Slashdot Mirror
A Browser War Preview
"Browsers are lousy in terms of supporting the various specifications people have published that define useful things web developers want and need to do. This has numerous effects:
- It slows down and frustrates web developers.
- It raises the costs of web development.
- It makes some things impossible.
"All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?"
"The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them."
The more browsers that pass the Acid2 test, the better support there is for web developers. The better support there is for web developers, the higher the quality of the work they put out. And you, as an end-user of that work, benefit."
Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing
"I like Opera. I use Opera. I read the comparison, and Opera looks to come out favorably. Then I read the comments. Firefox compared to IE, again and again. Reasons why Firefox is better. Reasons why IE is better. Reasons why more people use IE. But there are fewer comments on Opera. I can't understand why. It has lots of things that Firefox needs extensions for built right in (and without significant differences in resources), and some things, like bittorrent support, that aren't available in any extension. It has better standards compliance than the other two. It has Widgets (like extensions) if you want to expand it more. But yet, a 3-way comparison is treated as a 2-way comparison. I thought this would be more of an eye opener, 'Wow, I didn't know Opera did all that and did it better than the other browsers!' But instead, the comments read like the posters glanced at the IE and Firefox pages of the article (if they read it at all) and hopped right back on the IE vs Firefox war. I find it sad that a competitive browser receives to little consideration, especially from a group that is supposedly early adopters.""
"Me, too," wrote reader lee1. "I think there is a reflex to ignore Opera because for so long it was pay- or ad-ware."
Reader bartkusa also spoke up for Opera
"Opera's UI is extremely customizable [opera.com]. Skinnable interface and lots of flexibility with toolbar and button placement, on the output side. On the input side, you can set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures if you don't like the default ones."
Dan East pointed out a glitch in the linked story as originally displayed:
"Their memory usage charts cannot possibly be right:
- Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
- Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
- Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
- Opera 9.0: 52K
- IE 6.0: 155K
- Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K
A single image on one of those pages could require more RAM than what the entire program is consuming. That's way, way off. What's even more amazing is, going by their charts, Opera actually consumes LESS ram with 6 pages loaded than when it first starts up! 53k -> 52k"
Reader dtfinch had another complaint: "The "Features at a Glance" table is very inaccurate with respect to Opera. For one, Opera has very good theme support."
Several readers offered rationales for the continued popularity of Internet Explorer; among these, according to reader chiller2, is better printing support compared to Firefox.
"e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.
"Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print."
Reader fuzzandwater complained "It's ridiculous that [the linked review's authors] defend IE by claiming 'no pages seem horribly messed up,'" writing "Clearly the author is not a web developer. If he were, he would know that the reason the pages display correctly in IE is javascript hacks, css workarounds, web developer headaches, Dean's IE7 javascript library, a separate stylesheet for IE, etc... It's not that IE is inherently displaying the sites correctly, it's that the site developers were forced to make them play nice with IE."
LWATCDR piles on the Explorer complaints, writing "It seems like a good number of people use Firefox now. So unless you want to exclude 1 out of 10 users from your site can not support just IE. I will not due business with a company that has an IE only site. Now the rub is this. IE doesn't support current standards. Yes, web developers have every right to complain about Microsoft ignoring standards and making their life more complicated. Because of IE I can not use PNG files with an alpha channel on websites I design.
"Just because most people use junk that is no reason to
a. Not tell them that is junk.
b. Try to get the producers of said junk to make it better.
c. Try to get people to use a better product."
Yvan256 raises the interesting point that as Windows changes, whether a browser is backward compatible makes a difference:
"Will Internet Explorer 7 run on Windows 95/98/ME/NT4? If not, then MSIE7 won't be ... And with Nintendo going with Opera for both the Nintendo DS and the Wii, Opera's marketshare might soon explode beyond 1-2%. Just keep that in mind before jumping into the 'MSIE7 has nice proprietary features' train."
Reader El_Muerte_TDS asks just what a "Favorites button" is, asking "Is it like a bookmark button?" To this, readers responded that "favorites" (in Internet Explorer) are equivalent to "Bookmarks" in most other browsers.
Blimey85 asks "What about extensions?," arguing that "Comparing stock Firefox with anything [isn't] very relevant. You need to compare Firefox loaded with some extensions to show the true power of the platform. Same with the other browsers and their add-ons or widgets."
