasses that msn.com is.

Seriously, there's a reason why Microsoft makes it the default homepage in Windows XP...

Re:Regardless of which.....

[killjoe]

livebookmarks, find as you type, foxylicious. I can't imagine browsing without them.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[sulam]

No offense, but which would you rather have, standards that outpace implementation, or implementations that help define standards?

You can't have both, there's no free lunch here, and the fact is that standards implemented in a vacuum have had significantly less success than standards which follow actual implementations (OSI anyone?)...

I have nothing against calling a spade a spade, Microsoft's business practices leave a lot to be desired. But you can't knock them or anyone else for trying to innovate in their implementations. It's those innovations that help pave the way for the standards you obviously appreciate. Once the innovations show up, content developers take advantage of them, and help further the case that the standards bodies should take a look at how to add this to Web++...

Re:Regardless of which.....

[mab]

I would prefer if it was standards compliant and IE is the standard at the moment.
Sure the w3c has recomendations but that doesn't make them the standard.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc.

That sounds awesome. Can it browse the web, too?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[hunterx11]

There's a difference between pushing the envelope, and purposely making it a different size so only your letters will fit, which is more like what Microsoft is doing with things like ActiveX.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that the W3C is a standards body and Microsoft, as much as they like to think they are, isn't.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

While no browser is or ever will be 100% compliant with the vague and impossible to implement W3C standards, if you're looking for the most compliant out of current browsers, that crown goes to Apple's Safari, and not Firefox.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[jrumney]

The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF

In both cases you did something wrong, and the browsers either did something to try and salvage things, or followed the spec and gave you garbage. If anything, I'd expect non-ASCII text in headers to be encoded as per RFC-2047, but I doubt any browsers implement that.

What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?

Non-ASCII text in headers is explicitly forbidden.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

none are i think. especially firefox, which doesn't even comply to iso-8859-1... (destroys some chars because some US dev thought they were useless)

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Weh]

at first the idea of extensions seemed cool, however I find that there are two things I don't like about them:

1. whenever I upgrade to another version of firefox some of the extensions won't work anymore.
2. whenever I install firefox on some other computer I have to remember, find, download each and every extension again.

Now I only install a few extensions because I don't want to get used to one and have to miss it in the next firefox.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[porneL]

No, Amaya's standards support is worse than IE's and it crashes on all sites just because it sucks. Just take a look at Acid2 test in Amaya.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really expect one of those part-time-web-monkeys to care about such subtle issues?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.

I wouldn't be so quick to put Safari in that list. I work on a Mac to develop the school's website and let me tell you, we've had a butt load of problems. Our page actually works BETTER in IE than it does in Safari. Our website is still under develop but even under the 100% XHTML W3C compliant pages, Safari has that stupid scrollbar bug so the bottom 10% or so of the page is just plain missing. It's just gone! The scrollbar simply doesn't go down far enough. That's just one of the problems we've had. Thankfully we've been able to fix all the other little annoyances, but that one just keeps popping up!

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Espen Skoglund]

You mention security as being an important factor for not choosing IE. Then you mention features, and in particular the possibility of extensions, as a important factor for choosing FF. This doesn't add up. If anything, the extension mechanism in FF should prompt you not to use FF (or at least not use its extensions) if you care about secturity.

You touch upon your problems with high memory usage in FF. Other people around here have complained about this as well, including stories about memory leakage and crashes. The general consensus seems to be that the cause of these problems are the extensions, and not FF itself. It's been said that if you just turn off the extensions everything works fine. Sure, you could do this, but then you take away perhaps the major feature that makes people like FF so much.

So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.

The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to. I have too little knowledge about the extension mechanism in FF to say whether such a solution is really feasible, though. All I can say is that if FF is going to take security, stability, and robustness seriously, more effort must be put into properly designing the extension architecture.

And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move. Yes, I know that Opera has the User JS stuff, but for some reason this has never caused me any troubles whatsoever. Not that I have much experience with the User JS design or have played around with many User JS extensions, mind you.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Dan Ost]

whenever I upgrade to another version of firefox some of the extensions won't work anymore.

Do you have to upgrade right away?
Is there some reason you can't wait a couple of days for the plugin authors to catch up before upgrading?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[callipygian-showsyst]

If you want the only "by-definition" W3C compliant browser, then you need to run Amaya/ Since Amaya is the w3c "reference browser", it's compliant by definition!

Of course, only a crazy masochist would run Amaya! It's worse than Safari!

Re:Regardless of which.....

[MikeFM]

Supporting full CSS2, PNGs, DOM, and Javascript would be a good start for IE. I for one refuse to support IE until it supports at least these basics. IE has 80-90% market share so there is no excuse for them not supporting these modern features. Everyone else should be catching up instead of leading. Opera is rather shoddy but better than IE and maybe the new version is even better. Safari and Firefox have small bits missing and minor bugs but are /mostly/ supportive of all these standards (and many more).

If Microsoft can't get it's house in order then I suggest making an IE interface on top of the gecko and/or khtml engines. There is no reason to keep on a fight they've clearly lost and will see little profit from rejoining. The best way to keep their customers using IE is to make IE use the competitions technology.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

-Security. ... See the newest Javacript exploit for it? ... It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what.

Explain how any browser with JavaScript enabled can be considered "fully locked-down".

As long as you want "features", you will have to live with the security vulnerabilities that come with those features. Not that coders shouldn't try to make their product secure, but any piece of code can/will be broken.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Senzei]

If anything, the extension mechanism in FF should prompt you not to use FF (or at least not use its extensions) if you care about secturity.

On its own (and given an idiot behind the keyboard) I will admit that it is a gaping security hole. That is why there is an official, secure extension site. The vast majority of firefox extensions in popular use are hosted there, and the whole thing is controlled by the people who write the browser.

So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.

No, what it should tell you is that bad extensions are bad. The mechanism is not flawed, some extensions using it are. FF extensions are meant to become part of the browser once installed, which means that by default they should be able to do anything else the browser can. A malicious extension getting on your system and screwing with things is your own damn fault, not a problem with FF. Poor coding and bugs are obviously always an issue, but that is too general to really be relevant here.

The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to.

This is actually sort of done. There is a special context for XUL applications loaded from the net. They get roughly the same access as a regular web page. XUL applications are not browser extensions, but they are the closest thing to it that fits what you are saying. Extensions are meant to be either trusted or not installed. They have no special security context as they were designed to run as part of the browser. In short they are not activex controls, so do not treat them as such.

And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move.

I don't really think so. What it means is that people who want more from Opera are stuck waiting for them to make the changes. Someone with the right knowledge, or just the motivation to do it, could add what they want to firefox.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[BZ]

> but I doubt any browsers implement that.

Could try testing. Gecko implements it.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually msn.com is not so bad :
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3 A//www.msn.com/

Re:Regardless of which.....

[jp10558]

I don't really think so. What it means is that people who want more from Opera are stuck waiting for them to make the changes. Someone with the right knowledge, or just the motivation to do it, could add what they want to firefox.

Not really though - I mean, I have to wait for the extension to be approved for it to be "blessed" in any sense. Otherwise the security of an approved extension site means noting in practice.

I also wonder to what extent the people actually vet the extensions. I mean, will they support any extension on the site as if they wrote in (part of core FireFox)? Do they test for conflicts, and only allow in extensions that don't break something?

It doesn't sound like it if any of many forum posts are correct.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[bdcrazy]

In my opinion, now that i've seen and used find while you type in firefox for a while, every program/window/object should have it. It is just too frustrating to be searching any kind of help without it. I open up text files in firefox just for this feature.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[audi100quattro]

bad example... yesh. just wanted to use some prominent online real-estate as an example. The point that amaya isn't fully standards compliant is one I wasn't fully aware of, either that or the websites weren't.

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox still has major performance bugs affecting the display of Flash, memory consumption, and others. They don't get fixed because they aren't ego-boosters like other pet projects. Wish there was a commercial interest in charge of fixing bugs over there.

Re:Whatever

[Comics]

Arguably, Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer and look at how that has worked out...

Re:Whatever

[Cyberllama]

I hate to say it, but there's a definate kernel of truth in that. I know that I periodically have to close all of my firefox windows and start fresh -- after a day or two they start consuming way more resources than they should be. Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

I would probably get flame for saying this.

IE is more stable than FireFox.

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.

I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.

Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.

*Burn karma burn baby*

PS. Image/flash processing mostly.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

You're computer's corrupted. Hardware or software, doesn't matter. IE crashes every day? I can't stand using Windows and I won't go that far.

Re:Whatever

[staticsage]

How about better NTLM support, so i can use it to browse my corporate intranet site using FF.

Re:Whatever

[McCarrum]

I just looked at my Task Manager, and 42,538k .. I have (counts) 15 tabs open, a handful of addons loaded like adblock, fasterfox, tabprefs .. using a custom theme .. four of the tabs have rather active flash animations, one of the pages is littered with them.

This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!" ...

Re:Whatever

[Dachannien]

I almost never have to restart Firefox, except on rare occasions when some third-party plugin (Acrobat, WMP) hoses things up. Something else on your machine must be borken.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I would probably get flame for saying this.

MS DOS is more stable than DR DOS.

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, MS DOS crashes once per day while DR DOS crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to MS DOS, where Windows 3.11 loads perfectly on it, DR DOS takes forever to load it _and still reqiuires config.sys gymnastics_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my machine.

I have to restart DR DOS once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.

Yes this is a rant, so please, Digital Research, do something about your horrible WFW incompatibilities that existed for as long as I could remember.

*Burn karma burn baby*

PS. Use a non-shit OS, retard.

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.

Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.

Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.

Re:Whatever

[KinkyClown]

I do believe that you should look at Netscape. They invented this thing and are commercially exploiting the GRE. They are always using an older version of the GRE.

Re:Whatever

[Qbertino]

Macromedia for one should have a commercial interesst in Flash running stable on FF.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

if someone could prove that there is in fact some foul play going on. that somehow firefox being unstable is because of microsoft sabotage just like when they made windows crash on dr DOS. How great would that be!

Sadly, I really doubt this to be the case. Firefox is unstable on windows for the same reason MySQL performance sucks on windows. Its a freakin PORT!

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

Look, I know Windows is shit and all, but it IS the most popular PC OS on the planet. If Mozilla Foundation wants to crack into the mainstream market, shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?

Remember, no matter what you might think IE has 10+ years of codes under it's belt, logically the codes are more mature than FF (minus the security holes, of course- but they exist because of all the blatantly added "functions" (read useless/bloated) codes added my MS during the IE4 era).

It is this kind of attitude that has stop common (read computer idiot) people from jumping on the FF band wagon. Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person.
And you think why people still stay away from FF.

Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)? How the hell could you achieve that if you just plug your fingers into your ears and sing LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU.

Sheesh.
Manner, /. people heard of it ;) .

Re:Whatever

[NilObject]

Amen.

I've tried switching my friends and family to Firefox (those on PCs, anyways. Safari rul3z!!!OMGLOLWTF), but none, I mean not a single one, will stay on it due to this exact problem. They all come to me about three days after they switch and describe the performance problems in more or less the same way. When they go back to IE, the problems disappear. Guess which browser they'll be using from now on? Firefox just destroyed the thin thread of chance they had with those potential users.

All that evangelism, all that hype, all that work- for nothing.

Are there any efforts currently underway to get these critical flaws taken more seriously by the Firefox development team? Any "official" response from the higher ups?

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

I meant to say once per _week_, slippy fingers.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me preface this by stating that I am a huge fan of Firefox and I promote it very heavily amongst friends and family because I honestly feel that it is a better alternative to IE. However, I also feel that Firefox is in dire need of some serious optimizing. Take a look at what top is reporting as I type this (Thunderbird is included as a bonus):

PID USER       PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
8916 sc        16   0  316m 141m  17m S  0.0 37.6 205:53.37 firefox-bin
8996 sc        16   0  122m  39m  16m S  0.0 10.6   7:48.32 mozilla-thunder

With all that memory it is gobbling up, Firefox could pass for a Java app! Thunderbird looks as though it could stand to trim some fat as well. Memory consumption like this seems ridiculous to me especially when other browsers out there (e.g. Epiphany, Opera, etc.) do not consume nearly as many resources to get the same job done. Hell, Opera even packs its punch in a smaller binary.

For those of you who can't understand why this is an issue because you have 1 GB of RAM, keep in mind that there are still an abundance of Win98-era machines in use and bloated software is especially painful on them.

Re:Whatever

[Dr.Syshalt]

By default FF decides itself how much RAM it uses. You can limit the RAM cache either in user.js - add the following string

user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 10240);

...or just install FasterFox extension - it will allow you to modify RAM amount it uses for cache. I run FF 1.5RC here for several hours (yes, on Windows XP - I didn't even check it memory footprint on Linux since it simply doesn't bother me) - it uses 44MB of RAM which, I guess, is ok for me.

Re:Whatever

[ArwynH]

You know, I hate it when post like the parent and grand-parent get modded insightful, because well, they are not. Since when has it been the browser's fault when 3rd party plugins fail to work?

Not only is Flash a 3rd party plugin, so it has nothing to do with the Firefox team, but it is also Proprietary and close source, which means even if the Firefox developer wanted to fix it, they couldn't.

Quite frankly your arguments sound alot like those people who blame windows for running slowly and having adverts pop-up when they install a 'cool new search bar'. Place your blame where it lies, not on the first thing you see

In other words if you want your Firefox to stop crashing you may a) uninstall flash, b) install flashblock(not sure if that'll work. it might) or c) Bitch loudly at macromedia until they release a version that doesn't.

On the question of memory usage, there you have a valid point and it is being addressed. Firefox 1.5RC3 seems to play alot nicer with my memory on my system (linux), than 1.0 did.

Re:Whatever

[DigitumDei]

I'd say that arguably, after netscape died, they had no commercial interest in IE. It was the only browser, they could do what they wanted (or in this case do nothing).

It is only recently that the renewed competition, and the addition of more complex web apps, that has brought IE back into the MS managers sights, and thus back as a commercial interest. I think we will see over the next year, just how much commercial interest in IE will speed up it's development.

Re:Whatever

[sd_diamond]

I'm curious about this. I hear a lot of people talk about FF's memory leaks, but I have not had any noticeable problems, and I've used every version from pre-1.0 up to 1.5RC3. I will often leave my browser running all day and overnight, sometimes with multiple tabs open, and I rarely notice significant performance hits. Perhaps the people who experience these problems are doing things that I do not.

However, I do use Adblock (and, more recently, Flashblock) quite extensively to exterminate any graphical/Flash ad banners that I encounter. Could this be the reason I'm not experiencing memory trouble?

If so, then I (just for myself personally, not speaking for others) would classify this as a minor bug. I have no use for Flash. None at all. The one and only thing I have found it to be good at is providing cute and amusing web-based games -- which, admittedly, is nice these days because it entertains my little boy. But if I can avoid 95% of the Flash content on the web (unfortunately, some developers insist on using it for essential features like site navigation) I'll be happy -- and if doing so curtails my browser's most significant bug, all the better.

Re:Whatever

[vmardian]

Do what I do and delete all links to IE so that running IE means you have to do Start > Run > iexplore. I like Firefox because it means I have to fix my parents computer less often. They can't tell the difference. They don't even know what tabs are. For casual users, which are most, Firefox is fine. Personally, I use Camino (Mac).

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're sort of right. I was only meaning to be funny, and the comparison is only in the most basic sense. Microsoft sabotages all software that runs on it. Anything other than a clean install with all the latest sp's and insanely firewalled... it's just asking for trouble. You want to install Office? Sure thing. Autocad? Great. Dreamweaver... uh oh, you just exceeded the magical third-party software limit, where things start sucking ass...

Re:Whatever

[icydog]

IE using 300 MB memory? That is a whole lot of 5.1 porn movies simultaneously playing. I haven't seen IE at over 25 MB during normal usage (i.e. not crashed/frozen). But that's just me...

Re:Whatever

[killjoe]

That's odd, my exprience is the reverse both on the windows and the mac. IE on the mac is crap personified so that's to be expected but in windows? When IE crashes in windows XP I usually reboot because it sometimes becomes very unstable after an IE crash.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?

By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.

But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.

Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?

Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.

And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.

If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.

Re:Whatever

[TheoGB]

Yeah, but why would you use Dreamweaver? Textpad and a browser all the way, baby!

Re:Whatever

[TheoGB]

But I think this comment:

Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person. And you think why people still stay away from FF.

Is the key one. "Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use. Personally I don't even know if the software I have on Windows exists on (say) Macs - I've so far known two Mac fanboys who can't do the things with music that I can do with Cool Edit Pro.

But I digress,

If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.

But don't you get kind of bored of assuming Microsoft are the reason? I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability. Yes, it's possible they are trying to undermine Firefox but why would they bother? IE isn't making them money in the way MS-DOS was when they sabotaged DR-DOS for Windows. And I still need to use IE to access my work's online MS Exchange email, for example.

I would say it's more logical to blame Firefox for the problems or possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it, which I consider pretty stupid.

Re:Whatever

[gaspyy]

What are you trying to prove with a bad analogy?

The parent is giving an accurate state of things: Firefox is getting slow and uses a lot of memory... have you tried Opera recently? It's very fast in all respects, so it's not just a matter of "M$ knows all the tricks, explorer is loaded at startup anyway.

Re:Whatever

[Eloquence]

I haven't experienced much instability with Firefox. There are still a few websites where it reliably crashes (I try to report those when I come across them), but generally it's quite solid. Yes, Flash tends to be fucked up - I use Flashblock to selectively enable it, which helps a lot. Most Flash use is advertising or irrelevant (rotating headlines and similar shit), so I'm very glad to have it disabled by default.

I'm not sure to what extent Firefox is to blame for how Flash runs; I wouldn't be surprised if, being proprietary software, the plugin didn't get much priority, or if fixing integration issues was difficult. I don't know if IE handles Flash any better, but given that IE is still very much the dominant browser, it wouldn't surprise me if Macromedia heavily customized Flash for it. I guess the main reason there's no popular open source Flash engine is that people place similar hopes in SVG. What I've seen of SVG in Firefox 1.5 looks promising for sure.

I believe there are a few extensions which seriously affect stability, performance and memory usage. If you use a lot of extensions, check the comments on the addons site. Chances are one of them has a memory leak. Should extensions be able to affect the browser in that way? No, but I'm not sure it can be done differently.

The fundamental problem with the extension approach (as opposed to a monolithic browser) is that when you have lots of modules with different maintainers, module quality can be quite low, which can affect the combined whole. It might be a good idea for Mozilla to "officially" provide a home for some extensions (including a quality review process), similar to the way the KDE project integrates mature applications.

I do believe that Firefox, due to its surrounding hype, is faced with a lot of pressure to innovate from version to version, and that this pressure can take energy and resources away from integration and consolidation. If it becomes too much of a problem, we'll see a very, very small fork of Firefox being hyped up, and Firefox becomes the new Mozilla.

</RANT>

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Nano with syntax highlighting. Too lame for vi...

Re:Whatever

[tbigby]

Just out of interest... have you tried uninstalling/removing any Firefox extensions you have?

I guess it is just possible that some extension could be causing problems like this, especially if you have several that could conflicts.

I guess this is why Opera aren't planning on introducing something like extensions, for the concern that they could affect the stability of the browser.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

"Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use.

It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.

I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.

Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.

And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).

It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.

Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.

r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it

It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.

The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.

It's not worth it anymore.

Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I've tried opera, I like it too. Actually, anything non-microsoft is ok in my books. I am addicted to a few extensions, though.

But his comparison is bullshit. IE is highly integrated into the OS. I'm not even entirely sure there is a way to accurately determine how much ram it uses. Is that the OS, or IE using that 20 megs? Who can say? But no. He pulls bullshit task manager numbers out of his ass, when the IE numbers he cites are probably just for that explorer window itself, nothing else.

Does that make up all the difference? No. Mozilla was never meant to be a lightweight app. There is some bloat. But it also adds features IE never will.

Why is it so unstable though? Could it be DLL hell? Could it be shitty memory management on the part of windows? We can't even be sure it's firefox, he could have one of a million spywares running on the machine, sabotaging stuff. It never amazes me how even on windows I can choose and download software off the net and never once have a spyware issue, and the average dufus always manages to get something within 10 minutes. Maybe because for me it's a sourceforge tv tuner app, and for everyone else their first choice is www.scamsoft-online-poker.com's fabulous free card games...

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

I am not dissing the FireFox team. It is not as if I (or you I would assume) could create a massive program such as FireFox across several OS and different standards alone. Anyone(or company, for that matter) would have trouble trying to maintain the program. But the FF team didn't, and what they did was brilliant. On the other hand this little post is just an outlet of my frustration in general. Take it as a grain of salt.

Anyway I am sure there are hundreds, if not thousands of posts on Mozilla forum that described what I mentioned in the post. You don't need an error message when you see FireFox is taking up 1.2gb of ram and you only have two tags open.

This is sort of ironic that when a IE has a glitch, people blame MS; but when FireFox has a bug, people blame the user ;)

And I would like to play Civilization 4 without resorting to Wine :) . And I had heard the same old "MS is falling" since Red Hat 4 point something...are they falling?

Re:Whatever

[thezapper77]

I agree!!!

Firefox has crashed so often on my comp over the entire year (compared to IE), its ridiculous!
IE on the other hand, hasn't crashed at all (as far as i can remember)! It seems so much more stable.

If i actually used IE though, it might be a different story :P

Re:Whatever

[Ilgaz]

Windows 3.1 was designed not to work right with DR DOS.

Yes, Microsoft did it on purpose.

It is one of interesting chapters in "The Microsoft File" (Wendy Goldman Rohm)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812927168/002-25 64825-3883215?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance

See how clever(!) thing they did, you still say DR DOS was unstable.

Re:Whatever

[TheoGB]

Okay,

To some degree we are arguing at cross purposes. When I referred to the machine as being 'borked' I meant that there was malware of some sort hiding on there.

Clearly you put anything that is wrong with the machine at the feet of Microsoft, which I'll accept even if I don't agree with, making more sense of your either/or 'blame MS or blame Firefox coders'.

Personally I think you are letting people off the hook a bit there since you are basically suggesting (as far as I can see, taking it to it's obvious conclusion) that users aren't stupid, they just use stupid computers.

I don't know about games being stable. I know my new machine is borked in a hardware sense for games. I know this because the old machine was a beaut but this new one will crash with games. But I don't play games any more so I just do all the other stuff.

The software thing isn't a case of biting the bullet, by the way. It's about whether that software even exists under another O/S and it's about businesses that can't change for a lot more reasons than the cost to themselves. In the ideal world everyone would use a great O/S but this isn't that world.