"One example of not doing this is in the feature comparison table where it says that Firefox can't remember open tabs for the next session. My copy of Firefox not only does that when I want it to, it also has crash recovery so when I restart I can choose to reopen all of the tabs or not."
Yvan256, among others, thinks this is a double-edged sword: "The problem with Firefox is the extensions. People want a good browser, not fiddle around hunting for what exists. Power users do that, sure, but not regular users."
Reader Tet took issue with the reviewer's assertion that "the address bar is for URLs, not searches."
"I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unnecessary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it."
Reader GigsVT explained the appeal that a separate search bar has for him, though:
"If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search. We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be."
Thanks to all the readersa who took part in this conversation, especially those quoted above.
I have Firefox 1.5 installed, and tried installing the latest alpha release of firefox to see how different it is. Anyways, I uninstalled the alpha version, and now most of my extensions aren't working in 1.5. It's saying that they aren't supported by that version, so I'm thinking that the alpha release updated a setting somewhere with the new version #, but didn't undo it when it was uninstalled.
Any ideas?
...is that real men browse the internet with telnet to port 80.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Can someone explain this to me? Slashback, with story updates, etc, is useful. This, however, just appears to be a random collection of posts from the original article. What is the point?
I actaully installed IE7 last night, I'd been impressed with how it sounded but I never boot into windows so I had to make a special effort to get it, it is also the first thing I've installed in ages which wasn't free (in both senses), and I was amazed at the licence terms; it might just be that I'm not used to seeing them but on IE7 it was so restrictive about what you could do and they kept the right to do anything, including (if I remember right) the ability to change the contract without telling you about it. It actually said that you should re-read the agreement regularly because they might change it at any time, needless to say I won't be installing a final version of it.
As a browser it was ok, nothing really special but not too bad.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
- Will IE 7 handle PNG's with alpaha channel transparency like every body else. As in no Active x controls and proprietary scripting methods in the html. Can I drop my browser detecting code and separate servings of markup or css based on the browser?
- The Box Model, is the math 9in IE finally not backwards from every one else, does it now make sense? Will 'Border' not be full scree when I just set them to '30px'?
- Oh one thing I am happy about in Fire Fox that is a long time coming for me is the spell check, I wonder how it will work with online WYSIWIG editors?
Anyone Know?I'm not sure if it was posted yesterday or not, but there is a quick and easy javascript fix for transparent PNGs in IE.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/
I know it isn't perfect, and is a hack, but it is useful for using PNG graphics on sites displated in IE.
I'll admit that like most people here on /., I find that the comments people make are more interesting than the articles themselves. However, do we need the recent proliferation in Slashback articles? Usually the /backs are for discussions that have already been disscussed to death. Someone once described /backs as 'the dupe that isn't a dupe'. I feel that he's right.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
are great
Go into your profile, turn off Backslash, and stop reading them. Drivel comments like these are the reason Backslash exists - to improve the signal to dumbass ratio.
Am I the only one who doesn't see any need whatsoever for a bit torrent client built in to a web browser? There are a million free bit torrent clients out there that are way better than Opera's. Not only that, but its surprisingly difficult to turn it off. I personally lost intererst and opened the torrent from firefox before I figured it out.
That said Opera is my favorite web browser by far.
Anyone figured out how to turn off these silly backslash articles?
/.. I can't find that in my preferences any more...
If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.
For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on
Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.
Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.
the CSS parsing still sucks. I've been kicking myself from the day I installed beta1 and then beta2. It's not that the browser's bad. The UI is an improvement. Sure, the thumbnail previews are nice. Stacking similar tabs together - very cool (all of these were available in Opera9 by the way - OPERA RULZ! RoXX, etc etc.). It's that they haven't made any changes to the CSS compliance so far. The same errors in IE6 are in IE7. Is that all they did? Change the UI?
'tis but a scratch.
I disagree that you need a seperate search bar.
Now all you need to type is "g Jessica Alba" to search google for Ms. Alba. You can then safely get rid of your extraneous search bar. And as a bonus, you can move the address bar and navigation buttons up on the same line as the menu bar, and free up some extra screen real estate.
...I'm viewing this with Opera. I have all 3 of the browsers on my computer. Previously, I was a dedicated firefox user. However, I've come to find that Opera uses less than half the RAM of Firefox and that Firefox and IE use about the same amount of RAM as one another when idling on a page (e.g. Google). If your RAM and speed are important to you, go Opera. If your extensions are critical, go Firefox. IE is only worth using if you need to go to an IE only page. To do my own little backlash: Opera is the most efficient. Firefox has the most utilities. IE has the most pages catering to it.
Any browser that costs money, or used to cost money, is ridiculous.
NCSA Mosaic was free and wasn't supported by advertising. It's the principle of the matter.
Face it guys, a lot more "normal" people use the internet now compared to the 90s, when the last browser wars happened. And those people don't know what a browser is. They maybe have heard of the IE, but never of Firefox. They just click on the blue "e" to use the internet. I educate some, you educate some, but the userbase is growing faster than the number of people we can educate. Also Firefox is not faster or does anything better for said user than the IE, because all they do is click on links and take their time to use webmail and read some webpages. The only thing Firefox has going is that it is saver. But the only reason it is saver is because less people use it and malware writers target the largest userbase. Maybe Firefox is saver, but they have zero day exploits none the less. So it wouldn't make much difference IMHO.
I prefer SeaMonkey to FireFox. I have tried FireFox, but I did not like the interface.
Any stats on how many hits come from SeaMonkey, or do they use the same signature?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Main issues:
Don't worry though, Opera's UI could never be anywhere near as bad as IE7's, *shudder*.
Also, while extensions were never a big draw for me (particularly after using a pre-1.0 version of Web Developer and having it constantly crash Firefox) these days I couldn't live without them. I've got my security/add-protection ones in NoScript and Cookie Button (plus Cookie Button in the status bar); Web-Dev in the aformentioned Web Developer (now thankfully sans-crashing) and Console2; the fantastic Tab Mix Plus which has greatly improved my browsing experience (the ability to open closed tabs and save sessions is just fantastic, and yes I'm aware it's a standard Opera feature); and a bunch of others to tweak the interface (and sites) to my preference.
Not true http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.
Why does it always seem that Mircrosoft will come out with the same features as everyone else, and then make it look clean pretty wrap it with a windows bow and say "look what we can do now"
I think Opera has long ago passed the Slashdot threshhold so as to deserve its own category or icon! IE, Netscape, Mozilla, AND FireFox each have one, even though the latter three are all branches of one entity; Is there some deep-seated reason why, despite all the Opera news, there is not even one Opera category?
I do searches a whole lot more than I browse to single word domains without any periods in them. Is it that much harder typing in the http://porn/ on the off chance that you need to browse to a single word domain rather than clog up the top of the screen with yet another bar?
"However, I've come to find that Opera uses less than half the RAM of Firefox and that Firefox and IE use about the same amount of RAM as one another when idling on a page (e.g. Google)."
Perhaps, but try moving around. While browsing an image board I frequent, Opera started using more memory than Firefox usually does on that site. Maybe it has something to do with different image caching behavior, but the upshot is, the mem usage comparison can depend on how/where you browse.
until recently as it didn't provide NTLM proxy support (am I saying that right?). I've tried it in a couple environments that used some MS proxy server, and Opera couldn't authenticate. Who's fault is that? Opera 9 *does* support that authentication, but considering it's only a few weeks old, I hardly expect a massive uptake to Opera in the corporate world.
Opera may support a lot of tech standards, but that was a pretty big business standard they didn't support.
creation science book
I used to care. Now I don't any more. I consider the whole batch of so called standards collectively known as the web pretty primitive and backwards. CSS is a horrible standard not suitable for defining moderately complicated layouts (or even certain trivial ones). It's not the best we've got it's just something put together in a hurry independently from the (surprise!) independently evolving implementations, ten years ago. Attempts to steer browser development through forward defining new revisions of this standards have largely failed. And browser developers after spending most of the last decade interpreting CSS 2 seem to slowly settle on an interpretation of a significant subset of this standard from 1999 (or was it even earlier)?. CSS3 can now safely considered to be as dead as a doornail with browser developers cherry picking the little bitts and pieces that are more or less finalized.
:-).