To suggest that the answer to Firefox (comparatively a simple piece of software) not working is to get a new machine and O/S rather than Firefox attempt to fix it is unworkable in 99% of cases I would say.

(Personally, I don't have any problems at all with Firefox crashing under windows. I'm arguing the theory not the fact.)

Re:Whatever

[Ilgaz]

Speaking from Mac, they do nothing.

Macromedia Flash is using 60% of CPU which is blamed to browser user is using on OS X, the OS having Worlds most advanced 2d acceleration frameworks.

As it is a browser plugin, the browser what user uses gets the blame. Also yes, I am speaking about the 8.x version. If Flash uses 60% CPU , the browser (e.g. firefox) shows using 60% cpu.

Re:Whatever

[mbennis]

I'll paste what i said before regarding firefox memory leaks: I downloaded and installed every variant of mozilla, flock, firefox...etc to see if it eats less memory than firefox. infortunately, it seems flock and firefox consumes nearly 150 megs of RAM even if they're inactive. I love firefox, i hate IE but i can't stand this behaviour. I found a little browser called maxthon based on IE but with all firefox features (adblocking, mouse gestures, very friendly customizable...ana a lot of things cool for geeks. using it consumes 5 to 20 megs of RAM. That's a lot better than firefox and even opera.
Sorry, i love firefox but i want back my RAM
I don't have interest in maxthon. Try it, you'll love it.

Re:Whatever

[LiquidCoooled]

Flashblock doesn't actually stop flash, its the same as all the other extensions. They occur AFTER the page is loaded.

Have you even noticed that the page loads and sometimes a flash of the first frame of flash is loaded before its replaced by the flash nobble?

I uninstalled flash because of this little niceness.
In IE on Windows, I could do the same with a quick simple reg fix (on or off by a double click when needed - it just modified the killbits on the activex).

In FF its a bit more complicated, its either on or its off.

I would like to see a generic ObjectBlock code implimented within firefox itself which will block *any* content right at the core. It should only actively create the documeent after you click it (or whitelist the site/content type)

Re:Whatever

[WiFiBro]

A Bug Forum is a place where people suffering from bugs come together, and the easier accessable it is and the more people think their bugs are taken seriously, the more peopl will report there.
So if that's your indication of the quality of a product, think again.

My FF (1.5rc3) now uses 78k with 8 tabs, 1 window. It only crashes on rare sites, the last time I experienced one is over a month ago. But I am not that much of a flash site visitor, and I skip the average time-wasting intro.

Re:Whatever

[tokul]

I know that I periodically have to close all of my firefox windows and start fresh -- after a day or two they start consuming way more resources than they should be. Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.

Is it Firefox or Macromedia Flash plugin?

Re:Whatever

[CookieJago74]

You'll probably find (as I have) that the massive memory usage is partly due to FasterFox. Its a fantastic extension, yes, but I believe part of its functionality relies on larger amounts of memory. Therefore, when I turned it off for a while, memory usage decreased dramatically.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, most problems come from Flash and this is a MAJOR bug because more and more website are designed around flash. There's one thing I don't understand though... why don't you use links instead of Firefox if you don't need all that fancy stuff?

BTW, you do realize that people like you give Linux, Firefox and other OpenSource project a bad reputation, right?

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

what kind of websites do you visit? My Firefox hasn't crashed in a month.

Re:Whatever

[zootm]

Agreed. It's only now that there's real competition for MS again that they've retaken an interest. I think this can only be good for everyone (MS has already been working with other people on GUIs reflecting insecurity, and they designed the non-blocking popup notifier seen in Firefox for IE). Nobody really loses from teams bringing new stuff to the table.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

moron. firefox on windows is much faster and more stable than the same revision on either linux or osx.

Re:Whatever

[walt-sjc]

This is sort of ironic that when a IE has a glitch, people blame MS; but when FireFox has a bug, people blame the user ;)

Um, I think he was still blaming Microsoft.

Re:Whatever

[RoLi]

Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer

Actually, Microsoft has a lot of commercial interest in the Win32-platform (Windows-licenses, MSDN-subscriptions, courses, etc.) which is of course endangered by the Web.

That is why they wanted to establish their own network (MSN) with their own proprietary protocols and their own proprietary formats. They failed miserably and now MSN is just a normal ISP and uses Unix protocols and formats like anybody else. Microsoft did not "win" the Browser war, the whole Internet Explorer thing was damage control. After Netscape was dead, Microsoft was stuck with something they didn't really want. (An IE that was dominating but was running with open protocols and formats.) The better IE is, the more attractive the web becomes in comparison to Win32. So of course they let it rot, making IE better would have been counterproductive.

After Firefox started to destroy domination by becoming so big that it can no longer be ignored (over 10% and rising is too much to ignore, even if it's still a minority) therefore Microsoft fell back to damage control mode.

However, there are several reasons why IE will NEVER regain total domination:

• IE is de-facto dead (or dying) on the Mac
• While the IE to Firefox transition is quite easy (bookmarks get copied, etc.) the reverse is actually quite troublesome as Microsoft is quite arrogant and probably won't import FF bookmarks. Also of course FF-extensions don't run on IE, therefore IE7 might be able to slow further losses to FF, but it most likely won't be able to get back many users already lost.
• Smartphones and other wireless devices are slowly getting more important and most of them don't run IE and never will. Even those few windows mobile users will run some browser that might be called IE but will not have much in common with the PC-version.
• Embedded devices will become more important in browsing, especially the PS3.
• Also, Linux adoption on the desktop is progressing. Many governments all around the world are adopting Linux, especially in South America and Europe.
• IE has already lost domination and IE-only websites are becoming rarer already. Just one or 2 years ago, many people tried out Mozilla or Firefox, but were put off with IE-only websites. Quite a lot of those will try 1.5 and later 2.0 and even though the product is pretty much the same, there are much fewer IE-only sites around and therefore they are much more likely to stay with FF. Also, once a webmaster has established a standard-compliant website, it's unlikely that he reprograms it to be IE-only again, that just doesn't make any sense.

All these factors combined will prevent IE from regaining significant marketshare and will cause further decline for IE in the long term that might be slowed but not stopped by Microsoft.

Re:Whatever

[Hurricane78]

Hmm... must be your computer. Because i run firefox *every* day from the morning to late at night. With up to 20 tabs open and at average 3-5 tabs open. And i can't remember a single crash comign from it...

The unly thing that crashed were plugins like quicktime or windows media player. but i simply disabled them and am redirecting the stuff to bsplayer and winamp. problem solved.

For flash i can say that it seriously slows down everything and sometimes seem to hang. but closing the tab that contains it restores everything to normal state and i can continue using ff until the night. :)

Good thing that adblock now stops 95% of all flash (speaking: all the stuff i don't want to see :)

Re:Whatever

[mshiltonj]

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day.

I find that the instability of FF is directly related to the number of extensions installed. If I surf w/ no extensions enabled, FF is rock-solid.

Some extensions are better than others. I installed FasterFox a couple days ago, and FF crashed 3 times in half an hour, so I uninstalled it. I don't want to disparage FasterFox, because I'm running so many other extensions. Its hard to tell what's causing the instability.

So, in my experience at least, if FF could figure out a way to have an extension "crash" and be removed/disabled w/o affecting the running browser, isolating the problematic extension, then the perception of instability can directed to where it needs to go -- the extension and not the browser.

Re:Whatever

[tgv]

78k? Wow, if those developers would squeeze just a little bit more, it might run on a Commodore 64...

Re:Whatever

[Sodki]

Firefox still has major performance bugs affecting the display of Flash You do understand that the Mozilla Foundation has no control over Macromedia's Flash Plugin, yes? So, if there's a problem with Flash support, blame Macromedia and their proprietary solution.

Re:Whatever

[Tim C]

Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.

Well, I use a lot of software under Windows, and Firefox is the only one that leaks memory in this way. I too have seen it use in excess of a gig of RAM.

If you read any story here on FF, you'll see lots of people complaining about its RAM usage; a lot of those are running Linux.

You can blindly (and conveniently) blame someone else if you like; me, when a given app exhibits a given behaviour, I tend to assume that it's the app that's at fault until someone can prove otherwise.

Re:Whatever

[Tim C]

Lucky you. I currently have 9 tabs open, a custom theme, the web developer and adblock extensions, and firefox is using 95meg of RAM (and has a VM size of 120meg). I've seen Firefox use hundreds of megs of RAM and even, on one memorable occasion, in excess of a gigabyte.

This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!" ...

No it isn't, but in every story here about FF, you'll see people complaining about the memory usage. I'm not claiming that it's a universal problem (or even necessarily the Moz team's fault), but it seems that something needs to be done about it.

Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.

Re:Whatever

[WiFiBro]

oops, y're right... 1000x that.

Re:Whatever

[squidguy]

That is why they wanted to establish their own network (MSN) with their own proprietary protocols and their own proprietary formats. They failed miserably and now MSN is just a normal ISP and uses Unix protocols and formats like anybody else.
I rather suspect the creation of MSN was an attempt to steal market share from AOL, Compuserve et al, most of which utilzed proprietary garbage. In the early days of the web (and even back in the BBS days), this was the path to bring the internet to the sheeple.

Re:Whatever

[TotoLeFoobar]

I use Firefox for most of my work, which also includes web development stuff. I run it on a laptop which I put to sleep at night. I currently have an uptime of 38 days (does that include sleep time?), and for the past 38 days, I have not restarted Firefox.

I know that I am probably also not the average Web user (who is?), and surely Firefox has space for improvement, but I find it amusing that you make such a strong statement based only on your experience. :-)

In general, though, I have been installing Firefox on the computers of my friends and colleagues, and the vast majority of them have been very happy about it. I even know a few typical secretaries who cannot stop promoting it to their friends, which, from my geeky point of view, is a wonderful phenomenon to witness.

Re:Whatever

[Anpheus]

Well, I just looked at my Task Manager, and it's at 38,040K RAM, 28,216K Virtual Memory. And I only have this single tab open. Obviously there's something wrong with that picture because Slashdot doesn't require over 60 megabytes of memory to be allocated. I find that IE typically loads faster and loads pages more quickly, especially when rendering complex or badly proprietary (Microsoft's site) HTML and such. But I use Firefox out of principle.

Re:Whatever

[Junior J. Junior III]

DR DOS isn't a retard, it's a fully qualified Doctor, with a PhD and everything!

DR DOS, PhD.

Re:Whatever

[graemecoates]

PS. Image/flash processing mostly.

As has been said so many times before, it's often the plugins that kill Firefox off (like Flash, Java, etc). Firefox itself (ie the executable from Mozilla), is not necessarily at fault (though it probably shouldn't die on it's backside if a plugin starts playing up).

Re:Whatever

[darkmeridian]

Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.

One word: Flashblock

Here endeth the lesson.

Re:Whatever

[Monoman]

Install the Flashblock extension/plugin for FF. Flash popups won't run unless you click on them and why would you want to do that :-)

Problem solved as far as you are concerned.

While you are at it, install Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G updater.

Re:Whatever

[Eraser_]

Is that in megabytes? kilobytes? bytes? Neato parameter. I have trouble with firefox at work on my mac after leaving it up for a day or two.

Re:Whatever

[servo335]

Howmany tabs do you have open besides theone you are viewing slash dot in? 1 tab doesnt take up much. 10+ will!

Re:Whatever

[hotdiggitydawg]

I'd go one step further and actively urge the FireFox developers NOT to fix problems with Flash in FF. The last thing we need is more horribly bloated, all-eye-candy-and-no-content, security-hole-and-adware-ridden, non-standard-compliant Flash websites and more Flash ads/popups all over the internet.

Flash is the infected hemorrhoid on the arse of the internet. I've yet to see a website where the need for Flash is justified because nothing else would do what was required.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Install the Flashblock extension/plugin for FF. Flash popups won't run unless you click on them and why would you want to do that

When someone complains the fourth gear in a car doesn't work, do you agree it better would? Or do you recommend third gear, and throw in comments about conserving fuel and tire wear?

Re:Whatever

[LoKaDah]

I can appreciate what you're saying here, although Firefox on my box doesn't actually crash or lock-up with a similar load you're hinting about. I do dislike the memory usage though - the pain becomes dreadfully apparent whenever I bring Firefox back up to the foreground after doing a harsh I/O operation with another program (eg. working with files over 500MB).

Stability-wise, I could believe that IE *might* be more stable, although I am running 22 extensions in Firefox currently, which add who knows what level of instability to the browser.

Re:Whatever

[slavemowgli]

That still won't necessarily lead to (literally) gigabytes of memory being used, and I'm speaking from experience; I spend a lot of time on http://www.newgrounds.com/ , and thus see a lot of flashes each day, man of them in the four to five MB range.

Mozilla (Seamonkey, in my case) does have memory leaks that are large enough to drive a truck, through, that's for sure - after a day, its memory usage will typically be up to somewhere between 150 and 300 MB -, and it crashes a lot, too - once a day on average, and that's using 1.7.12, the last version in a branch that should be in deep maintenance mode.

But I can't say it's using *gigabytes* of memory, and it's never done that for me, either.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I've been testing the new IE Beta, and it too has memory leaks! :)

Re:Whatever

[SQFreak]

I used to have that (lots and lots of crashes when I try to open GMail), but I upgraded to FF1.5RC3 and all my crashes seem to have gone away. If you're leary about RC/beta software, just wait; apparently FF1.5 is being released final today.

Re:Whatever

[Anthracks]

Have you had these problems in one of the recent Firefox 1.5 release candidates? I know they've fixed a lot of leaks since 1.0, although some remain.

I think the reason these bugs don't get fixed isn't laziness so much as it is that they're just plain hard to track down. Most of the memory leak bugs in Bugzilla are along the lines of "I used Mozilla and now my system is slow". Some of the worse leaks also seem to be very machine-dependant (certain video drivers, versions of plugins, etc) making it even harder for developers to pinpoint a fix. Maybe that's more of a rationalization than an excuse, but it's not like the Mozilla developers want their code to be leaky, and it's a harder problem to fix than many people realize.

Re:Whatever

[mondainx]

I honestly cant remember the last time FF crashed on my work or home system and I use it all the time. I only open IE when I want to get "infected" oops, I mean when I want to test the functionality of a layout or such. Ive been in "the game" for a long time now and I have to say that FF is the best browser I have ever used; I will never go back to IE.

Re:Whatever

[saskboy]

I have firefox with session saver and other extensions, with 15 tabs, and Mozilla Composer open all day. The only time my computer hangs up is when I window swich to Composer after not using it for several minutes, and it takes about 20 seconds for it to let me type in real-time and behave normally again. Firefox nearly never crashes, lathough I do close it now and then, and am sometimes dismayed by Session Saver not actually saving my session for when I reopen it. But I've had Firefox crash about 6 times ever on my computer in a year, and IE in the years I've used it at least 30. On average, about the same stability I guess.

Re:Whatever

[utexaspunk]

It's not just Flash though. Even if none of the pages you open have Flash on them, if you open a few tabs and leave the browser window open for a while it will soon eat up as much RAM as it can. 150-200+ MB. Besides, even if it were the Flash plugin, there is apparently some sort of sandboxing in IE that keeps it from sucking up all the memory. There's no reason why the plugin should perform any differently in FF than in IE.

Re:Whatever

[Browncoat]

curious to know how Camino works on a mac...Camino and Firefox both have done poorly on my mac and I'm wondering if they are overall a better fit, like Firefox and Opera are better on PC.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.

Perhaps laying off of the porn is what you really need

Re:Whatever

[bmalia]

Something else on your machine must be borken.

Gut tu lufe-a sleshdut! Bork Bork Bork!

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like you are exactly what the OP was describing. Are you perchance a member of the Firefox team?

Why is it that a lot of open source programmers get all defensive about the bugs in their software instead of just fixing them? Nowhere else in the world would someone make a product full of defects and then berate the user for not fixing them.

Re:Whatever

[Devil]

Wouldn't it be safe to say that Microsoft hasn't released the IE7 beta because if it screws up a person's computer, it's impossible to downgrade again? Or am I way off, there?

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ man. There are almost 4,000 open bugs for the Mozilla Project older than a year that are major, critical, or blockers and you're complaining that the OP is the problem? That's just pure ineptitude. You must be of the Mozilla team.

Re:Whatever

[radish]

So your suggested fix for a browser which can't display a certain kind of content reliably is to not try to display that kind of content? Genius. It works in other browsers, it should work in firefox. There's no excuse.

Re:Whatever

[radish]

My machine runs windows. It's stable. Very stable. It DOES NOT CRASH. Got that through your thick skull? I haven't reinstalled windows on it. Ever. Still the original XP Prof install from 2 years ago when I built the box. Numerous hardware & software changes since then. Still works just fine.

Except for Firefox.

I use it everyday, it's a great browser. It's also as leaky as the titanic. It can easily hit 1gb+ within a few hours. Open up task manager, kill the proc, everything's happy again. Until the next time.

Looking at the evidence, I don't see why I should blame anyone other than the developers of the one, single application which exhibits these problems. But if you want to blame MS, go right ahead.

I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems

I fail to see any evidence for that. What I see is someone who has serious denial issues. Firefox is great, but it isn't perfect. It has issues. Get over it.

Re:Whatever

[pipingguy]

Firefox with the session saver extension sort of fixes this (compare to IE).

But yeah, FF does seem to be a memory hog.

If your system is crashing every hour that's probably not caused by Firefox though.

Re:Whatever

[ballwall]

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
This bug affects me too.
In linux moz/ff store the bitmap version of all images inside the X server. The following has only had ff up for 15 or so minutes, and the only tab open is this reply page.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
2963 root      15   0  176m  45m 4112 S  1.7  4.5   4:06.32 X
26048 marwatk   15   0  112m  43m  17m S  0.0  4.3   0:52.99 firefox-bin

Re:Whatever

[sd_diamond]

Yes, most problems come from Flash and this is a MAJOR bug because more and more website are designed around flash. There's one thing I don't understand though... why don't you use links instead of Firefox if you don't need all that fancy stuff?

There's a rather big difference between "I don't like Flash" and "I don't like anything other than text".

I enjoy graphical web pages, DHTML, AJAX, and all that other nice stuff (when it's done right). I just don't like Flash. I think it's pointless.

Re:Whatever

[darkmeridian]

No linky for this claim, but the flaw is with the closed-source Flash plugin for Firefox. Anyway, Flash gets abused most of the time with ads and stuff. Flashblock is a good feature because it stops those suckers dead and you can choose which Flash thingies to use.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

How many open critical bugs are there in IE? Oh, we don't know, because M$ doesn't make that public...

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

MS isn't falling. Too many people drink their koolaid though. They're the ones falling.

Re:Whatever

[dilvish_the_damned]

Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person.

I solemnly swear, we will only mock you when its funny.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I tend to have 10-15 tabs open myself. Firefox will easily go a week without barfing. When it does, it's always one of two things.

I open a huge, raw digital camera jpeg. CPU shoots up to 100% in seconds, and if I don't kill firefox, cpu_throttling doesn't kick in quick enough to keep the laptop from overheating.

I open a page with a java applet. Firefox will crash unexpectedly almost always between 10 and 12 hours later (even if that page has closed).

I'm using 60megs, 14 megs shared. Virtual is 77 megs. This has been about 4 days up and running, as I remember it. Deer Park alpha 2.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Why is it that on a machine as complex as a modern PC, idiots always pick out their favorite scapegoat subcomponent, and blame it for any sort of failing?

Re:Whatever

[HawkingMattress]

If the problem was with the flash player, you could see the same problem in ie.
And you don't.

Re:Whatever

[Darth]

When someone complains the fourth gear in a car doesn't work, do you agree it better would? Or do you recommend third gear, and throw in comments about conserving fuel and tire wear?

That's a ridiculous comparison. The issue is the flash plugin eating resources. It isn't even a problem with Mozilla itself. How do you derive from that an analogy to an essential part of a car failing?

How about a better analogy, like :
You bought a Honda Civic. You installed after-market, 3rd party ground effects on it. Now every speedbump you go over damages your car. Is that Honda's problem?

Re:Whatever

[ejdmoo]

Way off.

It's completely uninstallable, as it comes in update.exe form, like any other Windows Update.

MSDN Subscribers can see the beta.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

My machine runs windows. It's stable. Very stable. It DOES NOT CRASH. Got that through your thick skull? I haven't reinstalled windows on it. Ever. Still the original XP Prof install from 2 years ago when I built the box. Numerous hardware & software changes since then. Still works just fine.

Many machines run windows. It's often not stable. Very not stable. It CRASHES. Got that through YOUR thick skull? Many people have to reinstall windows just to get it working again. Repeatedly. Always the same same install from 2 years ago when they bought the box. Few hardware or software changes. Never worked worth shit.

Fuckhead.

What I see is someone who has serious denial issues. Firefox is great, but it isn't perfect. It has issues.

Of course it does. Apparently, so do you.

Fuckhead.

Re:Whatever

[Dan512]

Windows debuggers are free downloads:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/d efault.mspx

Re:Whatever

[Khazunga]

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.

sergio@localhost:/home/sergio>cat /proc/`pgrep firefox-bin`/status
Name: firefox-bin
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
(...)
VmSize: 184020 kB
(...)
So, I don't know what happened to your FF. Mine is using 179MB, and this is at the end of the day. Oh, and it never crashes.

Re:Whatever

[sj88]

How about upgrading to the newest version?

Re:Whatever

[JazzCrazed]

Camino is nice, but it's development has stagnated next to Firefox. Now, Firefox has at least equalled Camino in performance - and many extensions work just fine in it. My main issue is the lack of middle-clicking support. And performance improvements regardless, it's still slower than Safari - as is Camino.

Re:Whatever

[The-Bus]

I'm glad this wasn't marked troll or flamebait. For whatever reasons, Firefox has become near unusable in my environment, crashing (badly) every other day or so. At this point, it's instability cannot be mirrored by any other program I have used in a long time (save games).

I'm hoping that when a real 1.5 comes out, these issues will disappear.

Re:Whatever

[jp10558]

Sure there is. IIRC they are actually two totally different codebases - one is ActiveX, the other is Netscape 4 plugin format.

Re:Whatever

[jp10558]

Which is where proxy based solutions like proxomitron or privoxy or AdMuncher shine. I still can't figure out why someone hasn't taken the idea and had some sort of extension or just an added feature to have filtering done (whether AdBlock, or whatever) before the code hits the browser rendering engine.

Heck, FF could just integrate Privoxy as they are both GPL IIRC.

Re:Whatever

[Dr.Syshalt]

>Is that in megabytes? kilobytes? bytes?

Kilobytes.