Acid2 is not about CSS compliance but about supporting the documented ambiguities in the standard correctly (many undocumented ones remain). These ambiguities include weird parser behaviour, browser quirksmode hacks for non standard pages etc. In short, it test the browsers ability to fuck up the rendering in a consistent way. Of course the biggest fuck up of them all (IE) fails the test so the test is pretty much worthless in practice. It even fails rendering incorrectly
Then there is HTML which evolved from a naive attempt to capture semantics of certain documents by Tim Berners Lee to a slightly worse specification (HTML 4.x) which isn't really good for anything it is designed to do (ranging from layout features to representing document semantics). The successors in the form of XHTML 1.x and 2.x drop the layout stuff (which sucked anyway) and tried to preserve most of the flawed semantics whilst adding new constructs and increasing complexity so much nobody really understands it. Market apathy has ensured that these xhtml standards never moved out of the lab. XHTML documents actually served up as application/xml (alledgedly the correct way to serve them up) are extremely rare although well formed versions of html 4.x are now commonly served up as xhtml 1.0 transitional (or even strict). Other than forcing the browser into a somewhat better defined way of rendering, this has little effect in terms of layout features compared to html 4.x.
Let me see what else have we got? There's crappy SVG which slowly seems to replace gifs for sclable icons on some systems and also leads a double life as a poor mans graphics exchange format. There's the hopelessly underpowered javascript language and the accompanying APIs (DOM *shudder*). There's MATHML which remains ever popular in very small niches. Most of the mentioned technologies lead a double life in the form of how they are supposed to work and how they actually work in practice. Pragmatic web developers just copy paste and adapt what works and ignore the rest. The smarter ones build up some knowledge of how things are supposed to work and where the bugs are for each implementation. All the graphics designers seem to have standardized on non standard flash. With standards nazis mainly telling them not to use flash, instead of providing an alternative, this is unlikely to change in the forseeable future.
But as said, I no longer care that much. Increasingly tools take care of generating the exotic hacks to make it all work. Handcoding something like gmail would probably drive programmers mad, which is why the nice google people embedded the difficult stuff in a nice library so they can focus on application functionality.
Jilles
http://fosterburgess.com/kimsal/?p=89
Can anyone here help with this? Yes, it's a bit offtopic, but I can't be the only one with this problem!
Thanks!
creation science book
To me opera just doesn't look right on any platform, whether Windows or Linux. It doesn't look like a standard application, at least to me. At least IE and Firefox look like they belong on Windows, and Linux (well, firefox, anyway).
Interestingly enough, there is no mention of browsers such as Konqueror, Safari, Camino, SeaMonkey... Yes, this is a relevant point, because most of the discussion focuses on attributes such as bookmarks management, style, extensions, and the like, and not on the underlying rendering engine. Camino and SeaMonkey each take different approaches to the user interface but still use the same rendering engine as Firefox. And then we have both Konqueror and Safari, good web browsers that get very little mention. I would expect at *least* slashdot to discuss this more, but none was apparent in the slashback summary. Go figure.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Why does everything have to be a "war"? Can't it be a browser competition?
Let the indoctrination to the culture of war end.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Maybe I'll grab the latest Opera and try it out this weekend, but how is it's page compatibility with the greater web out there when compared to Firefox and IE? I know it's touted as having the "most" standards support, but I tried Opera way back when and it hosed up or just plain wouldn't render correctly a number of sites I went to. Does it work on bank sites? Most popular websites? You can say it's a problem with the web designers, but if everything works on Firefox with the IETab extension, but doesn't render right on Opera, where does the problem lie?
I've been using Opera for the last few months and I have to say I really like it a lot.
One major issue about IE and Firefox that turns me off is that both Firefox and IE have seemingly an infinite memory cache (as in RAM (physical and virtual) as opposed to Disk cache, which works well in all browsers) which I cannot control or limit. Opera on the other hand lets me limit the memory cache to under 60MB. And it works pretty well; with about 40 tabs opened, for the last 3 weeks, I am only using about 200MB physical and 220 Virtual in Windows XP and it drops when I close tabs.
IE and Firefox never seem to release the memory used, and I've seen Firefox use up to 800MB of virtual memory, with the same number of tabs.
Opera 9 is just a better browser for me. It's highly customizable, the zoom feature is sweet, the tab preview is nice, it renders most pages well, it supports major plugins like Flash and Quicktime, and it's fast too! Firefox has a slight stall when opening pages, and takes a long time to open when I restore a tabbed out session. IE 6 is well... IE6. Only useful for when I need to use ActiveX websites.
Opera 9 makes it easy to change things like user agent for websites that complain about non IE (or the occasional non-IE or non-Firefox websites) by pressing f12.
To address the thread-starter's comment in this /. thread, Opera isn't being ignored by just people in discussions like this. It's ignored by users as well; Opera is remarkably unpopular.
I'll offer some reasons why I ignore Opera:
Digital Citizen
For the very simple reason of average users. I'm not saying average user is too stupid to use bit torrent clients, but it's too bothersome. Torrent downloads are becoming more and more used over the web as means of downloading, so it is only natural that browsers would integrate this feature. Why burden normal users with need to get extra software for torrents, when the browser itself could already handle it?
Considering Opera's market share, the feature is not that revolutionary, but it's the first step. Next I would like to see both FF and IE to integrate torrent downloading capability to their browsers. Wouldn't hurt with the general attitudes against P2P either.
...because it has been, until recently, a niche browser.
The backslash complains that the comments on TFA mainly degenerated into FireFox vs IE regardless of the fact that TFA included Opera as well. This is because Opera's still working to extricate itself from the tiny niche it crammed itself into for the first part of its life.
1) Opera is not the standard browser for any major distribution of a popular desktop OS, including GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, and Windows. This means users have to specifically search it out and install it.
2) Opera, until relatively recently, was adware. You had to either purchase it or browse with an ad bar. This basically killed any chance of it getting heavy use on corporate workstations, as well as alienating the majority of people who were using Free OSs and/or would consider using an alternative browser.
3) Opera is not Free Software. This tends to make it less attractive than Free browsers such as FireFox and Konqueror to users of Free OSs. This has also been a major factor in preventing Opera from being the standard browser for any major distribution of a Free OS.
Opera has rectified #2. It will probably need to rectify at least one of #1 and #3 in order to gain more market share outside its current niche.
NTLM is not a standard, its a microsoft proprietary protocol. And anyone stupid enough to use ISA server is also stupid enough to use IE, it doesn't matter. Having kerb support is far more important.
You kids and your fancy Telnet clients.
In my day, we had to carry the bits by hand to the server and back (betcha didn't know that's where the term 'carry bit' originally came from, didja??), uphill, BOTH WAYS, in 10 feet of snow! And we LIKED it! Packet loss meant you'd been trampled by a horse.
I hate that stupid grey.
http://images6.theimagehosting.com/desk2.png
I mean, you can already gets lots of free FTP clients, why put it into a browser? Who wants to deal with the convenience of just clicking on a link regardless of the download protocol and have it just work?
I don't use Opera for the following reasons:
1. I am lazy when it comes to browsers.
2. Up until last year, Opera had the attached stigma of being a "for pay" or "advertising-supported" browser. For years, it also lacked solid features supported by many mainstream browsers, (like javascript). Only now is it feature-complete AND free.
So, let's address the lazy part (my background):
First browser: Netscape 3.
Used until: Communicator 4.7
Reason for switch: was tired of putting up with increased crashes, which had been bugging me since Communicator 4.
Finally gave in and tried IE 5.0, which was faster and hardly crashed at all.
Second browser: IE 5
Used until: IE 6
Reason for switch: reduced stability over IE 5, increased pop-ups and pop-unders, more security holes every day, random site redirects bugging me to install spyware without my asking.
Finally gave in and tried Phoenix just for the pop-up blocking and improved stability and security. Got hooked on the tabbed-browsing and extensions.
Third browser: Phoenix 0.6
Used until: present day (Firefox 1.5)
Reason to consider switching: not much. 1.5 isn't as stable as 1.0, but it's not bad enough yet to consider a switch.
See my point yet? Most people are stuck in their ways - a favorite browser is like a favorite chair or pen: when it's really good, it's REALLY good. When it starts to suck, you make due until it really starts to bug you.
Let's now come back to reason #2:
Opera has just been badly marketed, so lazy people havn't considered it.