Re:Whatever

[jp10558]

How would it do that though? Extensions are supposed to integrate with the browser, they aren't really any more separate once installed from FireFox then IE is from Windows.

This is also one of the reasons I'm still not convinced that extensions are a good idea.

Re:Whatever

[ArwynH]

Er.. no. the IE binary and the Mozilla binary are different. The plugin architectures are completely different for a start. Ofcourse they share the same code, but parts differ, so there is plenty of room for a memory leak.

And even if they were the same the correct experimental procedure to test whose fault this is would be to run Firefox without the plugin for a specific period of time, then run Firefox with the plugin for the same period and compare the results. All variables other than the one we are testing should remain as identical as possible.

Re:Whatever

[ArwynH]

Since I havn't experienced such problems on the Firefox installs I've done in the past, I'd still say the problem lies with something else you've installed, not Firefox itself. Might be the flash plugin, might not.

You can't say the plugins not at fault because when you had a page open with no flash the problem still occured because this is not the only time the plugin code is called. For instance all plugins are probably probed on startup, if the problem was there then your Firefox instance was doomed from the very start.

The only true way of finding out what is causing your problems is to install from the ground up Firefox and all your plugins, testing along the way for this memory leak.

That or use a debuger ^_^

Re:Whatever

[Ambush Commander]

It must be so difficult that increases in memory footprints are not grounds for freezing a tree and backing out the commits.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that's right, that makes FF better. I just can't get my PC to agree. It keeps insisting on using 100% CPU on pages that contain Flash ... EVEN WHEN THE FLASH IS OFF SCREEN OR THE WINDOW DOESN'T HAVE FOCUS. It also keeps using near 100 MB RAM. It scrolls painfully slow on pages with fixed backgrounds, and a resized JPG can bring it to its knees. I guess my PC is just biased against FF.

Re:Whatever

[StikyPad]

Well, FF (and OSS's) weakness is that developing it won't put food on the table, and can only continue insomuch as there is someone with the time, knowledge, and skills to do it. Commericial software will continue development until the company runs out of money and then some, which is more than a few years away for MS, even if they started operating tomorrow at million dollar losses per day.

Re:Whatever

[poofyhairguy82]

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_. Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.

Yes Firefox 1.x sucks at that.

Yes that is why I use Epiphany as my porn browser.

Yes Firefox 1.5 fixes the problem.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your contribution to this discussion, Slashbot 516230. Your pointless and inaccurate analogy, and your closing puerile rudeness, have undoubtedly elevated the discussion.

Seriously though, creep back under the rock you came from. If you don't have anything of value to say, and in addition cannot say whatever pointless junk you spew out without being an asshat, just shut up. The parent was making a valid comment in the debate as to which is better between Firefox and IE in certain regards. What's wrong with that? And the flame about using a "non-shit OS" and being a retard for using Windows is just... my God. I don't even know what to say. There are so many reasons one either would want to or has to use some flavor of Windows that it's ridiculous.

And you're at +5. Sad. Sad, sad, sad.

Re:Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a pointless remark.

Yes, it is a pointless remark. One could have to use Windows for several reasons, including:

1. Having to use software that only exists on Windows (the case for much scientific software people use in academia, but since your academic career no doubt stopped at the time you dropped out of high school you wouldn't know about this, would you?).
2. Working at a place where Windows boxes are the norm.
3. Developing things for Windows (for non-web apps, something like 95% of all software development is done for the Windows platform. But since you have never coded anything but a couple of lines of Basic in kindergarten, you probably wouldn't know about this either). John Carmack uses Windows for this reason, among others. Is he a retard too?
4. Enjoying playing modern games (no, Tux Racer doesn't count).
5. Simply prefering Windows (yes, that's actually possible).

But even disregarding all that, calling someone a "retard" for not using your OS is so infantile, rude, moronic that I'm at a loss of words. No, actually I'm not: you're a stupid, ignorant asshole. So shut the fuck up already.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Let's see.

Having to use software that only exists on Windows

Tragic. Regrettable. I consider anyone in this situation to be literally a hostage to a corporation that is an illegal monopoly. Some hostages suck up to their kidnappers, others get hurt trying to escape. Guess which one the parent poster is...

Working at a place where Windows boxes are the norm.

Sad. Do you mean "norm", or "the only permissible OS" ?

Developing things for Windows

Pathetic. This is what you call an "accomplice", unless they're sensible enough to port it to other platforms too. Don't complain about what are ultimately windows problems, if you are doing your part to further entrench an illegal monopoly.

Enjoying playing modern games

Funny, trying to paint me as the childish and/or uneducated one, and you trot out games? Better yet, you call them modern. Instead of what you really mean, which is "commercialized".

Simply prefering Windows

Completely irrelevant. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right. If I am right, then preferring something that doesn't work is stupid. Period. Preferring your engineless Ford Pinto sitting up on blocks is something you're allowed to do I suppose, but if you complain about not being able to drive where you want, prepare to be bitchslapped.

And if I'm wrong, well, then it's just moot.

but since your academic career no doubt stopped at the time you dropped out of high school

I did flunk out of highschool. I also went to college anyway, decent SAT scores can do that. Read John Taylor Gatto's book "The Underground History of Education" sometime, its a free web ebook. You might stop tossing around lame insults that rely on an unfounded respect for education and/or academia.

But since you have never coded anything but a couple of lines of Basic in kindergarten

I didn't go to kindergarten. But at about that age, my uncle bought a TRS-80 Model I. He tried to teach me assembly, but was a little beyond me. Whatever flavor of basic it was that the thing had though, I did pick up on that. I wouldn't try assembly again until the TI994a that I got for christmas, several years later. And on a TMS9900 cpu, ugh. Scary. But I can do decent asm on both the z80 and the tms9900 now, so it's not all for naught. Do you even recognize "tms9900" ? I'm quite decent at asm on most 8bit cpus, and I still occassionaly mess with PICs, even work on my own little z80 machine I soldered together. Amazing that it runs at all, with the tangle of wire-wrap wire that it has... but, the tolerances on that old stuff were always pretty lenient.

I can do 68k asm, 68020 to an extent. I do decent 386ish x86 assembly. I tinker in it too. I occassionally write little C programs, but I'm just as likely to crank out a perl cgi. I've offered patches on a bunch of weird linux apps you've probably never heard of. None have been accepted as far as I know. I'm working on some code of my own to extend a game engine called "glest", which is like a generic brand warcraft3.

I'm writing a word processor in XUL. Learning what I can of XPCOM, so that a spreadsheet might be possible.

I'm working on a webapp for a database that no one thinks is possible. I've got a whole series of diaries over on K5 explaining it, and while there are a few critics that claim it isn't modelable, much less any decent way to get the data into it, I've got a webapp that will allow distributed data entry from thousands of contributors who have to substitute in until we get some kickass AI.

Please though, tell us what it is that you do, that makes you such a veritable expert on programming.

Re:Whatever

[coastal984]

You know, you really have no clue do you? You're so caught up in anti-ms hatred that you're incapable of seeing all sides of the equation.

Personally, I still run Windows 2000, and I don't use FireFox. FF annoys me. It's slow to initially load, tabbed browsing is nice but isn't something I die without, and quite frankly, it does crash. Alot more than IE.

Further more, I too have been running Windows on machines for various lengths of time, from 4 months to 3 years, without reinstall (Note, the 4 months one was built just 4 months ago - the only system I have done a complete reinstall on is a dual xeon workstation that used to be a single, and when I upgraded to dual, I also decided to put a larger main drive in.) All this flagrant MS/Windows bashing is rediculous. Yes, it has problems. So does every distro of Linux. So does OS X. Sure, IE has problems. So does FF. So does Opera. So do all the other smaller browsers out there.

People that just violently reject and flame those who use Windows/IE are no better than religious extremeists - not in the sense of terroism, but in the sense that they are incapable of living with others. This, among other things, I believe is a major reason Linux/FF will never take over Windows/IE - because so many nutcases post stupid comments like the ones made above, unilatterally bashing Microsoft and not acknowledging that they and their software arn't anywhere near perfect, either.

Re:Whatever

[TheoMurpse]

Here's a tip: don't look at the "Memory Usage" tab in Task Manager; add "Virtual Memory Size" (View->Select Columns) and then look at that. VM Size is the correct memory usage of a program.

Re:Whatever

[TheoMurpse]

So, carrying your analogy over to browsers (the GP's post was concerned with Firefox's problems), wouldn't your response be "use a non-shit browser," implying Firefox is a "shit browser"?

You used an OS comparison (DR- vs MS-DOS) with a browser comparison (FF vs IE). Then you go on to say it's the OS's fault (DR-DOS's) for the crashes in your example, saying it's FF's fault for the crashes through analogy.

Use a non-shit logic, retard.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Two problems. One: he is unqualified to determine whether the problem is a browser or an OS issue.
Two: Even if a browser issue, the fact that it happens on one OS rather than another tends to indicate that it really is an OS issue anyway.

I wasn't using logic, but humor. You should get some, sometime. I highly recommend it.

Re:Whatever

[dublin]

Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.

Nope. That's why those of us that care about performance still use the Mozilla Suite (now under the deplorable name of Seamonkey) instead of the separate Firefox, Thunderbird, nVu, etc.

Even running just the browser and e-mail, I find my XP box is significantly faster and more stable with the Moz Suite than the FF/TB combo. Memory leaks and the like are still huge problem either way, but at least you don't have to duplicate all that code in two different apps, and the integration between e-mail and the browser is smoother in the Suite, too.

And don't even get me started on the features like roaming profiles (store your prefs, bookmarks, etc on a network server so they're available from anywhere!) and searching of bookmarks that doesn't obliterate their heirarchical location that worked in Netscape 4.x that *still* haven't made it into any of the Mozilla apps...

This is old

[ajdlinux]

Fx 1.5 RC1? I'd like to see it with RC3, thank you.

Re:This is old

[Wisgary]

Yeah, this is the Internet, not a damn paper magazine. I got tired of reading out of sync articles years ago.

Re:This is old

[Baricom]

I'd like to see it with 1.5 Final. Tomorrow/today has been strongly rumored to be release day for a while now.

What competition?

[js92647]

The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. Right, a closed-source browser like IE against Firefox. Seems to me like IE wants to be a "feature-whore" more than a useful browser. Pfft. I used Opera until I saw Firefox, you can fill in the blanks.

Re:What competition?

[theapodan]

Actually, with Opera's "wand" feature, you can fill in the blanks much easier than with firefox's comparable feature.

Re:What competition?

[lovedub]

And it doesn't use up half of your computer's memory.

Opera?

[neoform]

How does opera keep getting in the headlines?
I know 1 person that uses it, seriously.

I check my weblogs all the time and never see anyone of my visitors using it..

Re:Opera?

[cryptoz]

Now you know two.

Re:Opera?

[SCVirus]

Because so few people visit your blog that 1 person is like a 10% market share...

Re:Opera?

[brilinux]

Yeah, I use Opera on my Solaris and FreeBSD machines, and Firefox on my Macs. Is there a nice extension or something, though, other than just using CSS to block ads like adblock for Firefox? I find that going back to my other machines after my mac laptop is rather annoying...

Re:Opera?

[calvin1981]

I check my weblogs all the time and never see anyone of my visitors using it..

That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer. See the Opera page .

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it infrequently as I mainly use Opera.

For me, Firefox crashes at least twice a day, so I would have switch to Opera in a heartbeat if Opera offers extension support. Opera is probably the fastest and most feature rich browser in the market right out of the box right now _without_ sacificing_ stability.

The only thing that is holding me back to Firefox is 1. more website supports FF 2. Flashgot extension.

Re:Opera?

[nairnr]

Make it two! Well, you don't know me, I don't know you...

I quite like using Opera as a browser, and as a mail client. Mouse gestures, tabbed browsing. I find it to be a nice browsing experience. I had used Firefox and Mozilla, but I have settled on using Opera as my browser of choice. Too each there own but I am quite happy that Opera keeps getting press, I think it is a quality browser.

Re:Opera?

[Al Dimond]

I think Opera makes headlines not necessarily because lots of people use it but because people writing articles about web browsers care about web browsing and thus are quite likely to have tried Opera. Most people I know that have tried Opera are quite impressed by it, even if they don't use it every day. I use Firefox on the machine I'm posting from (a GNU/Linux box with a GB of RAM) but on machines without the RAM or processing power I almost always install Opera instead. There are a few things I prefer about the look'n'feel of FF, and how much it can be customized, but Opera's performance on otherwise slow computers is really impressive.

So I guess it's kind of like why many web sites discussing operating systems discuss desktop Unixes when for most people their OS decision is "XP Home or XP Pro?" More that the author is interested than the readers.

Re:Opera?

[Aranth Brainfire]

You obviously don't know the right sorts of people. I know a couple of people who use it, and I'm a user myself. It's more common on mobile devices I believe, but it's still a more mature browser than Firefox on desktops, in my opinion. A web browser is, to me, something that should "just work", not something that should be customized all to hell with extensions and stuff. Opera does that, and has most of the features of an extension-enriched Firefox. The main thing it's missing is the ideological "Open source is better than EVERYTHING" component, which means that (in my experience), you don't run into as many evangelical Opera users. I honestly don't give much of a damn who uses Opera, as long as the production team keeps making a good, responsive browser that I personally can use without problems. Firefox, however, by design encourages the spreading of itself, as it is in the user's best interest that more people get involved and contribute code or extensions.

Nice site graphics, by the way. Should be at least one record of Opera in your logs now, or they're doing it wrong :p

Re:Opera?

[croddy]

No.

It sends a user-agent string that is enough to persuade most browser detection that it's IE, but it includes the word Opera -- and web log analysis tools are designed to recognize that.

This is Opera's default user-agent (from the page you linked):

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; OS) Opera X.Y

People do, in fact, understand that this user-agent refers to Opera, and they develop their log analysis tools to report that fact. I have never seen a web log analysis tool that didn't understand Opera's user-agent.

The traffic on the webservers I maintain shows Opera at around 0.09% of total hits, just behind Lynx.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer identifies itself as Netscape 4. Yet Netscape 4's market share is not perceived to be very heigh :-)

Most stat packages know how to look for Opera.

Re:Opera?

[jeezuzz]

You see no one useing it in your weblogs because the browser identifies itself as MSIE by default,
users have to change the option in preferences to have the browser identify itself as Opera.
Im sure most users, like myself, dont even bother with it.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably don't see them in your logs - I use opera at home, but set it to pretend to be IE version (mumble) to avoid the ever unwelcome "we don't support anyone but ms" messages some sites insist on using

Re:Opera?

[Kelson]

Opera stays in the web browser headlines for the same reason that Apple stays in the PC headlines: They keep pushing the envelope. Opera's pioneered a lot of browser UI -- mouse gestures, MDI, integrated search boxes. Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other. There's probably a Firefox extension somewhere, but I can't think of another browser that does that. And while they weren't the first to implement CSS, the main author of the original spec, Håkon Wium Lie, has been an Opera exec for 5 or 6 years.

So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.

Re:Opera?

[neoform]

I have it installed on my system, which is more than i can say about IE.

In all seriousness the percentage of people using Opera compaired to IE or even Firefox is trivial. Why not start talking about iCab or winamp's built in browser? Opera is and probably always will have a trivial userbase..

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

• http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/
• select "in opera url filter ini format", "no links back to this page", "view list as plain text" and hit "Go".
• Save all the text except the blank lines and ones starting with "#" into your Opera directory, naming the file "filter.ini".
• Close Opera if it's running
• Add the line "URL Filter File=~/.opera/filter.ini" to your opera6.ini under "[Adv User Prefs]".
• Start Opera and not see ads anymore
• Eat pie - cuz itz goooooood

Re:Opera?

[sznupi]

In Europe it has at least (depending on the country) half of Firefox usage, which itself is at about 15%

Re:Opera?

[Lisandro]

Because it's a heck of a browser. The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics, but i know quite a lot of people that use and love Opera, me included. Hands down, the best UI in any software i've used as of lately, never mind in browsers, and a sleek, lightweight, fast piece of software.

    Opera gets a lot of (undeserved) flak arround here because it's not open source. They gave away a free, ad supported, 100% functional version and it wasn't enough. Now they gave away registration keys, and i guess that's isn't enough either.

Re:Opera?

[at_slashdot]

"Opera is and probably always will have a trivial userbase.."

Any particular reasons for that?

Re:Opera?

[Kelson]

That doesn't say much about how many of your visitors use Opera, because Opera by default identifies itself as some version of Internet Explorer.

Insightful? What Slashdot needs is a -1 Misinformation mod. This meme has been floating around for ages, but as other posters have pointed out, any stats package that is paying attention can tell that it's Opera even under the default identification. It doesn't really disguise itself as IE, it says, "I'm IE (OK, not really, I'm Opera, but I got your attention, didn't I?)" It's kind of like wearing a green T-shirt with the word "Red" on it.

Re:Opera?

[masklinn]

Håkon is Opera's CTO since 1999

Re:Opera?

[hkmwbz]

"Why not start talking about iCab or winamp's built in browser?"

Because those are not the browsers Firefox and others keep borrowing innovative features from. Those haven't been around for ten years. Those aren't pushing open standards, both by implementing them, and by paying people to work at the W3C and such.

You really need to relearn your browser history. Perhaps you are a bit too young to have followed Opera through the years? It has defined what a modern browser is supposed to be doing, both on the PC and on mobiles.

"Opera is and probably always will have a trivial userbase.."

You aren't quite paying attention. It's huge on mobiles, and now that it's available for free without ads on the PC lots of people are downloading it.

Re:Opera?

[DigitumDei]

On my web site Opera usage is sitting at 1.13% right now. I guess it all depends on the target audience.

Re:Opera?

[pherthyl]

Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other

Don't get me wrong, Opera is a very nice browser, but that is a fantastically useless feature.

Re:Opera?

[oldwolf13]

you get a big fat gold star as well.

awesome.

Re:Opera?

[Crayon Kid]

Now that Opera is free, there's really nothing holding back people. You can't blame lack of awareness for one of them more than you can for the other. They're comparable in terms of standard support. So what's left? Why isn't Opera raising next to Firefox? Extensions (and the implied features) are really all what I can think about.

Re:Opera?

[at_slashdot]

"Why isn't Opera raising next to Firefox? Extensions (and the implied features) are really all what I can think about."

I highly doubt it.

First of all we don't know if that's true or not, I know that when Opera become free ther were millions of downloads in the first couple of days, I think even more than Firefox got.

Secondly, Opera doesn't get by far as much coverage as Firefox. That's linked to politics not to technical issues. The issue is that Firefox is open sources while Opera is not. Opera is better quality program, if it were open sourced (and it might be one day) I would be curious if there will still be so many Opera detractors. It's one thing to say: "I don't use Opera because of my ideology" and it's a totally different thing to say "Opera sucks" because of your ideology.

Thirdly, I don't think extensions are that important. By the way I need to install 15 extensions or so in Firefox to make it work as Opera (and its still slower and not as crispy as Opera). Now if someone really can't live without one extesion I can understand that they want to use Firefox, but that's valid only for people that used Firefox before not for IE users. And if someone who uses IE wants to get a better browser they would get the one that get more press (firefox) not the one that's better (Opera)... extensions will be the last thing to be considered since they don't even know what are those or which one they would need or like to use.

And finaly, I don't give a damn if Opera is going to have more users or not, some people even say it's better to be like this because of security issue, I only reacted to the initial poster that was marked as "+5 insightful" where I didn't consider that really insightful, later on I saw his post marked "0 redundant" so I guess in a sense some other people agreed with me... so I feel vindicated.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of web sites do things like present a list of things, and when you select one of the items you go to a new page that doesn't have the list, but just a back button. With Opera Window Linking, I keep the list up, and can quickly click through the list, with each new item coming up in the linked window. Very fast, no new window opening/closing, etc. It stays where I put it.

It is more awkward to do that sort of thing with other browsers.

Re:Opera?

[bunratty]

Opera always identifies itself as Opera in the user agent string, even when spoofing as another user agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 9.0

Re:Opera?

[pherthyl]

Middle click all the links in the list to open them as background tabs, then view all those tabs in sequence. I would say less awkward than your solution, since it doesn't require any switching amongst tabs until you're done reading a page.

Re:Opera?

[Mathness]

I am pretty sure that Opera is completely ads free now (there even was a story on /. about it, if memory servers correctly).

Only features Opera is missing are 64bit support/binaries (UNIX like systems) and MathML.

Biased opinion as I am a long time Opera user and semi-fanatic :p

Re:Opera?

[Kelson]

The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics,

Argh! Can we please kill this myth?

Opera identifies itself by default as "[MSIE ID] Opera/version" It doesn't hide the fact that it's Opera. It's basically saying "Oh, hey, I'm IE (just kidding, I'm really Opera)" It's no different from the way IE still identifies itself as old-school Netscape: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE/version; etc.)"

Any stats package that's paying attention can tell that it's Opera and not IE. Any stats package that doesn't is broken.

Similarly, any browser detection script that's paying attention can tell it's Opera -- but the purpose of identifying itself as IE is to catch the simplistic scripts whose authors haven't really thought through what they're doing and just want to check for what 1999 considered a "modern" browser.

Re:Opera?

[wemgadge]

Opera identifies itself as IE by default. Those 3 million downloads they claim on their website aren't trackable. Thing is, they've done it to themselves. The browser identifies as IE for increased website compatibility, but as a result, they're out of the running in the statistics race.

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not undeserved.

We demand nothing less than freedom.

~Slashdotters for a GNU Generation

Re:Opera?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How does opera keep getting in the headlines?" - by neoform (551705) on Tuesday November 29, @01:34AM

Because it outperforms the rest of them on most web-oriented tasks, period. It's the fastest web-browser there is.

See here (latest test I have found, using Opera 8.x & other browsers were @ their current builds as of the date of this test as well):

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win

(& it's typically less "security-hole/bug-ridden" vs. IE &/or FireFox as well)

* That's why!

APK

P.S.=> As far as your weblogs, you've got to realize 2 things - Opera's able to "forge" it's identifier strings, & by default iirc, it poses as IE, and additionally, Opera wasn't free (as IE & FireFox are basically) until a month or two ago, & that's a BIG incentive for people to use software (which is why Linux has made such a dent in the marketplace in both home & corporate environs - it works, & costs nothing to purchase initially)... apk

Re:Opera?

[ccp]

Hands down, the best UI in any software i've used as of lately, never mind in browsers

At last! I was wondering if I was the only one.

Cheers,

Re:Opera?

[CyricZ]

It's often the other way around. Had you bothered to follow the development of Opera and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, you would obviously have seen where the features were first implemented: Netscape, Mozilla, or Firefox.