Opera made a bad move charging money for their browser because it meant I never seriously considered it as an option. I couldn't stand the idea of having an ad-supported browser, so I threw it out of consideration. Same goes for many people I know.
Then Opera missed the boat last year: they only made their software free AFTER the big Firefox advertising campaign. This was very stupid, because with the limelight on Firefox, nobody cared. If it had been announced before or polssibly a few months after the big Firefox hodown, it would have made a bigger splash.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Firefox is based on GTK and so it fits right in with Gnome, except for a minor problem with the scrollbars (the up and down tabs are always squared off). Opera won't fit in on my gnome destop at all. So on linux, Opera does fit KDE better than Firefox is, and for gnome the reverse is true. Firefox actually uses my Gnome theme to draw the widgets (or emulates them very well).
h ots/bittorrent.jpg
And on windows you get things like this:
http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screens
Sorry, but that is not a native-looking windows XP app. It looks like the crappy consumer Symantec Antirvirus UI. It reminds me of the first Mozilla versions with their owner-drawn controls that weren't themed native at all.
What are you talking about? If you change the setting in Firefox printing preview you can easily see that it does in fact scale the content and not just widen the margins. You might come up with other issues that Firefox has in printing pages but this is not one of them. The fact is all browsers suck at printing webpages. The reason? Most make the assumption that you do not want to waste ink and by default turn off background graphics and some formatting. The other reason is that most users screens are wider then plain white paper (8 1/2 X 11) is.
Most importantly the main theme of your argument revolves around the fact that the webpage you tries to print from uses frames. Ever try that from IE? I just did and one page that fit on my screen without scrolling printed at 5 seperate pages and it didn't even show that way in the preview. The point is that browser suck and frames and really web developers should not be using frames. Frames suck and they confuse all modern browsers.
I use all three browsers on occasion, with Firefox being my favorite.
Sure, the interface and speed of Opera are great. And the plugins and widgets are neat. But Firefox has EVERY extension I could possibly want, and I really see no need to switch. This is the single reason I stick with firefox. My system has 512 MB of RAM, which isn't all that much these days, but I can run Firefox along with several other programs and my computer flies. So memory usage isn't a dealbreaker either.
To each his/her own, I guess.
No, it's based on XUL. This is why it doesn't look like anything else and that's why it is so goddamn difficult to make it look okay: you have to program your own skins, unlike Opera, where it's done with .ini files and PNG images like people are used to since the age of Winamp.
Shift+F12 -> Appearance -> Skin -> Native. If you want then also a GNOME icon set: http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info /?id=3465
Sorry, but that is not a native-looking windows XP app.Switch it off. Good so?
http://noz.hp.infoseek.co.jp/diary/20051122OperaSk in002.png
http://images.google.com/images?q=opera+native+ski n
So install themes, for goodness' sake. Here you go: GNOME based themes, and KDE themes.
Firefox wins! Game over! Seriously, is there a point to using any other browser, for me or the 100 people I help admin on a daily basis? Firefox is awesome. It's stable, fast, has a small footprint and renders just about everything correctly. What rare sites don't render properly (mtv.com, others), I advise people not to browse, as they may not be safe, since they are clearly not w3c compliant.
Just stop being a fatuous minority opera users, and stop being lazy and uninformed, IE users. I gladly welcome our new dinosaur overlords.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I have three browsers available in my knoppix remaster.
/ramdisk files and directories, to give some room there. Doing "df" gives 624 /ramdisk before any applications or browsers are started, and I seem to have reached a point where I cannot go any lower. With Firefox 1.5.0.4 up and running a while, "df" gives 4824 /ramdisk or 3% on a 256 MB box. The initial figure of 624 is way down into 1% on that 256 MB RAM box.
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4, preconfigured with 8 RSS feeds.
Flock 0.7.1, no RSS feeds.
Opera 9.01, 13 RSS feeds.
Opera boots the fastest, but once the RSS feeds get active, right away, older computers need a minute or two to get them downloaded on dialup, before the browser is responsive again. Best way to do it is to click on a link right away, and let the whole mess download, RSS feeds (with small pictures) and the web page. Also, E-Trade won't work in Opera 9.01, you cannot log in. Otherwise it's great, and works very well on an older machine with only 128 MB RAM, with 64K cache Pentium II or AMD processor.