It was Netscape who pioneered many of the web browser developments we take for granted today. CSS and JavaScript are two examples. Of course, the others like IE and Opera copied from Netscape.

Mosaic and Netscape were also highly innovative in providing a cross-platform browser, long before Opera.

Indeed, Netscape pioneered the concept of providing the integrated browser/email package, which Opera proceeded to copy. Even today the Netscape 4.80 email client is superior to that of the latest Opera releases.

Re:Opera?

[hkmwbz]

"Had you bothered to follow the development of Opera and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, you would obviously have seen where the features were first implemented: Netscape, Mozilla, or Firefox."

You obviously didn't read my post, because I clearly talked about "innovative features". Neither iCab nor the Winamp browser have defined the modern browser the way Opera has.

What Netscape did years ago is basically irrelevant in this discussion, because the other person brought up a couple of obscure browsers that haven't really done anything like Opera has. Most of the things we take for granted in modern browsers (popup blocking, the standard browser search field, privacy controls, sessions, bookmark nicknames, etc.) were invented by Opera.

It's fun to notice how many years ago was the last time anything that had anything to do with Netscape was innovative. Mozilla has certainly always been a follower and always trying to catch up with Opera, as is apparent from its blatant ripoff of Opera's features.

Sadly they are unable to do it properly, so it ends up as a rather bloated software package. 5 MB for a plain browser without anything else?!

"Mosaic and Netscape were also highly innovative in providing a cross-platform browser, long before Opera."

Again, they are irrelevant because they are old, and they never "innovated" anything beyond creating some of the first browsers and some common features. Just like Firefox doesn't innovate, but just keeps copying Opera. Just look at the new features in Firefox 1.5. Guess where most of those were borrowed from? That's right, Opera has had most of those for years!

"Netscape pioneered the concept of providing the integrated browser/email package"

Actually, Opera had a newsreader and e-mail client back when the first version was released in the mid-nineties.

Also, integration was a known concept ages before Netscape did it.

"Even today the Netscape 4.80 email client is superior to that of the latest Opera releases."

I would have to disagree with you there. The e-mail client in Opera is what Google based their Gmail (officially the best webmail service in existence) functionality on, and even back when Opera had a normal folder based e-mail client, it was better than Netscape's. I used to be a Netscape user, and the e-mail client sucks badly. It can't even compare to Opera.

I'm sure

[Anonymous Coward]

they're just saving the best for last...

Avant Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

For those that dont know, I like Avant browser better than all the others due to being able to control every aspect of it... Disabling flash and other stuff as well as flipping through windows with the scroll wheel (while holding right click) makes it great. Also can close/make new windows with mouse motions by using the right click. I just wish windows had the same features for managing windows as avant has, would be a great addition to vista.

Re:Avant Browser

[cryptoz]

The features you mention sound suspiciously like mouse gestures in Opera...are you sure it's not Opera that you're using? ;)

Can't say I've ever used "Avant" before, but...everything you've said is available in most other browsers, AFAIK.

Re:Avant Browser

[P0ldy]

Can't say I've ever used "Avant" before, but...everything you've said is available in most other browsers, AFAIK.

You're wrong there. Avant has some features only available in IE, which makes it pretty special. From their FAQ:

Is Avant Browser a secure browser?

Yes, Avant Browser is secure. Since it's based on Internet Explorer, Avant Browser is as secure as Internet Explorer.

Re:Avant Browser

[cryptoz]

Oh, so Avant is not even a real browser? What a rip.

Re:Avant Browser

[aconbere]

I'm afraid cryptoz is right, what you're talking about is mouse gestures, and as suprising as this may be to you this feature has been available for some time in firefox as an extension and default in opera for ages. *gasp*

If you are however content to use a IE based browser that fails in all the same ways that IE fails (security and standards compliant rendering being my main to beefs) then by all means go right ahead. But be forewarned your avant browser, is nothing but an IE skin, and in my opinion it's not even a very good one.

~Anders

Re:Avant Browser

[Farrell]

Avant Browser is actually an alternative version, if it's not the direct descendant of, an IE browser called, I believe, IEOpera, who's goal, quite amusingly, was to bring Opera's features to IE. Everything you listed on there is an Opera feature, and some of the more basic ones. It's definately worth trying Opera out itself, if just because it's now completely free.

Re:Avant Browser

[Lisandro]

It's a "wrapper" for IE; it gives you a better interface, but it's IE under the hood alright.

Re:Avant Browser

[trollable]

Firefox, Galeon and al. are just "wrappers" around Gecko. And Safari, Konqueror and al. around KHTML. Not sure I follow your logic.

Re:Avant Browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Your pathetic sentence structure make Gorbo mad!

I wonder...

[FF8Jake]

how many ultimately cool creative proprietary new filters they can pack into IE7 instead of getting standards support right. I can see it now, along with the usual "glow" and "shadow" filters, we will also have "rainbow animation" effects!

Re:I wonder...

[pomo monster]

Drop shadows are terribly overused nowadays, but they can be enormously helpful sometimes to emphasize elements or set them apart from busy backgrounds, e.g. captions over a photo. text-shadow is already a property in CSS2, and they're considering adding a "glow" or "outline" to the next recommendation.

Firefox doesn't support text-shadow (or, totally apropos nothing, display: inline-block for that matter), but Safari does, and tastefully applied, it's great to have around. Why IE doesn't pair its proprietary filters to standard CSS properties like these is beyond me.

Re:I wonder...

[masklinn]

They tested IE7, which has just about 0 W3C-standards improvements from IE6 (a few bugfixes, nothing more). Beta 2 will admitedly (from the ieblog posts) be extremely different, with a full compliance to CSS1 (including the damn position: fixed) and a fairly good CSS2.1 implementation (including most if not all selectors: child, next-sibling, attributes, ..., and combined classes selector as well)

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Copperlists in IE ??! That would be totally awesome !!

Re:I wonder...

[Bogtha]

text-shadow is already a property in CSS2

Unfortunately, because nobody bothered implementing it, it was removed from CSS 2. It'll probably be back in CSS 3 though.

Opera

[roman_mir]

Just a couple of months ago I remember a story here, on /., about Opera giving away free serial numbers for their browser to anyone who wanted one (or more.) I must admit, I got myself one of those numbers and tried the browser and hated it. So I am stuck with FF for now because there is no way in hell I will use IE ever again in my life (haven't used it except in corporate environment for IE based intranet apps that someone wrote for over 3 years now.)

But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue. There are problems. I hope these problems will be fixed quickly because this is getting annoying, and even though I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.

Re:Opera

[cryptoz]

Why did you hate it? I've been an Opera user for coming up on three years now, and I admit I disliked it at first. I'll even go so far as to say that it's one of those applications that just flat out doesn't feel right at first...but seriously, I can't go back to anything else. Not FF, not IE, not Konqueror, nothing, just because Opera is so wonderful. Are you sure that you didn't allow yourself time to get the feel of it? Did you customize it at all? I also admit that by default Opera's interface is awful, but in the end it's all about the customization, isn't it?

I suggest you give Opera another chance, since it sounds like you gave up on it rather quickly.

Re:Opera

[John_Booty]

I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.

Okay. Fair enough. Let's see what "LeetKey" is...

LeetKey is similar to Russ Key... this extension allows typing and transliterating English into 1337 and other encoding schemes such as ROT13, Base64, HEX, URL etc. For some encodings this extension will translate the text back into English

Wow. What a blow it will be to Firefox if you drop active development of that. Christ.

Re:Opera

[roman_mir]

You are right, it's not a big deal. It is only loss of mindshare. I am not silly to think that anyone cares, I am saying that I will move and I am not the only one.

Re:Opera

[roman_mir]

I hated it because it felt awkward and unnatural. Obviously if problems in FF really get to me I will have to deal with this awfull feeling I have when I look at Opera when it opens. But I am still hoping FF will get fixed in the real release of FF1.5

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Try K-Meleon, it is Gecko-based but lacks most of FF's faults.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of the box, Opera does not feel or look like FF or IE. It puts basic things in different places. I tried to switch everything to look like ff for 30 minutes, then realized I could just use ff. That is my boring story of why I, and 99% of the other people out there don't use Opera, and probably never will.

Re:Opera

[gaveawaymyname]

I jumped on the Opera bandwagon when it went free (8.5?) and I thought it was great.

I ultimately went back to Ff because I didn't like the all-in-one browser/mail/etc. It had some issues on XP (install/uninstall oddities). It also crashed when I repeated the same word using Speak (like 100 times), but I should have seen that coming.

I even had to go grab Auto Refresh, Mouse Gesture, and QuickNote (with the All-in-One Sidebar, of course).

Re:Opera

[masklinn]

Lacks every single Firefox feature too (such as a useable UI, configuration dialogs, extensions, themes, ...)

Re:Opera

[hkmwbz]

"I hated it because it felt awkward and unnatural."

Wow, that's really specific!

That's like saying "I don't like Firefox because I don't like it".

Re:Opera

[SleepyHappyDoc]

For some encodings this extension will translate the text back into English

Wow. What a blow it will be to Firefox if you drop active development of that. Christ.

You don't have kids, right?

Re:Opera

[bst82551]

You ever try K-Meleon? I use it daily and it's starting to pick up activity again. I expect an official version should be out within a month or two with the updated GRE. Although it doesn't have direct support for extensions, most of the time, the guys in the forums can manage to get them to work. It's very fast, very stable.
Give it a try and if you don't like it, oh well.. at least you can say you tried it.

Brian

Re:Opera

[teh kurisu]

What? Opera has skins, and it's a lot easier to customise out of the box than Firefox is (have a poke about the community site, you might be surprised). I'm pretty sure it has configuration dialogs too :P

Sure, no extensions. Personally I find that the most useful Firefox extensions are the ones that offer functionality that Opera already has, by default, and in a smaller download.

Re:Opera

[rmstar]

But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue.

It seems that the good FF folks just forgot to make sure the cache gets flushed. So you can fix FF's "memory leak" easily. See here.

Re:Opera

[tbigby]

Slashdot/Slashcode needs some feature to show that a comment is a reply to another comment below your browsing threshold. Perhaps just show these posts as children of 'A reply beneath your current threshold'?

In this case, the grandparent was replying to a (currenly 0 score) anonymous post talking about K-Meleon, not Opera... and the non-appearance of that post changes the context completely.

Re:Opera

[teh kurisu]

Whoops :)

Re:Opera

[asavage]

If you have frequent crashes I bet they are from extensions. I had some before with a bug in an extension and Firefox crashed almost every day. I have been running 1.5 beta, RC1, RC2,& RC3 for a while and I don't think I have had any crashes. Also if you install SessionSaver and there is a crash all the tabs you had open will probably be saved.

Re:Opera

[WiFiBro]

Hm, did you know Opera has several sort of 'skins' so you can make it imitate whatever browser you were used to?
(no i am not an opera user)

Re:Opera

[TheRaven64]

I used Opera on Windows, and liked it. I used it on FreeBSD, and liked it. Then I got a Mac, and got used to the uncluttered feel of Safari. Coming back to FreeBSD, I tried Opera, and then went with Firefox. The Opera UI feels very cluttered - there are a lot of buttons that I never use, and paring it down to something sensible is a lot of effort. For example, it has a Google search box, but you can also do a google search by prefixing your search terms with g in the search box.

Opera does seem to do better at rendering HTML than Firefox (about as good as WebCore when it comes to standards compliance, but less good in terms of aesthetics) and it has a few features I like (the forward and backward buttons spring to mind) but since I stopped using Windows I've got out of the habit of struggling with poorly conceived UIs, and I don't intend to start again.

Re:Opera

[nx]

That's why I have a love-hate relationship with conducting interviews, as opposed to observations, when it comes to usability testing. On the one hand, it's necessary and can be extremely useful. On the other, 80% of all responses are something like "I just don't like it" or "it looks nice".

Although, I must admit that specifying exactly what in the "look n' feel" of an application is "awkward and unnatural" is at times difficult. (And I can confirm that mocking users for their vagueness is not appreciated. :-) )

Re:Opera

[wheany]

I thought Opera felt a bit off when I tried it for the first time (version 5, I think). I hated the side panel (I still really don't use it) and I hated tabbed browsing (which I love now). The first positive thing that I really noticed was the instant back-button (I had a modem at the time).

Then I read about mouse gestures. The concept was odd at first, but after trying them for a few days I could't really use any other browser anymore. I mean who wants to mouse all the way up there just to go back one page, then wait agonising seconds before the last page appears.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

there are a lot of buttons that I never use, and paring it down to something sensible is a lot of effort

Either that's a stretch of the truth or you're one lazy mofo. WTH is so difficult about right click-remove from toolbar or turn off bar?

Get rid of the stuff you don't need and then don't do it again, because Opera keeps your settings when you upgrade.

Re:Opera

[bunratty]

No, there's no problem with the cache in Firefox. The instructions given on that page will make Firefox consume more memory on most computers, because it's telling Firefox to use 60 MB of RAM for the RAM cache. The default amount of memory Firefox uses depends on the physical RAM present, and is 32 MB on a computer with 1 GB of RAM.

If you see a problem with the cache, take the time to submit a proper bug report, not pass on advice that hurts instead of helps.

Re:Opera

[whitehatlurker]

It also crashed when I repeated the same word using Speak (like 100 times), but I should have seen that coming.

That was a case of Opera saving your life, just in case you had been in an environment with other people.

Re:Opera

[b4k3d b34nz]

I'm not sure if you know this already, but Opera has a really good mail client called M2 built in. It also has a feed reader and an IRC client, if you want to go that far.

Re:Opera

[gaveawaymyname]

Correct, hence the "...because I didn't like the all-in-one browser/mail/etc."

I thought M2 was decent, but I didn't really give it enough time to "settle in." I remember being impressed the with IRC client.

I would certainly try it out (for Linux this time, I don't recommend it for XP) if I could get it simply as a browser (plus the browser features mentioned previously). But I do think it's a fine program. Very impressed with all the features, even if I didn't need them so much.

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I've also been an Opera user for several years, and I was using it sporadically for months, picking up features and shortcuts here and there, before I really became hooked and used it exclusively. Now I use Opera daily on no less than 3 machines.

It does sound like many of the people who post on here about how they hated Opera don't really have valid critiques of it, and pretty much gave up. I find that frustrating and very ironic, that someone can sit at home night after night working on extensions and skins and whatever else to get Firefox to do what they want, and then those same people won't even bother to open the help in Opera or check out the 30 days to becoming an Opera lover site before they completely write it off as crap. With all the knowledge around this place, there's a lot of hypocrisy, and a lot of ignorance.

I've pretty much stopped trying to pimp Opera on Slashdot, because the arguments I hear back are always crap and never address anything that can be validly argued. Don't like the UI of Opera? Well then ini file editing is for you, or maybe just downloading other people's! Don't like the layout? Well start dragging, check out Nontroppo's site and get yourself some custom buttons, and learn how to make your own.

I just gave up and quietly use Opera, content that it does everything I want an internet program to do, all in one install. It just seems that for all the talk around here of customization and doing things for yourself (there's people on here who compile their own fucking kernel and still can't be bothered to look up Opera help), in the end it's just zealotry that keeps people from adopting Opera. The IE people don't even know about Opera, and most of the Firefox people it seems are too zealous now to even consider an alternative to Firefox (which is quite ironic..).

Re:Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

even though I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser

Yes, be a bully! Threaten to take your ball and go home if they won't play your way. After all, that is the spirit of Open Source, is it not? I for one think you should move over to Opera. After all, if there's one thing that Opera lacks, it's the ability to change text into leet-speak on the fly. If this were a feature, then surely Opera would rule the world!

Thank you for your endless dedication, you are making the world a better p14c3.

Re:Opera

[roman_mir]

You have no idea how this works, do you? I am not going to take anything away from anyone, I will just stop caring and supporting. You can support it if you want.

Re:Opera

[TheoMurpse]

If you ever decide to go back to Opera, you should know that it's now free (as in beer) and has no registration, and is not ad-supported anymore. And they're getting closer to releasing version 9, which apparently does quite well on the Acid2 Test.

It seems to me,

[BattleRat]

that the most compelling argument to NOT use Firefox in favor of IE died when the "IE Tab" extension came out. Everything you need is now within your reach with Firefox. You have no excuse now...

Re:It seems to me,

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankyou :D You just found the extention allowing me to bury that little blue e icon forever :)
The only reason I still needed it was for Windows Update and Dell Premier... (Although Opera works with the dell site)

Re:It seems to me,

[OneFix at Work]

Now, if only they could integrate this with Wine so that I can use it on my Linux box...I have to use IE to test sites from time to time, but I prefer to just fire up wine instead of rebooting to Windows...this would make it a whole lot easier on me (and a few others I'm sure)...

Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[sysrpl]

Both Opera and Firefox are rolling native SVG support into their browser. If you are unfamiliar with SVG, this site.

http://svg.codebot.org/

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[BlueEar]

Support is still buggy in Firefox 1.5. I just experienced a complete xorg lock when I tried to look at the tiger logo at http://svg.codebot.org/. This happened under Ubuntu Breezy (5.10).

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Kelson]

They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.

So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[gaspyy]

Man, is Firefox slow on rendering SVG!
I don't want to sound like a troll, but it's shockingly slow.
rendering is slow, scrolling is slow... The firefox logo or the tiger head are not *that* complex; rendering should be instant! rendering should be much faster and scrolling shouldn't take a hit since the graphics are already there. Also, no zoom in/out?

Opera renders the same thing faster and scrolling speed isn't affected.

I know most /.-ers hate Flash, but that is the target speed. If browsers can't render animated stuff as fast as Flash, you have no hope of imposing SVG for real stuff.

I'm using a Athlon Xp 2600+, nVidia GeForce 4, 512 Mb RAM, Firefox 1.5 RC3, not the fastest system but don't tell me I need a new system for a tiger head to display properly.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[hunterx11]

That site tells me that my browser doesn't support application/xhtml+xml and tells me to download Firefox or Opera. This is strange, because I use Safari, and it does support application/xhtml+xml. I don't think a great way to promote web standards is to have websites break on purpose when they detect browsers they don't like.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Saeger]

The same thing happened to me with Firefox 1.5RC3 under FedoraCore 4. The first time xorg kicked me back out to KDM; the 2nd time -- after I'd logged back in thinking it was fluke -- it froze up and no ctrl-alt-f1 or ctrl-alt-backspace could save me.

That kind of thing almost never happens to me. SVG is slug-slow to begin with, but now I'm twice shy. Also, Firefox 1.5 final is supposed to be released sometime today, and the SVG support won't have improved much if at all from RC3.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Sigg3.net]

There is something wrong with the natives. They only show up like text and quotes and equals.
There must be something wrong with the nets. *sigh*

I can't wait to download the new standard.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[jeff_schiller]

Opera 9 is MUCH further along in its SVG support, it now supports scripting for its SVG and is inching towards SVG Basic - Opera 9 TP1 is almost to the point of supporting all of Mozilla's supported SVG features (as well as declarative animation). Things are getting better...

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Bogtha]

This is strange, because I use Safari, and it does support application/xhtml+xml.

No it doesn't. It doesn't complain when presented with an application/xhtml+xml resource, and it applies some XHTML rules, but it's quite a way from supporting XHTML properly. Look at the Konqueror testcases for examples. Because of this, it doesn't ask for application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header when it's requesting resources from web servers.

I don't think a great way to promote web standards is to have websites break on purpose when they detect browsers they don't like.

That isn't what's happening. The website is correctly detecting that the browser doesn't claim to support XHTML.

For what it's worth, I don't think a great way to promote "web standards" is to claim that your favourite browser conforms to specifications that it doesn't conform to :).

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[hunterx11]

it's quite a way from supporting XHTML properly

The example you gave is that it chooses to attempt to render XHTML which is not well-formed. While one can argue that this is a bad thing, this is a deliberate decision, and not a lack of support. And think about how ludicrous this is in the context of this website:

We refuse to send you a well-formed webpage even though you can render it, because you would render it even if it weren't well-formed. So, instead of sending you a webpage which would work on your browser, we won't send it to you until you switch to a browser that makes other webpages stop working.

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Bogtha]

The example you gave is that it chooses to attempt to render XHTML which is not well-formed.

No, as I said, look at the testcases. Safari actually gets that part right. It's the rest of XHTML support that it has problems with.

While one can argue that this is a bad thing, this is a deliberate decision, and not a lack of support.

I don't think you can claim that the browser developers deliberately decided to do that when the browser doesn't do that.

From the rest of your comment, it seems you are under the impression that the only differences between HTML and XHTML are the media type and the mandatory error handling for malformed documents. In fact, there's a lot more to XHTML than that - there's:

• differences in the DOM,
• differences in CSS support,
• differences in how tables are parsed,
• differences in comment handling and the content model of style and script elements,
• differences in handling xml:lang,
• alternative ways of linking stylesheets,

...and probably more that I can't remember off the top of my head. The testcases attached to the bug report I linked to test for XHTML support in these areas, and Safari gets a substantial number of them wrong. A browser must do a lot more than throw errors to support XHTML.

We refuse to send you a well-formed webpage even though you can render it, because you would render it even if it weren't well-formed.

Again, please read my previous comment. It's more like this: "We refuse to send you an XHTML document because XHTML doesn't appear in the list of document types you have told us you support." HTTP already provides a mechanism by which clients can tell servers what document types they want. Safari says that it wants HTML. Safari doesn't say that it wants XHTML. If you look at browsers that support XHTML, you will see that they include application/xhtml+xml in their Accept header.

My theory?

[Travoltus]

I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first. People saw FireFox and perceived it to be far better than IE, and at least "good enough" against Opera, and FireFox was free, so there you go.

Completely non-informative article

[AcidArrow]

To sum it up: IE7 gets tabs and better security (supposedly) (wow, we already knew that for quite a while) FF gets autoupdates that work (well, we all know that already) and Opera gets a variety of new features (but they were unable to test them for the article)

Re:Completely non-informative article

[killjoe]

All the IE users will be soo happy with the leet new tabs!. Most of them will never know that everybody else has been enjoying those features for a long time now. I sometimes feel sorry for them but I get over it quick.

Re:Completely non-informative article

[trezor]

I've tried IE7 Beta 1 and let me tell you. They fucked up the UI in every single way possible. Rearranged everything known, and basicly implemented tabs in the poorest way I've ever seen it implemented.

Even people complaining about Opera's "untraditional" default UI, would praise Opera after seeing this mess. The best part? It can't be configured to work in a sane or usable way.