Mozilla Firefox is great, just takes a little longer to boot up.
Tried the Beta of 2.0, it had very tiny fonts in the toolbars, etc. that I could not fix.
Don't have those in 1.5.0.4, so cannot figure out where that problem comes from.
The RSS feeds load up very fast, and since they do not have the complete summaries and small picture that Opera has, only story titles, you get your RSS feeds up and running quickly, even on dial-up.
Flock is very nice also, I don't put RSS feeds in it, so it is less complicated to use.
I have all three running under control scripts, that only load the browser's home directory files when the user starts the browser, and then deletes the ~/.flock, ~/.opera when the browser is closed. Firefox is excepted, to allow saving that configuration.
I hesitated quite a bit upgrading Opera 8.54 to Opera 9.01, since it is slow on flash games, and has an expanded RSS feed setup that can slow the browser down initially on older computers. Didn't know about the E-Trade site being defective until Opera 9.01 was "in there".
Just my luck that Firefox 2.0 won't be acceptable because of the tiny toolbar fonts.
As far as memory used, I do cut back considerably on the default
--Rapidweather
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
I'm browsing now via elinks, which is my default. If I need graphics I use Dillo and if I need JS, Java, or (gag) Flash I fire up Opera. I don't really see the benefit of always using a "full-featured" browser when the primary result is singing, dancing, blinking ads every-flippin'-where I look. But apparently I'm rare; good ol' text is still my preferred method of acquiring information...
Caveat Utilitor
That's good. I might try Opera again now that I know I can turn the native lnf on. Now the question remains, why didn't they do the native skin in the first place.
I use Linux. That narrows it down right away. However, IE6 works very well for me with wine. I keep the latest version of Opera installed. So, how is it an easy decision for me? Well, for one thing, only one of the three browsers in question is open source. But that's really a separate topic. To use the article that inspired the conversation as an example, here is how it is displayed by Opera 9:
The article displays properly in Firefox.
Now, I'm sure someone can finish a sentence that starts with "That happens because ...". You might even tell me that it's a problem that happened on the server. Does it matter?
Must people tweak their browser to view all Web pages properly? Must developers test in IE, Opera, and Firefox? Poor compliance with standards is one problem. But I think I read somewhere that Opera was the first to pass the Acid2 test. Problems at the W3C are another problem. Microsoft's slowly-loosening strangle-hold on the browser market is another problem.
These are the problems I can identify, but I'm sorry that I can't offer solutions. So, I comment in hopes that someone with possible solutions will read it.
-- Ghodmode
Congratulations to whoever renamed Slashback; the new term makes much more sense, as it can invoke a similar, appropriate word. It is also confusing for those that vaguely recall what to type a few years ago. Even better!
Plus, what goodies can the millionth Slashdot username expect, a free T-shirt? I seem to recall that the millionth post said something appropriate for a lot of the people here.
I've succeeded in getting only one friend of mine to use Opera, and thats because I fixed his computer and told him that from now on, he was going to "use a grown-up browser". I remember using Firefox on another friend's computer. I thought to myself, "Wow, this looks and feels just like Internet Explorer, but with a download manager and some room for extensions. Meh, I'll stick with Opera." I'm starting to be able to back up my incredible smugness. And as for people complaining about earlier versions which had ads, they took up very little space, were easily ignored, and could be configure to display generic rather than targeted ads. And when it was set to that, it pretty much just advertised Opera.
"hey, look at this Brian...I can open up multiple pages in one window. It's called tabs."
"Wow, I've been doing that for years...Microsoft is trying to catch up to all the other browsers."
"well screw you."
I can guarentee I will have that conversation at least 3 times in the next 12 months.
Seriously. They corrected box model miscalculations dating back to IE 5.5 and added support for + and > operators. And then they added PNG support.
There are no CSS properties supported in IE7 beta 2/3 which were not supported in prior versions. I ran them through the entire CSS2 test suite.
That's it. No corrections to mistakes like text-align:center aligning block elements instead of their child inline elements, and ZERO behavior change between DOCTYPEs. Still absolutely no recognition for the XHTML MIMEtype.