In short, from top and down: Tabs on top. Then the URL-bar. Then the toolbar and finally the menu-bar. In all honesty, you can rearrenge the toolbar and menubar, but the tabs and URL-bar has to remain on top.

Maybe there are fixes, but if an advanced user can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I call it "broken". Which seems to be the most fitting word I can think of for IE7.

Re:Completely non-informative article

[StikyPad]

Maybe there are fixes, but if an advanced user can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I call it "broken".

Or the user isn't advanced enough. Any insufficiently advanced user is indistinguishable from a noob.

IE 7 , why bother?

[DrkKnght]

If you want tab browsing and the extras and want to use IE as the heart of your browser, than get the latest version of Maxthon. I tried a beta version of IE7 that was a legit download I found on a site through a link from another site, I think the link was on Lockergnome. I found it poorly set up as far as tool bar placement was concerned and slow. When I uninstalled the program in favor of Maxthon, I lost all use of IE6 even though I could use Maxthon. Took a while but through the sfc function of winxp I was able to get IE6 back. I have no intention of trying IE7 again. I will stay with Firefox 1.5 RC until the official version comes out and use Maxthon only when less freindly sites force me to.

Re:IE 7 , why bother?

[giorgosts]

Notice how much less system resources are used when viewing multiple pages in Maxthon than multiple windows in IE, or FF for that matter.

Re:IE 7 , why bother?

[HeroreV]

The reason I don't use Internet Explorer is because of security problems, not because of the lack of tabs. Does Maxthon solve that problem?

Re:IE 7 , why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you want tab browsing and the extras and want to use IE as the heart of your browser,"

Why the hell would anyone want that?

Re:IE 7 , why bother?

[DrkKnght]

Not really. Maxthon uses the IE core. It is just a better interface. I prefer Foxfire for security.

MSN will be the default...

[bsaxon]

Will MSN be the default site/source used for search and homepage in IE 7, and MSNBC for news, etc. like MS has always done? I would assume that it would be... I think that has always been a problem with IE... in many ways. The dominance of using MS-created products instead of popular/superior third party resources. To get the most enjoyable experience you had to customize and tweak everything to make things convenient... like the Links toolbar in IE is annoying b/c it is filled with Microsoft related products and services that people rarely take the time to think of its usefulness.

Re:MSN will be the default...

[TheTopher]

What other sites would be homepage for IE7? Possibly http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/?

Re:MSN will be the default...

[trezor]

Not to give you a heartattack or anything, but you can actually choose your searchengine of choice in IE7. It works pretty much like you it does in Firefox. They copied everything good about Firefox (which Firefox in most cases got from Opera) and implemented it poorly.

Yours sincerely, Firefox-user who has tried IE7 Beta 1.

what about galeon?

[larry bagina]

Galeon recently released v 2.0. Considering that most /. users claim to hate windows and love linux, it saddens me that such a feature rich browser gets completely ignored.

Re:what about galeon?

[ajdlinux]

Galeon is based on Mozilla.

Galeon is a minor browser because it only runs on Linux, requires GNOME and doesn't have all the cool extensions that Fx gets.

It's a pretty good browser though.

Re:what about galeon?

[MaskedSlacker]

Its a fine browser, but like FF is based on mozilla, lacks extensions, or even the nifty features of opera. All in all, opera and FF are hands down the two best across all platforms, and if FF didn't have extensions, Opera would win. Opera > FF w/o extensions, FF w/ extensions >> Opera.

Re:what about galeon?

[damiam]

IIRC, Galeon is dying. The developers have basically said that they don't plan to do much further work on it. Instead, they're planning on rolling some of its features into Epiphany.

Re:what about galeon?

[sremick]

When Galeon or Epiphany get extensions I depend on like AdBlock, then I might consider them, as they are indeed fast and slick. However, I cannot browse the web without Adblock, and I use quite a few other extensions regularly too.

Opera UI

[strredwolf]

It's nice that Opera's free again, and it was useful... ...once before. Now, I can't stand it.

• I can't configure it to use larger fonts.
  
• I can't change the layout to be what I like.
  
• The URL bar doesn't let me Tab-Autocomplete
  
• It basically doesn't follow IE and Firefox's own UI, nor allow me to change it so it does.

It was a nice browser when it was working for Windows 3.1. Now, it's nice but it makes me want to yank the source code from Opera's hands and rip it apart like Larry Wall did to rn.

For Linux, it's Firefox (plus the Gecko browsers) and Konqueror. I can't wait for Dillo to be fully grown. Makes me want to write my own...

Re:Opera UI

[cryptoz]

I can't configure it to use larger fonts.

Actually, you can. Look under Tools / Preferences / Advanced.

can't change the layout to be what I like.

Ah, this is interesting. You see, I can't get FF to make it the layout I like (one of my main reasons for using Opera.) I have the address bar and the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, and no File Edit etc menus at the top. Last time I checked, it was either impossible or nearly so to get FF to do this. So, I understand what you mean about interface being a big deal, but it's not Opera's fault that it doesn't work just the way you specifically want it to. I'm not blaming FF for it's configuration problems, even though I believe it has some.

Re:Opera UI

[Aranth Brainfire]

"I can't configure it to use larger fonts."

You mean like the option, "minimum font size (in pixels)"? Or the options that allow you (in the same part of preferences, "fonts") to define the default fonts and sizes for websites? Or perhaps do you mean the option to zoom in on any webpage (although that increases the size of images too...)

Re:Opera UI

[Crayon Kid]

You see, I can't get FF to make it the layout I like (one of my main reasons for using Opera.) I have the address bar and the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, and no File Edit etc menus at the top. Last time I checked, it was either impossible or nearly so to get FF to do this.

Grab DOM Inspector and userChrome.css, identify those bars and menus and either apply display:hidden or align them to bottom. I don't recall the exact syntax but it's definitely possible. Search the Web or ask in the mozillazine.org forums.

Re:Opera UI

[cryptoz]

Okay, so I'm a geek and I can edit CSS. Sure, not a problem. But everyone else out there who *isn't* really able to understand a userChrome.css file? I mean, Opera has a nice interface allowing you to do this. Okay, I understand FF has the functionality built in, but it's by no means easy.

And what about making the top menu bar disappear?

Re:Opera UI

[DavidTC]

Get the Menu Editor extension, and delete the menus. (Good luck getting them back, however. I'm not quite sure where you're going with this.)

Then get Toolbar Enhancements and add toolbars wherever you want, and drag the stuff around like normal.

Re:Opera UI

[Senzei]

So what you are asking for is support for the community that wants to reorganize basically their entire browser menu structure, but does not have the technical merit to run dom inspector and edit a css file, or possibly convince someone who knows how to do the same?

That's what, like three people on the whole planet?

Re:Opera UI

[jp10558]

I think he might mean the Opera menu fonts - which for whatever reason lock to the windows settings. So you have to change them in windows, and hence globally. From a ideal design standpoint, I'm not sure if programs should pull from the window manager settings for their menus and chrome or not.

The glow filter is actually useful

[Anonymous Coward]

The glow filter is actually useful. Bear with me here...I was designing a hi-glitz web page (OK, I'll confess, it was just a myspace profile. See, I had this crush on this girl on myspace, and I knew that she sometimes looks at my myspace profile, so I wanted to impress her with some kung-fu CSS). Making it look nice in Firefox/Safari/Opera/whatever was pretty easy: Get some transparent PNGs, do some :hover effects; this resulted in a very snazzy looking web page where you could see the background picture.

OK, so far so good. Unfortunatly, this pretty girl who I had a crush on is, how do I say this, browser-challenged. She uses MSIE. Version 6. Probably has every single spyware on the planet on her computer. So, anyway, the question was: How was I going to make this page look decent in IE (a profile where you can see the background, and read the text in both MSIE and any other browser)? I used the glow effect to make the text stand out from the background.

It would be nice if Firefox and Opera would support text-shadow, which allows one to have a glow effect using standard CSS.

Re:The glow filter is actually useful

[kyouteki]

If she uses MSIE, I would give up on her. She's not worth it.

I'm getting tired of this

[yootje]

They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[cryptoz]

Merely because a product is used for a simple task does not make it any less important than anything else. The reason people care so much about the security features in their cars is, shockingly, because it's important. While moving from one place to another is simple, it's very important. Actually, by the nature of things, the more often a task is performed, the more important it is. Without very advanced browsers, one of the most common tasks of today's world for anyone - using websites - would become dangerous for nearly all computers.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Phroggy]

They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.

What percentage of your time using a computer is spent using a browser? For most of us, it's a pretty significant percentage. That's what makes it important.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Vo0k]

He's got a point though. It's just a tool, and should feel pretty "transparent" too. The important thing is the webpages, their content. How much time do you spend talking about your TV set as opposed to TV shows and movies? Or about your computer monitor? Without it, using the computer would be "somewhat" harder, but it just works, fine, let it be. You don't talk about brands of paper used for making your favourite magazine, about how amazing microphone did the singer on the concert use, or such. These are just media, and as such, the perfect ones are the ones that aren't visible at all, bringing the content directly. The more the medium is visible, the less the content it presents is, and it's all about the content.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[LordSnooty]

Some people are happy to spend hours wanking off about their new 50" plasma, or the fancy new TFT monitor they bought. So yes, people DO rattle on about tho objects you might think are merely functional.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[TheRaven64]

It's the piece of software that lets you read Slashdot. What do you have on your machine that's more important than that?

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[hendridm]

They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.

Maybe not for you, but I'd dare to say there are a significant number of web developers here that would disagree. That might be a minority, but using IE helps support the pollution of the web, and creates countless wasted hours in trying support IE's way of doing things.

Yes, it is possible to make a web site that looks good to everyone. But it would be a lot easier if all the major browser manufacturers made their best effort to support standards. Microsoft prefers to implement their own standards.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Dirtside]

Ah, I think your browser is missing the plugin that makes the WHOOSH sound when a joke flies over your head.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Senzei]

Also as the "web as an application delivery platform" concept takes off (and it appears it will) this will only become more important.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a world where only IE can be used to view websites means a world where only Microsoft can sell products, with any price it wants.

Currently, we have a world, where you actually can choose between browsers. The more users we get for the non IE browsers, the less power Microsoft will have. This will cause competition between companies and competition means better products or cheaper prizes. So browsers actually mean everyhting to everyone, in the area of computers.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[AK Marc]

He's got a point though. It's just a tool, and should feel pretty "transparent" too. The important thing is the webpages, their content. How much time do you spend talking about your TV set as opposed to TV shows and movies?

As the tools become more complicated, the tools themselves become topics of conversation. I know plenty of people that sit around and discuss cars, rather than the places the cars take them. Most people give a great deal of thought to the car and it's qualities before selecting one. Even people that don't really care about cars care about comments about their car.

It is the same with browsers. There is a significant difference between the browsers available. The use of different browsers makes a difference in the experience. So the browser is worthy of being an independent topic of conversation. Some have better 0-60 times. Some look cooler. Some get better mileage (memoryage). They have quantifiable differences which affect their ability to do their job. It's not like people sitting around discussing their TVs, you give their size, and that's about the only significant difference most people recognize.

The Article is a Bit Misleading

[nant]

It mentions a new widgets feature. Most chances are that the author is confusing the AJAX SDK opera released not too long ago (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/11/15) to be a new Desktop feature.

Aside of the above, it is a pretty good article. Kudos to my fav. browser maker ;)
/me eagerly awaits Preview 2/Beta 1/votevah!

You've gotta check out IE Tab!

[thecampbeln]

This is an extension I found a few days ago, and though YMMV in the few days I've been using it it works pretty damned well (in the latest 1.5 RC to boot!) Enjoy!

Re:You've gotta check out IE Tab!

[Vo0k]

Too bad it doesn't run under Linux ;)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Stupid mods

[ajdlinux]

Just a few minutes ago this was rated 4 or 5, it's now 0!

Perfectly valid point, Opera is one of the smallest browsers. I would rather use seamonkey than opera for several reasons:
* it's free and Free (FSF)
* it looks better
* runs better on linux
* XUL
* etc.

Re:Stupid mods

[Lisandro]

Have you tried Opera lately? On my system (Gentoo Linux 2.6, Athlon XP1800+, 512mb) it runs noticeably smoother than Firefox, never mind Mozilla.

Re:Stupid mods

[Kelson]

I can see it being overrated, but a troll?

That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.

Re:Stupid mods

[ajdlinux]

No, and I won't because I support the Free Software movement and believe that proprietary software is wrong.

Also, Firefox and mozilla/Seamonkey runs quite well on my system: Debian GNU/linux 3.1, athlon XP 1800+, 256MB RAM, which is less than yours.

Re:Stupid mods

[Lisandro]

Come on man, you're willing to miss a great piece of software just because it's not OSS? The Opera developers are now focusing on mobile devices, and they're (effectively) giving it away for free for desktop users. No ads, no strings attached.

    I really like Firefox, but i find Opera to be a much more polished browser (like i said earlier, specially in the UI department). Their Linux support is excellent aswell. It's cool, and it's free. No OSS, but *free*. What's to hate here? And this is from an OSS advocate...

Re:Stupid mods

[hkmwbz]

"* it looks better"

Looks better? SeaMonkey is extremely ugly. How can Opera not look better?

"* runs better on linux"

What is that supposed to mean? Opera runs noticeably better on all Linux computers I've used it on.

"* etc."

Yes? Such as? Still waiting you to come up with something of substance and not just excuses for non-existing reasons why SM is better ;)

Also, didn't you say that you hadn't tried Opera lately anyway? So how can you make this comparison?

Re:Stupid mods

[ajdlinux]

There's the OSS philosophy: give in just because the software is good. Opera may be a good browser, but OSS people don't stand up for their beliefs because there is good software. Free Software advocates do stand up for their rights and refuse to install proprietary software. The only times I use proprietary software are at school and on other peoples computers. (because I have to). But the open source people will compromise. RMS wouldn't.

Re:Stupid mods

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS is a damn dirty hippie. His not using Opera is a plus for Opera in my book.

I use FF under XP Pro, Mandrake and NT 4.0..

[msimm]

Memory problems under 4.0, sure. But major problems under either other operating system?

Sounds like maybe you need a good clean-up. Thats where I usually start when programs start acting erratically.

Opera beats out Gecko

[Bitsy Boffin]

For a long time I was a big advocate of gecko based browsers. Then firefox started to suck a bit, ok, it started to suck memory and CPU a LOT, not all the time, but enough to be incredibly annoying.

A few months ago I started using Opera again (I've used it since Windows 3.1 days, but not seriously since then) full time, it took some configuring, I changed some keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-T to open a new tab for a start), added a web developer type toolbar, rearranged some stuff, and got a nice skin for it. But man, it's just so much faster and more responsive than Firefox.

There are only three things I miss.. the abundance of plugins (some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee), Venkman, and a designMode/contentEditable API (rich text (html) editing in the browser). Opera 9 implements designMode now, so that just leaves 2 before Gecko browsers earn the "browser of 2nd to last resort" badge from me.

People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[patro]

some I miss particularly - ... the flash click to play thingee

Try this.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand why do you like Opera but...6 months ago i found nasty crash bug in Opera, probably exploitable. I made sample crash page and send details about it to Opera dev team and i'm still waiting for patch. So now i'm back to FF.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[pherthyl]

Tried it, ran it for a month, switched back to FF (1.5 this time).

Opera is nice, but some things really iritated me. One is the shortcut for new tabs is CTRL-N by default. Yes I know I can change it, yes it's fairly simple to do so, but it still drove me up the wall. 3 installations of opera that I used, some I had changed to use CTRL-T, some not. Basically I always ended up hitting the wrong key combo. Stupid, I know, but annoying.

Much more importantly, Opera doesn't support Gmail properly. Most of the time it will load, but every so often it will just sit there with a blank screen, or suddenly refuse to do anything when you click on a link. Also autocompletion of email addressed would only work half of the time. That's a showstopper right there.

Opera is a nice browser, but in the end I liked Firefox better after all. Try 1.5 with the Tabmix Plus extension. Very nice tab enhancements, and does proper session restoration.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I did the same thing and the bug in the previous version that I reported was corrected in the current version (8.51). Works for me.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[moonbender]

FWIW since either Opera 8.5 or Opera 9, Ctrl-T works by default. Pissed me off to no end because Ctrl-N stopped working, the key combo Opera has been using since before there even was a Firefox. But it was simple enough to add it in, now both Ctrl-T and Ctrl-N work. I also use Gmail with it without any showstopping bugs, although I'm not sure if the address autocompletion works.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[oldwolf13]

works great... the only thing I was jealous of FF for...

you my friend, get a big gold star.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Kjella]

FWIW since either Opera 8.5 or Opera 9, Ctrl-T works by default. Pissed me off to no end because Ctrl-N stopped working,

When? I've been using Opera since at least version 5 or 6, and I don't remember Ctrl-N ever doing anything different than what it does now (open new window = tab in Opera).

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[moonbender]

That's just it, they changed the default behaviour in version 9 TP1. From the changelog:

Changed keyboard shortcuts for closer cross-browser compatibility:
Ctrl+T replaces Ctrl+N for opening a new tab.
Ctrl+N opens a new browser window.

Since I never ever use a second root browser window, I've bound both to opening a new tab. Note that in contrast to what you say, opening a new window is not equal to opening a new tab in Opera (or Firefox).

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[5E-0W2]

It still loads the flash though, it just hides it from view. If I recall correctly, the click-to-play thingy for firefox doesn't load flash at all until you've clicked on the "click here to start flash" link. I think I'll stick with setting plugins disabled and manually enabling them if I want to view flash.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Threni]

> People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's
> free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.

I'd rather pay £35 for another half a gig of ram and stick with leaky old Firefox, the source code, extensions etc. Also, I'm not sure what spec PC you've got but Firefox seems fast enough to me.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

I think ultimately Firefox will win the war. Geeks need plugins, and Firefox wins at this. And while the majority of users may have no use for most plugins (although I can see where some of them might be useful in a corporate environment), geeks also either make (parents computer) or influence (work) deployment decisions.

Yes, I'm a FF fanboy, but I like to think there is a reason for that. FF today is far from "perfect," but I still think it's only a matter of time. Opera is cool and very usable, but the Mozilla seems to "get it" better than anyone else, IMO. I think extensions and extensibility will decide who is king, eventually.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[plenTpak]

That ctrl+T thing really confuses me. I mean, I'll get used to it, but I don't understand why ctrl+T opens a new Tab, but ctrl+W doesn't open a new Window (it closes the tab). In Opera, fortunately, you can ctrl+Z to get that tab back, but in Firefox, I lose the page. Isn't this a intuitive/consistent UI issue?

(Note: not trying to turn this into a FF vs Opera issue, I have and run both off my usb key; it's just a usability question).

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[whitehatlurker]

some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee

Okay, I'm not familiar with all the extensions available for FF. However, the last one can be handled with a filtering proxy of some sort. As mentioned elsewhere you can "F12 u ctrl-R" in Opera to en/dis-able the plugins as well.

While everyone has their own tastes, Opera suits me fine. The only drawback it had for me is the lack of an ftp upload tool, but there are actually ftp clients, so I'm told ;-)

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree... I think people should give Opera a fair try. I've noticed that when it comes to browsers people are in two camps.

IE is good enough and why should I change?

and Firefox is GOD! It's open source and that has to be better right?

So the IE people aren't going to bother with Opera because they're happy with it and the Firefox people think what they have is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But then there's the people who understand that there isn't such a thing as a "best" browser.

My two main browsers are SeaMonkey and Opera. My use of them is just about equal and I'm quite happy with both of them.

So there's more than just two games in town. It's not all Firefox vs IE. There's a lot of other quality browsers out there.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Illissius]

> Much more importantly, Opera doesn't support Gmail properly. GMail doesn't support Opera properly. Set it identify as Mozilla and voila - it works again. sigh :(

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[pherthyl]

Well.. Kinda. I tried that, but didn't have a lot more luck. Usually I would have to close and reopen the browser to get gmail to display. Maybe I'll try version 9 again when it comes out.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason why it's sucking the CPU and Memory is simple, you're using Windoze. The solution, get rid of windoze, then install BSD or Linux. 'there is a verion of firefox for *bsd

Remember BSD and Linux and all open-source 'Rulez'
M$ Windoze and all closed source shit 'Droolz'

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[jp10558]

Depending on OS, and intestinal fortitude, you could always get/use proxomitron with proper filters (JD5000 derivitaves have click to play flash, and don't load the flash till clicked) or AdMuncher are both good choices for windows, and I believe similar features can be had in privoxy on Linux.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Bitsy Boffin]

CTRL-W is the de-facto standard for "Close", in most applications, not just web browsers.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[Bitsy Boffin]

Linux mortimer 2.6.12.3 #1 Sat Sep 17 22:57:14 NZST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

MOD PARENT FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

take what you can get

[wardk]

On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""

good to see microsoft is upgrading the internet soon, we get to read about firefox and opera in a mainstream rag

safari!!!

[crashelite]

i use safari haha i use it cause it rarly crashes... oh wait i have a mac... it doesnt have those silly security problems that pc's have... ( i think it might be because no one cares to find them in apple or no one wants to... or the fact that is is more stable... reliable... and ya...) well safari has many good features but the 1 it seems to lack is anti fishing one

Re:safari!!!

[ajdlinux]

Safari is based on the KDE projects KHTML engine. I find KHTML and Konqueror work quite well for most web browsing needs, but try something like loading the full manual of PHP in there. It's 10MB that firefox handles brilliantly, but Konqueror has trouble. It takes ages to load in KHTML browsers, then ages to browse through the document. Firefox takes a while to load at first, but then document navigation is done in less than a second.

Re:safari!!!

[JonJ]

I think you are confusing "PCs" with "Windows", a common mistake amongst Mac fanatics.

Re:safari!!!

[PitaBred]

And this is what happens to your children when they use Macs... please, parents, don't allow your kids to become like this.

Mac. Just say NO(tm).

Re:safari!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn the difference between an Architecture (like the PC) and
and an Operating System (like Windows) before embarassing yourself on
public forums

Agreed - major performance problems with Firefox

[mrawl]

I love Firefox, but it's obviously pretty poorly written in parts (yes, I could do a lot better given some resources). The way it slows down and becomes unresponsive with a large number of tabs indicates severe internal locking conflict. I believe they use spinlocks too, hence the cpu piggishness. Once it gets bogged down it's truly hosed. Now, the thing is, why on earth would different tabs have major locking conflicts? Shared data structures, cache, etc. I'm sorry but this was just not well thought out. I can't see any reason for this level of extreme contention. They've added more and more synchronization to fix bugs to the point where it's just a lumbering pig, instead of freeing up the design. Different tabs, different threads, minimal conflict - any other design can not work. I bet IE 7 doesn't behave like this.

Second point. The Flash thing is truly nauseating, but it's not a firefox cpu issue, what it seems to be is the XUL UI not having any priority on events. It's not that the browser won't switch tabs when flash is running, it just needs to be shaken awake. For example, flash is doing its thing (soaking up unused cpu), you click a tab, firefox simply does not respond, for minutes sometimes, it's infuriating, an absolute usability nightmare - but now bring forward another window, return firefox to the top - bingo it switches tabs. It's XUL event handling (or lack of events) that's the problem, not flash.

Ok, some educated guess work there, but it can't be far wrong. If they concentrated on a few of these issues, the improvements could be truly staggering. God I hope I get a chance to help - and you guys should all help too if you can.

Features in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft says more is in store, including an option to view all tabs in a one-page thumbnail layout (absent in both Firefox and Opera)

This feature is avaliable in firefox as an extension

I AGREE WITH THIS POST

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Shouldn't be that complicated

[Blue Mushroom]

I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator. If any possible compliant page does not correctly display in the browser, the browser is not 100% compliant. Any broswer that can't correctly display any possible compliant page should only be called partially compliant. Why should it be more complicated than that?

That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.

As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.

Anybody see standards as having a different purpose?
Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages?
Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Kelson]

As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.

You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Neoncow]

So how do you do the analysis of all possible webpages against the Gecko codebase?

I mean, "..all webpages that pass the W3C validator" is a really big set of input. It might even be an infinite set. Maybe we can try induction on that. From what I understand, doing formal analysis on code is really really expensive. Expensive as in, it's the kind of activity that NASA and nuclear power plants to on the most important safety critical portions of their code.

Specifying a standard isn't just a feature set. It also involves specifying how feature sets interact with each other and what to do with invalid input. And you're not specifying aganist some fixed set of well formed input. You're specifying an engine that must run against every person with access to notepad.exe, a geocities account, and a belief that they can make a webpage.

The above post should be read with a curious/questioning tone and should not be interpreted as mocking. btw, I don't know who you are, so if you turn out to be the founder of WC3 or the creator of Zen Garden or something, I'm going to slap myself.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Blue Mushroom]

As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.

You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?

Far too many, actually, but you have a good point. I can see why that would make somebody want to insist that an extra feature breaks compliancy. Even so, such a person would still be missing the point of standards, in my opinion. I did stipulate that an extra feature should only be included in a standards compliant browser if it does not interfere with any of the specifications of the standard. If you want the standard to force browsers to not include ActiveX support in order to maintain compliancy, you should write security level requirements into the standard. That way ActiveX would be excluded explicitly rather than implicitly.

By only allowing a standard to explicitly state what qualities would require a feature to be excluded, you get to have both your security and your freedom to innovate beyond what the W3C can think up.

Of course, if your goal is to totally lock down the browser feature set and prevent innovation, then you would define the purpose of standards differently than I do.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[FireFury03]

As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status.

The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.

We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).

Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Mprx]

It's not an infinite set, as no computer has infinite memory.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Kjella]

I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator.

Assuming the rendering of said page is unambigiously defined in the specs, since it relies on the definiation of "correctly displayed". Last I checked the mark-up was well defined, but tell me, what is the right rendering of this: <html><body>Hello world!</body></html>. Ignoring the fact that it lacks a DTD, it simply isn't pixel-identical defined. As such, there's many renderings that one or all could be considered correct, and helps you very little to make a WYSIWOG (what you see is what others get) interface. What looks good on your "correct" rendering might make a brainfart on someone else's "corrent" rendering.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Blue Mushroom]

I agree, "all possible validated webpages" is overstating it. Regardless, the status of theoretically being able to correctly render any validated webpage should still fundamentally be the definition of a hypothetical fully compliant browser. The testing of the browser should just be as thorough as is practically possible. There are test suites for the different standards available on the W3C site. A rough compatibility rating could be defined as the percentage of test cases a given browser gets right.

Don't worry, no mocking tones detected, nor will any slappage be required.
But that Kelson dude... boy is he gonna get it.

T.B-L.

Ok, I'm not actually Tim Berners-Lee, in the strictest possible sense, as it were.
Someday I AM going to be cool and famous like that though,
any day now I'm sure,
so some slapping may be necessary. I'll get back to you.
hehe, just kiddin

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[martinultima]

The problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.

We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).

Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.

Hallelujah!

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[abbamouse]

It gets worse. Many sites appear broken to Opera because they detect the user agent and send different code to non-IE browsers, even though Opera can display the "IE" code just fine. As a consequence, sites appear "broken" because they ARE broken -- they send alternate buggy HTML that hasn't been updated in ages to non-IE browsers.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Bogtha]

Yes, it can be an infinite set. Not all web pages are stored on disk; some are generated dynamically. For instance, consider a news archive. It might allow you to show the stories that were published on a certain day. It would let you pick that day from a calendar. That calendar has links to show the previous month and the next month. "The set of all web pages" would be infinite because you could keep following the "next month" links to get a new, unique page, without ever stopping. If I remember correctly, this has already caused problems for some people with search engine bots.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[teaserX]

You said it. Just as my school's website was made to recognize Mozilla as an acceptable user agent I switched to Firefox and the website pretends to be broken again and you get a "continue at your peril" screen. One of the developers told me that building the sight for IE was metioned explicitly in the specs for the project. Funny thing is that it Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, et al, have functioned correctly from the begining but the school refuses to "officialy" recognize support of user-agents past IE and Mozilla. Go figure.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard allows for interpretations. The presentational side of things is handled by using a stylesheet.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[aztracker1]

Guess that means no AJAX for you.. The fact is, that the XmlHttpRequest object is a re-implimentation of an MS Active X Control, that iirc Mozilla came up with, and then Opera copied. It, afaik, isn't part of *ANY* standards body browser specification for w3c, or EcmaScript. Does this make it bad, No.

The Active X ability within IE came at a time when the standards weren't nearly as mature as they are now. If the XHTML was released in the HTML3.2 timeframe, and the JavaScript DOM at the time included XmlHttpRequest (or equivalent), it might have been much different. The DOM at the time was very limited, and the Layer model for Netscape sucked... Some may not remember this very well, but that's how it was.

All of this aside, I am really disappointed with how MS handled the security model here, it *should* have been more inline with the Java sandbox for browser plugins, but wasn't. There have been many holes because of this. That lack of foresight doesn't make the idea bad.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML is a content markup language with 'hints' how a page should be rendered.

Lynx / links / elinks / w3 are all text based browsers, and hence w3 compliant.

So whats your definition of a ""correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator.""

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that to say that, in Bizarro World, where Internet Explorer does not include ActiveX or anything else outside the spec, and is otherwise 100% compliant, if all of a sudden you take that browser and add ActiveX, suddenly it's no longer compliant? It still renders all of the pages correctly, just possibly displaying some additional content. Surely adding a content recognition feature doesn't make a browser lose the ability to still be just as compliant? If you give it compliant code to render, it will always render it correctly, so why does the addition of something else make the compliance just go away? It seems like it's all just for the sake of argument, or for the sake of arguing against ActiveX at least, which I am inclined to do as well, but not on the basis that it is not compliant or that it doesn't fit in with some spec. It has nothing to do with compliance, and anyone arguing against ActiveX on the basis of compliance needs to figure out what's important and focus.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Kelson]

Practical considerations such as limited RAM and addressing space shouldn't impede theoretical mathematics. Consider this PHP code (not tested, may have typos):

<html>
<head>
<title>Infinite page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php // Define $n here
for ( $x=0; $x < $n; $x++ ) {
        print "<p>Line $x</p>";
}
?>
</body>
</html>

Since $n can be any natural number (remember, we're assuming no limit on the numbers that this theoretical computer can handle), and the set of natural numbers is infinite, the set of potential web pages that can be generated with this algorithm is infinite.

It's not a particularly interesting set of documents, but it's also clearly a subset of all possible HTML pages, which means that that set must also be infinite.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[MCraigW]

<html><body>Hello world!</body></html>

Hmmm... doesn't have a DOC type, doesn't have a Character encoding, no <head> tag, no <title> tag -- this isn't valid anyway...

Try this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transition al.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
   <head>
       <title> </title>
       <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"/>
   </head>
<body>
Hello world!
</body>
</html>

A nice feirytale

[gnarlin]

Regardless, just having a choice is a great thing for consumers. Vive la difference.

And they lived happily ever after.
"Mommy, you shouldn't tell nasty lies!".

Insightful? You obviously haven't removed IE...

[Anonymous Coward]

... with LitePC.com, Revenge of Mozilla, or other offerings. Just removing this one buggy app reclaims a ton of resources, especially on the older PCs. Boot times are improved, as well as shutdown times since IE's dll's are no longer pre-loaded this way. Mysteriously, other browsers are more stable when IE is absent. Try for yourself and then compare.

Re:Insightful? You obviously haven't removed IE...

[guardiangod]

Look, I just _reinstall_ Windows XP, added 1 gig of ram, and did raid 5 for all harddrives. If these are not enough for FF, I don't know what does. If all else fail I would just post a screenshot...

Re:Insightful? You obviously haven't removed IE...

[Penguinoflight]

Your experience with firefox eating all your ram is not the general rule. Every once in a while the mozilla foundation either misses big bugs, or they just put off the fix to the next version. My guess is that your system is heavily riddled with spyware (that can happen overnight if you are targeted and unfirewalled on an Win32/IE system). This may or may not be the cause for firefox performing poorly though, and you should probably report the problem to bugzilla.

tip for convertors

[know1]

if you are going to try and convert your friends to firefox, don't show them the 1.5 version yet. pretty as it is, it is the one with more of the memory hogging bugs that all you slashdotters talk about, and being the crowd that you are i'm assuming you are all using the beta. in my recent experience though, the 1.0.8 or whatever the latest one is is fairly stable and doesn't eat up memory/CPU cycles as much.
wait until 1.5 is released proper....it has quite an xp feel to it, even on a linux box. maybe when you upgrade them to that it will be another stepping stone to linux when you can show them an xp feeling app on it...

LOLROTFLMAOWTFBBQ!!!!11!one! *clears throat* ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Avant Browser a secure browser?

Yes, Avant Browser is secure. Since it's based on Internet Explorer, Avant Browser is as secure as Internet Explorer.

Now there's a selling point! Man, my sides hurt.

Acid2 Test

[POWRSURG]

Since the article does not discuss this, does anyone know how well these browsers do on the Acid2 Test. I remember Slashdot reporting on Safari and Konqueror passing the test. Were those changes ever rolled out into the latest versions of those browsers?

Re:Acid2 Test

[Twid]

Safari 2.0.2 shipped with OS X 10.4.3, and it includes the ACID2-compliant version of WebKit. That made Safari the first shipping browser to pass ACID2. Firefox 1.5 RC3 does not pass it, and I seem to remember they will not until FF 2 for some architectural reasons. Not sure about Konqueror.

Safari is really getting solid these days. Dave Hyatt and his team have been working on memory leaks, javascript compatibility, and other issues. Now that the latest version of Safari works properly with Gmail, I'm using FF less and less on my macs.

Re:Acid2 Test

[Yaztromo]

Now that the latest version of Safari works properly with Gmail, I'm using FF less and less on my macs.

If I could run AdBlock on Safari, I think I'd use Safari a whole lot more than I do. I'm already using Safari for its RSS support, and as I use three different Macs, being able to synchronize my bookmarks between them is also a big plus.

Still, AdBlock keeps me on Firefox 99% of the time on my Macs. I hate it when I click on a link in Safari and am presented with a slew of flashing banners everywhere -- I'm so used to having all of them filtered out (and enjoy the resulting browsing speed increase) that visiting any site with ads on it seems painful in Safari.

If I were Apple, I'd be really tempted to integrate Firefox's Extension subsystem into Safari, which could take advantage of Firefox's library of existing extensions, like AdBlock.

Yaz.

Re:Acid2 Test

[kaarlov]

Konqueror 3.5 passes ACID2 test. It's included in KDE 3.5 which is currently in Release Candidate stage and should be released shortly. Older versions don't pass.

Re:Acid2 Test

[wheany]

Opera 9 is really close to perfect.

Re:Acid2 Test

[Yer Mom]

I use PithHelmet, which nukes ads quite nicely.

Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first."

I disagree.

Opera has done well by selling browsers. It's a company, after all, so they have to make money and can't rely on donations from others.

Today the company is growing at an incredible pace, and rather than losing that momentum on the desktop because they could have been huge and losing users, they are now tiny instead, and are gaining users. Firefox was there at the right time and people started switching. All Opera has to do now is to offer a free alternative, which it does, and market it properly.

Opera has been around for ten years and has always experienced growth. I would hardly call that "messed itself up".

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[spejsklark]

I don't think Opera has ever made money on the desktop browser. They do make money from Opera in embedded devices, mobiles etc..
The desktop Opera browser is just marketing.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

You are wrong, actually. About a third of their revenues came from desktop browsers until recently. Now that they've made it free without ads they expect to make even more money on the desktop.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[spejsklark]

You're right about the numbers. However, Opera has never made much profit (except some legal claim payout last year). Internet devices are their niche, and that's what brings in the larger percentage of revenue. And that percentage is increasing. (over 80% now)

Now that they've made it free without ads they expect to make even more money on the desktop.

And how would that work?
What they are doing is basically recognizing that they are not going to make money from the desktop browser (while the biggest competitors give it away for free). So they release it for free and get a lot of good PR. And leverage that PR for the internet device markets.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"Opera has never made much profit"

What is "much profit", and what does this have to do with your initial claims that "Opera has messed up" and that they have never made money on the desktop? They've been expanding a lot the last few years to keep up with demand, and that costs money of course. That doesn't mean that the income has been going up too.

Opera has made plenty enough profit to survive and experience constant growth for many years.

"Internet devices are their niche, and that's what brings in the larger percentage of revenue. And that percentage is increasing. (over 80% now)"

Now, yes, because they just eleased the desktop version for free without ads. I've already told you about that. Please pay attention.

"And how would that work?"

You get lots of users searching through Google (a huge part of the desktop revenues in the past), even more now that Opera is free without ads, and combined with a better search deal with Google, you have the potential of a lot of money flowing in.

"What they are doing is basically recognizing that they are not going to make money from the desktop browser (while the biggest competitors give it away for free). So they release it for free and get a lot of good PR. And leverage that PR for the internet device markets."

You are wrong, as I have already told you. They expect to make a lot more money on the desktop side now. They get better PR and they make more money.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[spejsklark]

What the marketing dept. tells you, isn't always the complete truth.
They release it for free to survive, they say they expect growing profits.

Let's check back on this a year from now, OK?

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

That is not a marketing guy, and the actual claims are from an announcement on the Oslo Stock Exchange, where it is illegal to lie about these things. If they didn't think that this would lead to increased revenues they could not have made an official statement about it on the stock exchange in the first place.

Norway smacks down hard on companies that try to play the market, and Opera Software is also known to be honest and modest. The original owners could have sold out years ago and would have been filthy rich, but they are still running the company themselves.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

To clarify: the announcement on the stock exchange was not meant to generate PR or get the attention of the media. It was meant to inform current and potential investors of its future plans, and how it intends to make money. This is necessary knowledge for people to decide whether or not they want to invest in the company. And again, lying on the stock exchange and misleading people there will get you in big trouble.

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[jp10558]

As I understand it, Opera started doing what FireFox currently does, and FF gets what, $30 million a year from Google? Opera want's some, and I can't see why I would expect them to not make *some* money the same way. Unless you think that Mozilla is lying also about the money FF makes them with Google?

Firefox 1.5 comes out today.

[DroopyStonx]

Guess we'll find out soon enough!

A more useful extension: Ghostzilla?

[Atario]

I'd like to know is why no one has written a Ghostzilla extension for Firefox. That is, something that makes Firefox do what Ghostzilla does, except without the bugs and old rendering engine and separate installation and stuff.

Please? Someone?

Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[bjornte]

Starting in Q3 2006, Firefox is likely to break on the following sites:

Norway: http://www.elkjop.no/
Finland: http://www.gigantti.fi/
Denmark: http://www.elgiganten.dk/
Iceland: http://www.elko.is/
Norway: http://www.lefdal.com/
Poland: http://www.electroworld.pl/
Czech R: http://www.electroworld.cz/
Hungary: http://www.electroworld.hu/
Sweden: http://www.pccity.se/

This is because Firefox does not support soft hyphenation, a six year old bug that breaks the HTML 4.0 specification.

German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.

Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.

We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.

A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[o'reor]

> This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide,

80 *pixels* ? Oh man, what kind of screen are you working on ? Even mobile phones have wider screens these days ! 8-)

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[killjoe]

It seems odd that no european has ever submitted a bug fix for this don't you think?

Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[GauteL]

I would recommend adding to the bug and actually listing the web sites that are going to break. These sites are the equivalent of Dixons or Best Buy in their respective countries and are mainstream sites with lots of visitors.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

This is because Firefox does not support soft hyphenation, a six year old bug that breaks the HTML 4.0 specification.

Read the specification. What Firefox does is correct according to the standard -- it could do more, but it's definitely not 'breaking' the specs.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[bjornte]

Will do :-)

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?

Yes, anyone building browsers may choose to ignore markup hints, but any user may choose to ignore that browser (though preferribly I - as a user - would like to stick with firefox as its descent on most other aspects).

In the end, the burden is with the site builder, who shouldnt make assumptions about resolution, colours or even the type of medium (monitor, paper, speech, braille,...). Sure, CSS & XHTML allow you to do a lot, but in the end having stuff render different on two mainstream browsers doesn't help.

Nuff said. Let's hope grandparent poster stops bitching, instead fixes the bug (how hard could it be?) and submits it to the firefox team which is doing a great job otherwise.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of HTML is beside the point.

If you type an "a" and it appears as a "b" that's a bug. Similarly, handling soft hyphens is a character entity (hidden unless a linebreak) and not an optional tag, but part of the HTML spec.

For default behaviour lets follow the HTML spec, and if someone wants to code up an about:config switch to turn it off to follow your concept of HTML (which is against the spec) then they can do that.

Defaults matter, other browsers do it better and more correctly, and let's please agree that it should change.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[porneL]

I would, but bug has already been submitted years ago.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Bacon Bits]

Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?

Of HTML, yes. Of XHTML with full CSS support, no. CSS is designed to enforce pixel-level layout.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Bacon Bits]

Bug fix , not bug report.

Firefox is community developed OSS. Consequently, essentially anybody can submit a fix to any bug. If the Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, Danes, etc. want this fixed, they're fully capable of doing it themselves instead of waiting for English-speaking coders who don't care about it to do it for them.

There is no vendor. You are the developer.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[potaz]

Because the Firefox developers never play politics and ignore several working fixes for no good reason!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[slavemowgli]

The browser should decide, and unless you actually specify pixel-exact layout constraints in CSS, you shouldn't expect to get that, of course. But I don't see how that is relevant. Soft hyphens are a standard feature in HTML, and have been for a long time. What's more, they're actually used, too; not so much in English, but then, there's more languages in the world than that.

Still, Firefox doesn't support them, even though people have been requesting it for literally years. Why not?

And "just submit a fix" isn't really an argument, either. Has it ever occured to you that not everybody who notices a bug may know enough C/C++ (not to mention Gecko internals) to be able to create a working fix?

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[sco08y]

It seems odd that no european has ever submitted a bug fix for this don't you think?

Not really. It would be like doing unpaid overtime.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Kjella]

I think it must be because the soft hyphenation is one of the best kept secrets of HTML. I'm Norwegian as well, I've worked with HTML on and off for many years (biggest assignment was probably building a XHTML/CSS validating site for 2000 students using a CMS backend, we rewrote the entire design), and I didn't know it existed. If I ever got into such a situation, I would simply add it manually as it is only really necessary in really cramped spaces where I'd have a particular phrase, not a general text flow. For example, I would never need one for a slashdot comment. Another way of solving it is to rewrite the phrase. E.g. "Substantivsammensettingseksempel" = "Eksempel på sammensetting av substantiv" = example of joining of nouns. Not to mention the language is suffering from englishitis - the separation of Norwegian words as if they were English. The only reason this is a real issue now is that it is supported in all other major browsers, so that others might take it for granted. To put it this way, I didn't know it existed, but then again I didn't miss it. Nothing that caused me more than a light shrug and "Let's split that word, then".

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why we have Seamonkey. Because we're sick of their BS, and we're not giving up on the basic product.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[mr3038]

Firefox developers [...] ignore several working fixes for no good reason! ... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375

Did you even read that bug? The real problem is that it depends on another bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2286 73). And if you check that bug you'll notice that the last comment says:

Comment #43 From Robert O'Callahan (Novell) 2005-11-23 19:17 PST I think the basic problem here is that we don't know how box-wrapped blocks are supposed to behave.

So the problem really is that they are trying a bit too hard to fix it correctly, but they don't yet know which the correct way is.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[mr3038]

CSS is designed to enforce pixel-level layout.

Oh really? The way I understand it, CSS is only used to give hints about the author intended rendering. The C in CSS means "cascading", which in turn means that the user can override rules defined by the content author. In addition, there's no way to even specify anything in real pixels. The "px" unit is defined as a part of field of vision. Some displays just "happen" to have actual pixel size near the CSS "px" unit. As a result, some browser manufacturers have implemented the "px" unit as a pixel. The spec does not require that!

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[mr3038]

Still, Firefox doesn't support [soft hyphen], even though people have been requesting it for literally years. Why not?

Their view is that an HTML compliant rendering of soft hyphen is to not render it in any situation. HTML doesn't require the UA to use soft hyphen as a line break opportunity. It just says that UA may break the the line at soft hyphen and if it does then it must display a visible hyphen at the end of the line. Mozilla/Firefox doesn't do the "may" part so it isn't required to implement the "if" part. Just ignoring the character is compliant behavior.

Yes, it sucks. Yes, my mother tongue is Finnish so I know how much it could help the rendering. But the fact is that Mozilla/Firefox is indeed following HTML to the letter on this issue. The spec should have required support for soft hyphen but it didn't.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[roca]

We should have hyphenation working in Gecko 1.9 which will hopefully come out near the end of 2006.

Has firefox fixed updates?

[Nightspirit]

In my experience, users never upgrade anything unless it is automatic or they are prompted, which is why I prefer to install Opera on computers I fix (it automatically shows a popup when an upgrade is ready).

I know firefox has the icon change near the upper-right of the screen, but for me it never worked (the upgrade would always freeze, on 3 different machines), and I always had to install a fresh copy from the firefox website.