90% of what went into making IE7 was adding widgets, security features and reordering the interface. As far as standards support goes, it would be generous to call it IE 6.5.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Hi, Well, i am a big fun of firefox but i always had a problem with firefox memory consumption... until stumbled upon this http://pc-tunning.blogspot.com/ ...its sure worth to check out!
For me the browser that will win is whichever secure, tabbed browser that adds in an audio toggle. I want to be able to cut off all access to audio devices from the web browser, but still be able to get music from my audio player. I want an end to background music on websites, an end to having to figure out which of the 15 tabs I loaded in the background started playing music when it finished loading, so I can kill that one. I want an end to web annoyances, and that's my biggest one right now. I'm not bothered by blink tags anymore, animated gifs are no more, pop ups are almost gone, and now this remains as my biggest peev about a web browser.
This is NOT TRUE. You would know if you had looked at the test description even once, but no, you're just parroting lies you've heard somewhere.
XHTML 1 is not really very complex. Don't assume that you are the pinnacle of human intelligence, and that if you have trouble understanding something then it must be inherently "too complex".
Yeah, you're pretty much talking out of your ass. Javascript is actually a rather powerful and expressive language, but you need to be a programmer to appreciate programming languages (duh). Do you know what a closure is? Yeah, thought so.
Whether it's fair or not I leave as an exercise for the reader, but I think the reason Opera doesn't get the attention or respect of Firefox is that it's closed source, pure and simple. After all, how many years did people put up with early versions of Linux simply because it was open source, rather than using more polished but closed tools?
I like Opera, and I hope they succeed, but I will never want to rely on them because in the end they are closed source, and if their company should die Opera would die with them. That's why people support open and inferior over closed and superior - the open software can be improved upon, and won't go away. There are cases (CAD is one, at least so far) where the difficulty of writing the software is such only a commerical model has produced reasonable tools, but Firefox and Konqueror are proof that web browsers are not in that category. So source code ultimately matters, and there Opera looses.
Now if we look at Opera vs. IE, there I would agree I don't understand support for IE.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If Honda had been giving away Accords for years (beside actually letting you open it up and replace it engine), humm, yes.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Why does it always seem that FireFox will come out with the same features as Opera has had for years, and then make it acceptable to /. with an OSS bow and say "look what we can do now"?
I love Firefox, but don't pretend it's any more innovative than IE.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
This will probably be the most insightful comment a slashback will ever generate.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Browser war is hell.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
I just call up my ISP and scream noises in the phone. I have almost perfected it at 1200 baud.
With all due respect to Firefox, it's not like they pioneered the touted features in their browser. The credit goes elsewhere.
I'm a web developer, now i freely admit i'm probably not a great one, just an ASP hacker who's lucky enough to get paid for it but i just spent two working days making the HTML + CSS layout for a new client site work for about 8 browsers, over two pcs and a mac. god knows what will happen if i dare to boot the linux box and check it out in knoqueror. Does my employer get to send the w3c/ie development team a bill for the salary he had to pay me for those two days? No i guess not.
Think about it like taking a photo with your digital camera and then having to edit the jpg in a hex editor because different graphics programs on different platforms corrupt the photo in different ways depending on byte offsets, color space settings and comments in the text lump. Doesn't the very thought of that make your mind boggle? There is NO REASON that browsers cant do things the same, and cant be forced to. All it takes is some authority to hold the trademarks (or whatnot) on the technology that is HTML+CSS and refuse to allow any browser by any vendor claim to support them without 100% standards compliance. Quirks Mode was a mistake, and should never have happened, the only way to solve this problem is to either start over with something entirely new (and give it buzzwords so that corporate management wants to impliment it so they sound technologically advanced) or spawn a dictatorship to force compliance. Letting people stick "w3c" buttons at the bottom of their pages clearly doesn't help.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
This will work: http://userstyles.org/style/show/414
I'm like you when it comes to using the minimal browser for the given task. That's mostly because I'm still on dial-up, so I don't want extra fluff that isn't necessary. On Linux, my browser preferences are roughly the same: Elinks / Links2 (text) -> Dillo -> Links2 (graphical) -> Opera or Mozilla. On Windoze, it's Lynx / Links -> OffByOne (tabbed browsing!) -> Netscape Communicator (who needs iframes?) :) -> Opera / Firefox.