Is this common for other people, or has anyone else experienced this problem?

Re:Has firefox fixed updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Deer Park and Fx 1.5RC3 automatically download updates (by default) and prompt the user to either restart or install updates later.

As for Fx 1.0.x, yes, upgrades never seemed to work (the ones I installed used the en-GB locale, if that makes a difference), and I always just installed the latest manually for friends.

Frankly, the new update is far too 'in your face' for me, I would really like an option just to automatically install updates the next time I run Fx.

Re:Has firefox fixed updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know firefox has the icon change near the upper-right of the screen, but for me it never worked (the upgrade would always freeze, on 3 different machines), and I always had to install a fresh copy from the firefox website. Is this common for other people, or has anyone else experienced this problem?

I never noticed that upgrade icon thingy before untill you said something just now. Thanks. It looks like an arrow pointing upward inside a green circle. I'm going to try upgrading by clicking on it. If it don't work I'll come back here to piss and moan about it.

Re:Has firefox fixed updates?

[Hieronymus Howard]

Yes, software updates in 1.5 are vastly improved. It automatically downloads the update and then asks you if you want to use it the next time you start Firefox. I've had no trouble with this on the release candidates.

Can't beat this

[Safirul.Alredha]

Firefox is almost *NEW* everyday, With their user contributed addons such as themes and extensions http://addons.mozilla.org/

Re:Acid2 Test: first was iCab indeed...

[Herve5]

Contrary to what's announced in the previous post, Safari was not the first browser to be Acid2-compatible. The mac-only iCab beated it from more than three months.
Now, iCab may well be the browser witht the smallest share on Earth :-)
Not only is it mac-only, it is very old and was for years not compatible with CSS, a real show-stopper in spite of many other features (tab browsing, ad-filtering wellll before Adblock, site downloads, page+image saves...).
The relatively recent version 3 not only is perfect with CSSs, really it rocks... including on Acid2.
Now, given its 10^-12% market share, all I hope for iCab is it'll get enough shareware fees not to die :-/

who?

[pawnroot]

IE? IE who?

Re:Two points

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that instead of fixing the firefox bug, change a large percentage of all human languages; because you think, without being serious student of lingustics, that they are badly designed (for search engines)?

Your arrogance is breathtaking.

iCab: au contraire

[CommandoB]

Contrary to what's announced in the previous post, Safari was not the first browser to be Acid2-compatible. The mac-only iCab beated it from more than three months.

This is incorrect. Contrary to your post, "perennial Mac browser also-ran iCab has edged out Linux browsing heavyweight Konqueror for second place in the Acid2 stakes." link

RSS in Firefox

[penguin-collective]

Firefox lists the headlines for each of your RSS feeds, but you get no further story preview.

If you want that, use Sage: it gives you a summary on mouseover and an entire page of summaries when you select the feed (like Safari has added now as well).

Shut FF down once a day

[trollable]

There is certainly some problems with FF and/or plugins. Quite often, if I don't shut it down in the evening, it will crash in the morming when starting to use it again. Yes, it may be Flash or another plugin. I didn't find a "restore session" option. Does FF has one?

Re:Shut FF down once a day

[Anonymous Coward]

Open this on firefox, opera and internet explorer.
Whenever you focus the window with the page open, regardless of whch browser CPU usage goes to 80%, 90%.

http://www.themexp.org/preview.php?mid=126617&type =vs&view=date&page=&cat=&name=Royale+Vista+VS.zip

There are a few inside pages on gamespot, lycos UK and other websties, and it happens in all browsers.

A friend of mine said, javascript is causing it, in case of lycos. the link i pasted above i found 10 minutes ago.

like really should not any of the 3 make sure the browser doesn't eat the CPU out, and put a stop at whatever is causing it, or place some restriction not to let the browser eat the CPU.

Commercial or Opensource, it is your product, and you have to fix it.

I first noted CPU usage increases in FF 0.9 Opera 7 . IE I am not using it over 1 year but IE 6 I guess. It is still here. :) Well actually I just had to END TASK my FF, because I opened too many of links like above. Same if i had been using Opera or IE.

Re:Shut FF down once a day

[The One KEA]

You can use the Session Saver extension to restore your current browser state (i.e. the open tabs).

The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.

The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...

Re:Shut FF down once a day

[trollable]

Thanks for the reply, I will try it. Let's hope it works in cases of crash.

For the crashes, I have no doubt the reason is somewhere in an extension or more probably a plugin. However, I disagree with "it's the data the program is using which is broken...". Robust software doesn't crash for bad data. But I think the problem is more in the native code, maybe a plugin.

When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[cheekyboy]

Why cant we have real true resizing of webpage,if I show page at 60%, all images etc... should scale accordingly... or
is that just too hard for a multiplatform? bitmap scaling in software is trivial btw, go google it FF-devs.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[StarkRG]

60% of what?

The idea is that the layout changes to suit the viewer. If I view a page on a 200 inch screen at a resolution of 102400x76800 I expect that it's not going to look the same as when I view it on a 6 inch screen at 400x400. The point is not to write the page so that it forces the client to show it in one particular way, it's to design a layout that can stand to be streched and skewed and still be readable.

There is no right way to view a standards compliant web page, however viewing it in a non-standards compliant browser is a wrong way to do it.

How is a browser supposed to know what size you want to scale images to if you resize the window? 60% of what? 60% of your screen size? 60% of the size the window was when you first loaded the page? 60% of 800x600? 60% of the smallest screen that's phisically possible? 60% of the largest screen? what if I projected a web page onto the moon? how big should the images scale to then?

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[nick8325]

Opera's had that for ages, can't remember when it first appeared though...

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[cgenman]

Opera recently added "fit to window width" under the view tab, which intelligently downsizes pages to avoid horizontal scrolling on smaller windows, but keeps everything as-is if there is sufficient width. As a last resort on very, very small screens it degrades to a custom CSS file. It's really quite nifty.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[IkeTo]

Because it doesn't fit the needs of the user. As a user, if I show a long page at 75% size, I expect the browser to use the full width to show more words in the page, rather than to show a page that fill use 75% of the screen width. And when I make the words small, I have no intention to make the images small.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[Wildclaw]

Yes, there are two types of zooms when it comes to web browsers. One zoom changes relative percentages while the other doesn't. Since changing relative percentages just makes it so you have to side scroll when zooming in, that version isn't that useful.

That leaves the version that doesn't change relative percentages. Note, that text wrapping also uses relative percentages, so text should usually wrap inside the browser borders. This basically means the following, assuming 150% zoom:

* Images will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Text will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Pixel offsets should be multiplied by 150% (1.5)
* Relative percentages should remain the same.
* Text should wrap as it currently does.

In some cases, there will be problems when text/images are forced outside of the width of the page, but that is nothing different than if you resized your current browser and made it really small. A good browser should be able to handle those cases.

It isn't brain surgery. Opera has done it for a long long time. Unfortunally, firefox/mozilla hasn't come closer to a solution since the feature suggestion was added to bugzilla in the year 1999 (bug #4821).

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[sco08y]

Opera has had that for a while now.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[SamSim]

You might find ColorZilla vaguely useful. It's not designed primarily for zooming in and out per se, but it does zoom in the way you describe.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[Anonymous Coward]

This extension will do what you want. It works exactly like opera.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1499

I agree this should be built in to the browser, though.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[TheoMurpse]

It's had it at least since Opera 5.5, when I started using it. Ctrl+Scroll wheel, baby!

If

[Anonymous Coward]

IE finally makes blink work, I'll go back to using it. Mozilla rulz!

firefox is best for porn

[DrSkwid]

firefox is best for porn, middle click to new tab is teh business

and with extensions, even if it *does* crash your whole tabbed session is only a restart and a click away, great for one handed websites !

Re:firefox is best for porn

[ronanbear]

You never know where some of those websites have been. Everyone should practise safe browsing and always use protection.

Re:firefox is best for porn

[saintp]

Opera has had both of these features for as long as I've been using it.

Re:firefox is best for porn

[sketerpot]

If you're using Firefox for porn, you should check out some of the resources at the Pornzilla project. Also I highly recommend this modified linked images bookmarklet, because it's so useful and the original from Pornzilla has all the visual appeal of bleached oatmeal.

Firefox and Opera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well not all features of OPERA are available as extensions of Firefox.
I have been using Opera from 6.5 and Firefox from 0.6 / 0.7 (not sure), but at that time I was the only one in my neighbourhood.

Well Opera for once had faster loading times for pages initially, but rendering and compliance of ... - even javascript - was not up to mark. Memory was overconsumed. it has definitly changed. And to 8.5 - it has lost speed (still better than IE and by little FF) a bit but became more stable, less memory usage, and better compliance [I was using it with banners - they did not annoy me].

Thing I love about Opera is Last Session. :) Really good when I am in the middle of something and still one of the most loved things in it.
Also it loaded pages a little faster. But even now javascript is a little itchy in Opera.

I have also been using Firefox - no rules says you can't use two browsers - was pretty neet, it was good at one thing - browsing. The memory was not a issue - compared to that time Opera .. One and half year ago.
Now it has grown - extensions and all... and is certainly great in browsing, better compliance and stable.

[Yeah the ACROBAT extension - sink it in the sea, and sometimes the Flash extension, they are the things that crash it. Acrobat is a must crash extension ! Firefox eats memory and sometimes processor. (Not that it is firefox's fault - I remeber in 0.6 you had had to look for the flash extension, google for it)]

I haven't used IE over 1 year.
But people around me started swithing near FF 0.8-0.9 // Opera 7.4.

And by the way Opera has plug-ins, obviously, you do know that??!

I'll stick with the two for now.

Re:Firefox and Opera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up using the acrobat plugin and am instead using a plugin (mozplugger) that just spawns a stable pdf viewer (xpdf) and plonks it in the firefox window. Acrobat seems reasonably stable on windows last time I used it.

You have no point because

[nwogoldberg99]

if your TV kept shutting off, switching channels, or the picture was blurry, you would complain. If your monitor flickered or refreshed once per minute, you would complain. If your magazine was printed with watercolors, you would complain. You assume that everything works efficiently and properly. However, this is not the case with browsers, hence the gripe about their performances. I hate IE and only use FF except when some lame site like mtv.com or mcafee.com requires the use of IE. I have 1GB RAM, so I don't usually mind FF using up 80megs. However, it does need to close quite often, and you can forget closing a window if there is a pdf open in it...FF will freeze up and CPU usage goes to 100% and RAM increases to 150MB.

Re:Two points - bad moderation

[bjornte]

Hi and thanks for your comment.

I'd like to say that I don't think that this comment was trollish at all. It's OK to suggest some funding, in fact, if I was in charge of budget, I would propose it. But being a consultant this is beyond my scope.

Also the philosophical note is quite nice, albeit a bit nerdy. But that's why we are on Slashdot, isn't it. Moderators, don't troll people that are not offending.

Another poster suggested posting the sites to be broken to Bugzilla. I will do this, but I will get some page view statistics first as additional ammunition. These pages get a lot of hits.

Firefox eats non-breakable spaces

[boa13]

And it does so quite purposefully, deep in the Mozilla core:

// First, replace all nbsp characters with spaces,
// which the unicode encoder won't do for us.
static PRUnichar nbsp = 160;
static PRUnichar space = ' ';
aString.ReplaceChar(nbsp, space);

So, when you edit a wiki page, not only are the non-breakable spaces you just inserted not saved, but all the ones that were already present on the page are also destroyed. Way to please your fellow wikizens!

Note that this also affects sending mail in Mozilla (and probably Thunderbird), uploading files, etc. Patches have quickly been proposed, rejected, accepted for inclusion in the next next next release, someday, maybe.

Bugzilla entries:

• no-break spaces in submited text are replaced by breakable spaces (please vote for that one)
• non-breaking space turned into space (which got closed, way to get rid of 40 votes)
• Mozilla uploads wrong / empty file / does not upload file when filename or pathname includes no-break space ASCII character 160 ( )
• Non-breaking spaces are converted to spaces in mail composer

what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.

(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.

The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.

SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?

Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.

EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.

Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.

THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.

That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Crizp]

The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently)

What you recall may be IE finally being able to show PNGs in the first place. Transparency is still crap. Having such an image floating in a block DIV with background-color: #whatever does not reveal the background color at all :/

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

SVG support *is* in Firefox now, at least in the version that this article is talking about.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox.

Did what? Sure Firefox had an amazing rise in just a few months, but it took 100% share out of Netscape 6.2, and about 50% out of mozilla.
IE share was solid in the long run. The rise of firefox stopped as soon as every /.er had it!

So, firefox buble is like talking about IE users turning to Avant browser! Pretty lame.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[jeff_schiller]

SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?

Microsoft proposed their own graphical markup language (VML) that they also use in Office - but it was rejected. I guess they feel spurned.

But Mozilla has ignored SVG?!? Firefox supports SVG natively since Firefox 1.5 Alpha - it is NOT supported as an add-on. Furthermore, the SVG spec is a very complex one - it's not something that can be trivially implemented.

FYI, Safari is currently working on updating WebKit to support SVG based on Konqueror's KSVG plugin.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[helix_r]

I agree.

Part of the problem is that the w3c is very mushy about their "recommendations". Where the recs have different interpretations they should step in and clarify a CORRECT interpretation and incentivize browser makers to do the right thing.

So much of web-development is a pain in the ass simply because of inspid browser-compatibility issues. The year is now 2005, we've walked on the moon why can't we just get the story straight with CSS and XHTML?

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[richard.york]

Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now?

Er, last I checked SVG was included natively in Firefox 1.5

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[jdgreen7]

Transparent PNGs still don't work correctly in IE. I haven't tested IE7 Beta yet, but they sure don't with IE6 SP1. See the logo here in the top-right for an example. Works in Firefox & Mozilla, but the "transparent" background shows up as white in IE. What's funny is that Microsoft's own "Photo Editor" (copyright 1998, from the Office suite, I believe) correctly displays and can save the transparency on a PNG image.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Bogtha]

Firefox supports SVG natively since Firefox 1.5 Alpha

Can we please do away with this myth? Firefox only supports some of SVG. Saying that Firefox supports SVG is like saying that Internet Explorer supports CSS 2 - while it might be true that you can get it to do a few things that are in the spec, it's a long way from being implemented properly.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[jeff_schiller]

FUD anyone? Did I say it supports SVG fully? No. Key things that are missing with the Firefox SVG support at this time are filters, declarative animation and some text features. Yet to say what's left is only a "few things that are in the spec" shows that you are ignorant about what the spec covers. The implementors have to start somewhere...

And if you want to get technical, no browser supports CSS 2 fully yet.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Dan Ost]

It appears to me that Firefox is still doing very successful recruiting on college campuses which, arguably, is the best place to grab mindshare in this day and age.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Bogtha]

Did I say it supports SVG fully?

An unqualified "Firefox supports SVG natively" is a whole different story to "Firefox has large omissions in its SVG support". The former is very misleading. The latter is accurate.

The implementors have to start somewhere...

That's true. But by enabling SVG support as default before it's ready means that web developers will have to support broken half-implementations for years to come. Or avoid SVG.

And if you want to get technical, no browser supports CSS 2 fully yet.

There's a huge difference between supporting 99% of the spec. with a few bugs, and only managing to implement some of it, leaving out entire sections of the spec.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[accessdeniednsp]

Is this an RFC or some kind of dissenting argument? :)

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Quevar]

That is a good point - having a certification that says this browser works/doesn't work with these features would really put the pressure on the companies to comply with the standards. This does sort of exist with the Acid2 test, but few browsers actually pass the test.

Another example of a stupid hack is how to get tables to render correctly in IE. The following code puts a space between each cell of the table - incorrect because I specify that there shouldn't be any spaces:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td>
      content
    </td>
    <td>
      content
    </td>
  <tr>
</table>

But, this code - exactly the same, except for where the line breaks are - works as it is supposed to:

<table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td>
      content</td>
    <td>
      content</td>
  <tr>
</table>

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Well, I personally have seen a LOT of people switching from IE to Firefox, so I doubt those statistics. Of course, everyone has their own opinion on these things.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[commanderfoxtrot]

While it is true PNG support in IE is not very good, there are lots of workarounds to get useful results.

Take a look at PNG blog entry where I linked to a page describing how to use transparent PNGs as backgrounds &c.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Ahh, that's good to hear at least. Thanks :)

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[renderhead]

The Web Standards Project took it upon themselves to create a "pseudo-certification" of sorts with their Acid Test. Word of mouth elevated the test's standing as a legitimate benchmark for browser compliance.

Browser makers responded in various ways. Opera and Microsoft have both essentially dismissed the Acid2 test as unnecessary, preferring instead to focus on their own priorities. Mozilla has been come pretty close to passing the test all along, but I believe that they give some thought to eventually passing it perfectly. Apple got right on the ball with their Safari browser, and within a year they released a version that passes the Acid2 test.

So your idea is sound. In this case, not everyone got on board, but the fact that even one major browser maker made passing the test a goal means it was useful. If a stronger, more official certification were offered, it might even get the other players to participate. Unfortunately, the most likely source for a certification like this would be Microsoft, and who wants to match their standards?

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Nurgled]

Criticizing broken implementations is one thing, but complaining that browsers don't support every single standard that's come out of the W3C is a bit much. What would this phone: URL scheme actually be for in practice?

You seem to underestimate the amount of work that comes between the publication of a standard and a correct implementation of that standard. SVG support isn't something that you can just magically generate from the spec; it requires one or more programmers to carefully read the spec and come up with a workable way to implement it, and then of course they actually have to write the code. It's simply not practical to implement everything, so the browser vendors cherry-pick the stuff they think will be most useful to their users/customers.

Incidentally, IE6's PNG loader does support alpha transparency. Unfortunately, IE's image loading framework -- which dates back to IE4 at least -- was designed with the assumption that all images have only one-bit transparency, so the PNG loader simply cannot pass back the image with alpha channel to the renderer. Sure, Microsoft could have redesigned their image loading framework, but clearly they decided that there were more important things to implement.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Well, that's kind of my point: if the phone: url had been supported, it would have been as well-used as the mailto: url, and you wouldn't be asking this. Certainly, SVG takes time, but there have been decent SVG engines available for a long time, including open source ones, and if a certification body existed to provide a reference implementation, that would have helped a lot. Of course people will cherry pick features, but you can still have a core definition of what makes up a modern browser, and push that definition forward as you want the web to progress, if you can create a certification that people respect. Yes, I know about the pitiful efforts of MS's PNG implementation. But, if they can rip out the rendering engine of their entire **operating system** and replace it with vector graphics, then they can surely add support for multi-bit transparency, if they actually care. They problem is, and my point is, that they didn't care, because standards compliance isn't currently a bit issue for them. That needs to change.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of Mozilla, it's not as dead as the Mozilla Foundation wishes - see the project page here. 1.0 Alpha is based on the same Gecko engine as Firefox 1.5 beta 5, and 1.0 beta will probably be based on Gecko 1.8 RC3 or 1.8 final.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Transmogrify_UK]

Er, last I checked Firefox 1.5 hadn't been released yet. (other than in beta/RC format).

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Cereal Box]

They are actually in compliance with PNG standards with respect to transparency -- I quote from the W3 PNG spec which Slashdotters hold near and dear to their hearts but have probably never read:


13.16 Alpha channel processing
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most will be able to support compositing against a single background colour.


This is the funny thing about standards. They're generally not as black and white as people think they are! They contain lots of passages that say implentors "should" do this or "are not required" to do that. In this case, IE simply composites against a single background color (gray, IIRC).

Another Slashdot myth busted...

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Yes, but I don't think that anyone in their right mind would interpret that as meaning that, when a user specifies an image to be put on top of another on a page layout, they want the transparancy of the image they specifically created with graduation to be ignored and replaced with a gray background or even 1-bit transparency. That's probably intended for applications where there IS nothing to be displayed behind the image. Anyway, I did say that, where there is ambiguity, that should be worked out in a community process, rather than guessed at.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[BZ]

> SVG is similar: a well-defined standard,

That you say this tells me that you've never actually tried implementing SVG.... It's not as bad as HTML4, but it's not even close to "well-defined".

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[JazzCrazed]

Yep, it's in the Firefox Beta 1.5. It was in the "Deer Park" alphas, as well, but deactivated at default - you had turn it on in a configuration page. I agree that SVG is an enormously important standard, and having it built into browsers is a must. Hopefully, the next version of my site will have a vector logo instead of a bitmap PNG. :)

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Cereal Box]

Anyway, I did say that, where there is ambiguity, that should be worked out in a community process, rather than guessed at.

Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen when you've got multiple companies developing proprietary software that implements a standard (I'm not talking in particular about these standards, but such scenarios occur in many other situations). Besides which, nothing stops someone from coming along and interpreting the standard in the way that best works for them. After all, the standard is very ambiguous. The problem lies with the standard, not necessarily the implementors.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[JazzCrazed]

24-bit transparent PNGs work pretty good in IE7 beta 1. It's CSS where a lot of the work has to be done (and where it seems pretty much indistinguishable from the horrid IE6).

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[elcid73]

To say Opera has dismissed it as unnecessary is a bit of an understatement. Check the version 9 Tech Preview to see the Acid2 progress which is almost complete. I agree that Opera does appear to make it a top priority, but they are actively working it and post updates often. See this blog from a developer to get an update. Also, Safari has acid2 in internal builds only still IIRC, right?

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[JazzCrazed]

I must be running the wrong versions of both browsers, then, because Mozilla gleans no more than relatively decent Acid2 results (which have stayed pretty much the same for a year more or less), while Opera comes considerably closer to passing.

Also, I think you can credit KDE and KHTML for a large part of why Safari now passes Acid2.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[JazzCrazed]

Nope, Safari 2 on our Tiger machine here at work passes flawlessly.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Well, perhaps. But it's well-defined enough that graphics apps like Inkscape use it as their primary file format, and that different Linux apps and desktops can import them without major incompatibilities, and that people happily use SVG icons and wallpaper everyday. It's all relative, of course.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

Well, with all due respect, saying it's not likely to happen is meaningless. We're debating ways that it might happen, which is a much more detailed discussion. "It's not likely" is pretty vague.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[hostyle]

Excellent. Browser specific hacks are your version of the way to future compliance? May the w3c gods shower you with quail and mana.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[hostyle]

You, sir, are a master statistician. May I be the first to welcome you in advance as a future overlord?

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[spitzak]

In fact Window's alpha compositing support has been better than X for quite awhile (the XRender extension does this but is not as uniformly supported as Windows support for this call):

        BLENDFUNCTION m_bf;
        m_bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;
        m_bf.BlendFlags = 0;
        m_bf.AlphaFormat = 1 /*AC_SRC_ALPHA*/;
        m_bf.SourceConstantAlpha = 0xFF;
        AlphaBlend(dc, x,y,w,h, source_dc, X,Y,W,H, m_bf);

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[hostyle]

But by enabling SVG support as default before it's ready means that web developers will have to support broken half-implementations for years to come.

Where are you dragging these insinuations out of? Firefox 1.5 is still in development. Even when released not all features will be ready for public consumption - however, whether or not you have realised it, not that many websites actively employ SVG for their un-missable content.

Got up on the dismissive / pessimistic side of bed did we? May I suggest a little lie down. Everyone knows that Firefox is THE FUTURE. Why do you fight so hard young Jedi?

Yes, perhaps the OP is being a bit too zealous / over-optimistic, but IMO any face-pushing-into-the-muck with SVG is good. If people don't start using it, it'll get buried forever.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Bogtha]

Firefox 1.5 is still in development.

It was released as a finished product today, and it's been feature-frozen for a while.

Even when released not all features will be ready for public consumption

If SVG is not ready yet, why is it enabled by default?

Got up on the dismissive / pessimistic side of bed did we?

I'm not pessimistic, I just learn from experience. You can't be a web developer, or you'd be nodding along as I complained about supporting broken implementations for years. In a couple of years time, Firefox 2.0 with a full SVG implementation might be used by most people, but there will still be people using Firefox 1.x, and web developers who want to use SVG will have to waste their time coding around Firefox 1.x's deficiencies when all they want to do is target browsers that support SVG properly and provide fallbacks for browsers that don't support SVG at all.

Partial support for SVG is worse than no support. With browsers that don't support SVG at all, you can just provide fallback PNGs, use conneg, or whatever. With browsers that try and fail to support SVG, all bets are off, because the fallback mechanisms that HTTP and HTML provide aren't designed for browsers that think they can support something but can't.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[jeff_schiller]

Ah, but surely you're aware of svg:switch and feature strings, no? The SVG specification provides a mechanism to deploy fallback content from within the SVG document itself. Firefox doesn't support filters yet, so deploy filters for those implementations that do (Adobe) and something else (or nothing) for those that don't (like Firefox 1.5 and Opera 8).

This feature was put into SVG because the authors of the spec realized that no browser would be able to implement ALL features out of the gate.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[powermacx]

SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?

SVG support in Safari? here. Still rather unstable and lacking features, but full support will be there eventually.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Nurgled]

IE blends PNG images with an alpha channel against the background matte color specified in the image file or, if that chunk is absent, against the control background color specified in the Windows appearance settings. As you noted, that color is generally gray by default.

You can use pngcrush to add the appropriate background chunk to get IE to matte against a more appropriate color if you wish. It might not look quite as good as it does in a browser that blends against the underlying elements, but at least you can control what color is used so that it doesn't look so ridiculous.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Nurgled]

Certainly Windows itself can do the alpha blending just fine, but in IE itself the image loaders are separated out into modules. The API defined for the rendering engine to talk to the image loaders does not support alpha-channel images, so the PNG loader blends the image against a solid background and passes that back to the rendering engine. There was a post in the IEBlog about this some time ago from the person who fixed it for IE7.

Wrong Methods

[RAMMS EIN]

``They don't get fixed because they aren't ego-boosters like other pet projects.''

I don't think that's the reason. I think the FF devs would love to fix these issues, but haven't been able to. Furthermore, I think that this is because they built the beast the wrong way.

In the early days of the Mozilla project, they were building one big Communicator with lots of features and workarounds for broken sites and dog knows what else, all built upon a cross-platform framework with lots of abstractions and all. It was horribly slow. It was a memory hog. It was a huge download. It was buggy.

When Mozilla was about feature complete, they started working on speedups. The results were quite impressive. They got it to a usable speed. Then they finally got smart and created a separate project just for the browser. This browser would be very light-weight and fast. The developers started stripping out code, removing features, speeding things up, and reducing the size of the download.

After several years, we now have Firefox. It's the slowest, most memory hungry, and most crash-prone browser I've ever used. Looking at the history of the project, I am not surprised. It's the wrong way to develop things. You first make something simple that works, and then you can add features to it (preferably in a modular way, so that people who don't want the features can choose not to have them). What they did was first add all the features, and then try to make it simple. That doesn't work. I was saying this in the early days, and I'm still saying it now.

Re:Wrong Methods

[typicallyterrific]

You first make something simple that works, and then you can add features to it (preferably in a modular way, so that people who don't want the features can choose not to have them). What they did was first add all the features, and then try to make it simple. That doesn't work. I was saying this in the early days, and I'm still saying it now.

Ah yes. Do you program at all? From my limited experience, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE for that NOT to happen somewhere down the line in your project. Upon which you have to spend a lot of time fixing your current code base. The mozilla project inherited this massive, broken project that had been rewritten from scratch recently and that almost no one else would be touching (Netscape). Nothing is more frustrating than reading someone else's code when you could be writing your own.

All things considered, Firefox is probably the single most popular piece of open source software today - which is absolutely incredible. And I think you might be doing something odd for it to be the slowest, most memory hungry and crashy browser: it's main feature is the fact that it sucks less than IE. It has so, in my mind, ever since version 0.5, which is when I began to use it as my main browser :P.

Try Opera, Konqueror or Safari

[RAMMS EIN]

I think everybody complaining about Firefox's memory hunger, sluggishness, and instability should try Opera, Konqueror, or Safari. (Opera has some stability problems on Linux and isn't open source, Konqueror on Windows is probably a bit difficult, and Safari only works on OS X). Both of these are a lot snappier and less memory hungry than Firefox, and have been more stable for me.

Both browsers also have some really nice features. I haven't been keeping track of how many of these have been copied by Firefox or originally came from Firefox, so I can't say how they all differ, but the point is that both Opera and Konqueror are very nice to use, and may actually offer you things that Firefox doesn't have (yet). The only problem is that some sites really fail miserably on one or the other - I think Firefox does a better job at rendering broken sites.

Also worth noting is that Safari is built on the KHTML engine from Konqueror. Safari is also a really nice browser, although it had some annoying issues when I last used it (e.g. I couldn't switch tabs while one tab was busy loading a page). Doubtless, it has improved since then. So, if you're on OS X, give it a spin, although you probably already have.

Re:Try Opera, Konqueror or Safari

[jp10558]

The only problem is that some sites really fail miserably on one or the other - I think Firefox does a better job at rendering broken sites.

I'd claim that more sites are tested in FireFox, but hey. Anyway, with Opera's major addition of Browser.js in 8, and continued expansion upcoming in 9 - Opera software can rewrite broken sites so they work properly, and push that out to the users. This is almost as good as Proxomitron, with none of the hassle (and it works in Linux and OSX as well).

So, you can complain about a site not working, and Opera software can finally actually do something about it.

Thanks for your reply

[Flying pig]

Yes, I was being quite serious. I do apologise (a bit) for being a nerd, but as it's kept me gainfully employed for the last 25 years, why complain? If minority laguages are to survive (which is a good thing in my view) they need to adapt rather than fossilise. Perhaps Slashdot isn't the obvious place to discuss the evolution of grammar and how easy to learn languages tend to create cultural domination, but it is as true of computer languages as of human language.

Anyway, thanks for taking the comment the way it was intended. As for the moderator, well, at the risk of finding he has more mod points and a vengeful attitude, it looks like he is determined to reinforce the negative stereotype of Northern European behaviour. I say this...my real surname is a Grimm shift of the word "Viking".

Re:Thanks for your reply

[sco08y]

Perhaps Slashdot isn't the obvious place to discuss the evolution of grammar and how easy to learn languages tend to create cultural domination, but it is as true of computer languages as of human language.

Sure it is. You just have to be prepared to get modded down by people who are easily offended.

English happens to be an excellent language for working with computers: small alphabet, no accents (except for loanwords), and it is poorly inflected so stemming algorithms are simple. It also has, as you alluded to, very few compound words. The structure of English is a historical coincidence, and the only way someone who wasn't an anglophone could take offense to it would be if they had an inferiority complex.

modded funny!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded that funny? It's wand, not wang...

A plea to Firefox developers...

[PhilHibbs]

Don't overload the Reload and Stop buttons! I read about MS doing that in IE7, and it's one of the most stupid ideas I've heard. Then I tried Opera, and saw that they've done it too! The tabs being ABOVE the toolbar (ugly ugly ugly) is the main reason I don't use Opera, but the combined Stop/Reload button is another reason.

Re:A plea to Firefox developers...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can customize the layout of everything in Opera...so if you don't like the tabs being across the top then move them.

Re:A plea to Firefox developers...

[MP*Birdman]

Just as an FYI, all of the toolbars and buttons in Opera can be moved, rearranged, or hidden. I have my tabs on the bottom of the page, and have a custom set of buttons on the top of the page.

Rightclick the panel (in this case, where the tabs are), select "Customize" and you can set things where and how you want them :)

Re:A plea to Firefox developers...

[PhilHibbs]

One of these days I will devote some time to getting to know Opera. Enough people whose opinions I respect have said that it is good.

They forgot one.

[martinultima]

Whatever happened to Flock, the Firefox-based "social browser"? I guess it probably isn't mainstream enough yet, but I've been using it for a couple weeks now as my default browser (despite their recommendations ;-) and have yet to see a more innovative piece of software.

god, are we still having this argument?

[nowhere.elysium]

... i guess that i'm just gonna be deemed a pervert for eschewing all of these flash sites, and using browsers like links2, then. sod you all :)

Re:god, are we still having this argument?

[Kehvarl]

... i guess that i'm just gonna be deemed a pervert for eschewing all of these flash sites, and using browsers like links2, then. sod you all :)

thats pervect!

/me has been reading too much Myth

Firefox RC1?

[yoyhed]

Either this article is old or these PC World people don't use current material for their stories; Firefox RC3 has been out for a couple weeks already...

Re:Firefox RC1?

[BondGamer]

PC World is a printed magazine, so articals may be several weeks old by the time they get posted online.

Re:Firefox RC1?

[yoyhed]

You mean.. like.. on paper?

Man, they're more behind the times than I thought.

Although I guess if my laptop was broken I could use this "magazine" to read old technology news while I take a dump...

FF vs Fx

[trollable]

There is at least one thing wrong with Firefox. According to the releases notes, "The preferred abbreviation is 'Fx' or 'fx'.". But almost every one uses 'FF'. They should listen the users ;)

Keyboard Shortcuts

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn the keyboard shortcuts and you'll never worry about it again.

Something like and

New menus in Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using 1.5 (pre alpha fruit loops rc2beta9 patch level guano) for a few days and I love the new clean menubar and right-click menus. The new "can't find server" page is attractive. Now if only it wouldn't periodically freeze/slow when some site decides it has a lot of work to do, or is that a Windows thing?

Opera not available?

[Guerrillero]

You can get opera 9 beta here:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id= 108345

How I solved this problem

[Pac]

IE View is a Firefox extension for Windows that opens the current page in IE. It usually solves the "last site" problem, when all arguments contrary to Firefox have been shortened to "But I must use site xyz and Firefox breaks it" (still a fairly common situation specially with Internet banking applications).

Any KHTML-based browsers for Windows?

[Bloodwine77]

One problem I have is that I cannot test my websites for Safari, since it is a Mac-only browser.

I know that Safari uses a modified version of KHTML, but if I could test in a "close cousin" browser such as Konqueror then that would be great. Problem is that Konqueror is tied at the hip with KDE.

I don't want to mess with a bug of linux shells and/or emulators on Windows to get it working, I want a native Win32 KHTML browser.

Google brings up nothing, except for a stalled project for a Win32 KHTML browser.

Re:Two points

[dkf]

the compound nouns in Scandinavian/Teutonic languages are examples of bad linguistic design

No. Software is more flexible than people's habits, and as there's already a standard way of dealing with the problem (the soft hyphen, which is a defined part of the UNICODE spec) there is no reason whatsoever for software to not handle it. Anything else is just stupid linguistic imperialism. (Plus, sometimes it's really useful to be able to say where to hyphenate long wordlike-entities, even in English.)

is there an extension....

[zogger]

..that when it sees such a page would generate a report that went out to interested parties so they could swarm the webmaster there with emails about it? A polite "hello webmaster, this sucks for such and such reasons, would you please fix it?" sort of thing? It would have to be automated in some fashion probably. One or two emails webmasters might ignore, but if everyone who had the extension was part of the swarmed response it might get noticed and acted on.

Just asking, I really don't know if something like this exists

Re:is there an extension....

[Yer Mom]

...or the message text would get added to the company's spam filters in fairly short order once somebody receives 50 identical messages from different addresses.

Granted, that shows lack of clue, but we already know they're somewhat low on that particular resource...

Wishlist

[Lifewish]

What I'd really love is for this to be implemented for backgrounds. Currently there's no way to make a CSS-defined background for a DIV tag stretch to cover the necessary area without a hell of a lot of evil javascript or whatever. This is not cool.

Re:Wishlist

[kyofunikushimi]

IE, i believe, has a proprietary method for implementing this that violates quite a few specs. Also: it is part of the spec for css3 (background-size property) as seen here: http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-css3-background-20050 216/

Re:Wishlist

[HeroreV]

Like everything, it's coming. Been waiting paitiently in CSS 3 for quite a while now.

Firefox and plugins

[teslatug]

What is the deal with firefox and plugins?? Every time a new version comes out all the plugins break. Either make the plugin interface stable and stop blocking them, or bring the most important ones under the foundation and stop dicking around. Firefox has many annoyances that are fixed by extensions because developers won't fix them (saying there are extensions for that).

Oh come on

[Lifewish]

Everyone knows that ED is the one true editor!

Try using Irfanview

[gosand]

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.

Have you tried Irfanview? Seriously, it is an image viewer, that is what it is coded to do. Firefox is coded to be a web browswer (duh) which just happens to include viewing images. Irfanview is one of those rare, amazing, free programs for Windows that really has no equal. Use it, you'll love it.

Re:Two points

[sco08y]

there's already a standard way of dealing with the problem (the soft hyphen, which is a defined part of the UNICODE spec)

Uh huh. You know that hyphenation has to be prioritized, right? It may be *permissible* to hyphenate at a certain place but *preferable* to hyphenate elsewhere. Compound words are a perfect example: it's better to hyphenate between the words than within the words. Please show me how you can achieve this with soft hyphens.

Anything else is just stupid linguistic imperialism.

No, it's lazy Europeans who don't want to get off their asses and do it themselves. They need it implemented and are clearly capable of doing it themselves but... don't. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Opera's done that forever

[DABANSHEE]

Well since version 3 or 4

Re:Workaround

[Strixy]

Set two layers, one on top of the other. Insert your background image with a regular img tag width=100% and layer the second on top of it with background: transparent. Set the width's of each to 100%. It'll work in FF or IE, probably not both. As for Opera, my guess is that it will open your drink holder.

Funny thing is, people are listening

[Pac]

During the last days of Netscape, the early days of Firefox and any day with a Mac it was pretty useless to complain to anyone (person or company) about their IE-only/Windows-only sites. Usually people would ignore your complain or send an answer that in the end amounted to "We think you should try IE, billions of us can't be wrong - and by the way, there is no way in hell we will change our site just because some hippies here and there have an irrational hatred for Microsoft". But recently I've been seeing some change. Nowadays, besides those who have already gone and changed their sites right away, companies started answering apologetically and stating they were looking into it and would solve this problem Real Soon Now.

I think Firefox may have crossed the threshold where companies, specially the ones trying to do business in the Web, can't ignore it anymore, so things are bound to change and the odd IE-only site will soon be a thing of the past.

The article is totally bogus

[Anonymous Coward]

Amid all the philosophy, did anybody notice that the article is objectively full of cr*p? It says the IE7 beta won't be available "until next year", when in truth it's already been available for a couple of months:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=718E9B3A-64FE-4A4C-9DDF-57AF0472EAD2&displa ylang=en

Re:Overload the reload and stop buttons??

[Lord Bitman]

Given that you've just made up a new term, how about explaining what it is you mean? On the general idea of "what about reload and stop buttons do I sometimes not like in other browsers", I can make a wild guess, but it's a wild guess.

Please note that whatever horrible ugly useless thing IE does, Firefox will copy it. (I assume on the grounds of "Well, our way /seems/ much more useable, smart, efficient, whatever, but Microsoft actually pays people to come up with their shit, so I guess they know what they're doing better than we do..[*COPY*])

Re:Overload the reload and stop buttons??

[PhilHibbs]

"Overloading" means one thing with more than one purpose, for example operator overloading in C++ means that the + in a+b will add a and b together if they are numbers, but will concatenate them if they are string objects. A single button that either stops the current page from loading, or reloads it, depending on whether the page has finished loading or not is an overloaded button.

Re:Agreed - major performance problems with Firefo

[UnknownSoldier]

Loved your insights, and matches my experiences. (I haven't seen any FF code either.)

i.e.
There have been a few times (3 or so) that FF has completely stalled. Attaching the debugger and seeing that it is "stuck" inside a few functions, and forcing them to return, has brought the browser back to life, complete with my 20+ tabs all intact, and allowed me to save/bookmark them all.

For me the biggest complaints with FF have been ...
1. Memory usage (bloat with pre 1.0.7 was terrible.)
2. No ability to start a new window in a different process/thread. I believe the WinMain code is using a named atomic, and the new thread terminates (to prevent memory usage duplication) if it sees the semaphore already exists. Wish there was a command line option to force it by-pass this check.
3. Un-responsive UI (also much improved, but still stalls occasionaly)

--
/. sucks @$$ for posting code snippets. At least let the registered users in good standing be allowed to bypass the lame "lameness filter."

Re:Overload the reload and stop buttons??

[Lord Bitman]

[warning: wild tangent ahead]

I've never looked at ObjectTypeA + ObjectTypeA to be the same thing as ObjectTypeB + ObjectTypeB, so to say "+ has multiple uses" seems wrong.. To say that though it looks similar, its function is completely different, seems more accurate, and that's what I took "Overloading" to mean. In OOP, for example, if you overload a function in a class which inherits from another class, often you still want to do the same thing as te parent-class's function, but either have a different way of going about it or want to do something additional as well. So while they still achieve the same goals, they are not directly related (though one may call the other).
So what seemed to be said was: [something like] "The stop button is no longer a stop button, it now stops displaying the page, but keeps caching in the background". That would be, as I understand it, an example of "overloading" the stop button.

You know, because if you meant "combined the functionality" you could have said "combined the stop/reload buttons" instead of "overloaded the stop/reload buttons" :)

(that was not an attack, I just like talking about varying interpretations of things)

another vaporware evaluation

[LordActon]

On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year

So, once again, we compare something freely available and available now, to something not available. And /. is all over it like white on paper. Can anyone spell "Longhorn"?

If the PC World editors want to hang onto the hype train and pretend anyone cares about Microsoft's promises, let them. And ignore them. Because by the time their vaporware materializes, it'll be competing against Firefox 2.0 and 2.5.

Re:Overload the reload and stop buttons??

[PhilHibbs]

I accept that my post was not as clear as it could have been.

The Web browser market?

[radtea]

I'm doubtful about using the term "market" for a commodity that is given away in exchange for nothing. To have a market there must be a price.

Re:Overload the reload and stop buttons??

[Lord Bitman]

Well that's just no fun, now how am I supposed to waste time? ;)

rock solid!

[namekuseijin]

"IE is more stable than FireFox"

old stuff is rock solid stable. It's actually a Debian policy...

But what is really amazing is that even by supporting cool new-fangled tech like the newest CSS standards, XUL GUIs, XForms and SVG, FF _just_ crashes twice as much as a piece of software from the early 2000s which sports none of those features at all...

Acid2 isn't a compliance test

[Kelson]

Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.

At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.

It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.

Why Opera Firefox

[Monimonika]

I'm a Firefox user, but have Opera installed as something to play around with when I'm in the mood to explore its various functionalities. It may be that I'm too used to Firefox, but there's something about the way Opera displays its options that annoys me.

I can tell it's a great browser, though, so if someone doesn't like Firefox (for a reason that can't be fixed by tweaking/extension) I refer them over to Opera.

Anyway, I frequently visit Mozillazine, so one day I decided to see what gets talked about in the Opera forums. After a bit of reading, I decided to search for threads/posts that mentioned Firefox. The majority of the threads turned out to be the pinings for the addition of the AdBlock extension to Opera.

If Opera were to get the functionality of this extension, Firefox user base would drop dramatically.

Oversimplification

[DrIdiot]

In a recent study, security analysis and software company Secunia found that Firefox had 3 unpatched security risks out of 25 discovered problems, compared with 20 unpatched risks for IE out of 86 found. Opera had them both beat, with no unpatched holes out of 8 detected. Of course, as browsers become more popular, they also become more attractive targets.

That's only part of the picture. Currently, Secunia's most critical bug in IE is rated "extremely critical" (the highest rating). Then, looking at IE's records, we see that 15% of its bugs are "extremely critical" and 29% are "highly critical." Compared to Firefox's 4% "extremely critical" (which ends up being only one - and that one only affected *nix) and 24% "highly critical" (which sounds awful close, but IE has about triple the vulnerabilities that Firefox has).

And that doesn't even take into account that Firefox is an open source application whereas IE is not. How many bugs in IE are just temporarily hidden because it's closed source?

one more requirement

[r00t]

Extensions must not take the place of implementing the standard. Using SVG and vector graphics as an example...

It's OK to just not implement vector graphics.

It's OK to only have standards-compliant SVG for vector graphics.

It's OK to have standards-compliant SVG and something else.

It's not at all OK to have vector graphics without standards-compliant SVG. (pushing people to use the non-standard vector graphics by offering it in place of standards-compliant SVG)

Opera has that feature

[Mustang Matt]

Or at least it did last time I used it several versions ago. It was kind of nice in some instances. Since I like to run in higher resolutions if I had parents or grandparents over I would blow up the browser to 200% so that everything was easily readable from a few feet back.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what you used to generate your "leet speak" text, but it seems to have dropped quite a few characters.

Perhaps the original poster's plugin would have helped?

Opera!

[Anonymous Coward]

Three.
You understand that a lot of us will see that as a challenge? I clicked to your site *just* to get Opera 8 in your log.

BTW, nice site graphics, but I thougt splash pages went out of style in 2002.

Opera Toolbar are fully configurable.

[krischik]

The Opera toolbars are fully configurable you can drag and drop any Toolbar button wherever you like.

Right klick in the toolbar and choose "Customize". Then you can activate more Toolbars - choose where they should appear and then drag and drop the buttons where you like them.

Martin