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Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers
bsk_cw writes "With the exception of Google's Chrome (which got attention because it was, after all, Google), most of the alternative browsers out there tend to get lost in the shuffle. Computerworld asked three of their writers to take some lesser-known browsers out for a spin and see how they do. They looked at six candidates: Camino (for the Mac), Maxthon (for the PC), OmniWeb (for the Mac), Opera (both the Mac and the PC versions) and Shiira (for the Mac)." It would have been more interesting if they included some popular open source, Linux-friendly browsers like Konqueror or Epiphany, as well.
At my work, I'm forced to use a SLOT-A Athlon running XP with 32mb RAM. K-Meleon allows the machine to function. All other graphical browsers bring it down to its knees.
All that is to the good, but there are some problems, mostly because Maxthon uses the same Trident rendering engine used by Internet Explorer.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Some more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Layout_engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_layout_engines
That's right, all current browsers use one of four layout engines, or derivitives thereof.
Gecko (Firefox)
Trident (Internet Explorer)
Presto (Opera)
KHTML (Konquerer, Safari via WebKit fork)
Writing a layout engine is, I expect, very difficult so I'd say starting from scratch is only for the brave.
There are other layout engines but they are generally not compliant with the latest standards, with the possible exception of this one (although it is in alpha):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tkhtml
There is more to a browser than the layout engine though.
Dan
"With the exception of Google's Chrome (which got attention because it was, after all, Google),
True, but not the only reason: it's also a damn slick piece of technology and surprisingly intuitive in its initial phase.
First of all, Opera is not a forgotten browser and has quite a big following. Maxthon outlived its usefulness as "IE with tabs" when IE7 came out. Chrome was interesting because of its threaded design (ie individual tabs can't crash the whole thing, in theory), its specially-developed V8 JavaScript engine and its focus on making web apps part of the desktop. Slapping a different GUI on Gecko/WebKit, along with a general lack of support for add-ons and other crucial pieces of the browsing experience, does not persuade a lot of people to switch to something "new." Especially when that "new" thing is just a downgraded version of what they're currently using.
hv3 uses tkhtml3, and, while it is not as complete as the big four rendering engines, it seems well ahead of the other light alternatives, in that it has Javascript and passes Acid 2, it uses little memory and is going to show up in at least one distro's repo.
I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...
Handy for Gentoo installs tho.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
Unless I've missed it there is one thing that none of them do as well as Firefox and that is block ads. The browser extensions like this are the one thing that, at least for me, puts Firefox head and shoulders above the rest.
Please don't use the term "PC" when you mean to say "Windows." It's bad enough that Apple continues to push this belief that PCs inherently run Windows in their marketing (as well as being inherently different from a hardware standpoint, something that was one true but stopped being so after 2006), but on Slashdot?
It is a commonly accepted term and frankly it's way too late to change it now. Basically all you're going to do is confuse people for the benefit of... wee... being literal to the acronymn.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
FYI - Lots of new windows mobile phones made by HTC come with opera mobile (as well as the inbuilt IE). I've just got a HTC Touch Pro and opera on it works like a dream. (sadly, not sure if it would ever compete with the misleading apple ads we've all seen lately)
Opera is available as a download for the Wii (and was free for quite a long time), as a cart for the Nintendo DS (discontinued, but still) and as a built-in app/download (not sure which) for the new Nintendo DSi.
If anything, Opera is the fourth on what should be the "top four".
We must be using different Operas here. To be more prone to troyans that IE you need at least support ActiveX, you know. And yes, I'm from Russia.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Oh bother. Look at you all. There's a good reason for calling them PCs. Of course Macs are personal computers, but for many years up until around the Windows 95 days, a lot Windows and DOS software was marketed as running on "IBM-PC and 100% compatible computers" and then just as "IBM-PC Compatible. That's where it comes from. It's simply an evolution of a marketing slogan.
Bingo. There was a deliberate marketing campaign by Microsoft, right about when Windows 3.0 was about to emerge, to push the personal-computer press to stop saying "IBM-Compatable" or "Clone" and start saying "PC" when speaking of the computers that would soon be running Windows.
It was thought at the time that IBM would soon be running a different OS than the so-called clone market, so the old labels didn't apply.
Most Apple & Commodore users (among others) thought it was the stupidest thing ever, but Microsoft managed to get it to stick.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It depends somewhat on your geographic location, but these days the breakdown is something like
IE - 70-80 %
Firefox 15-20 %
Safari - 3-7 %
Opera - 1% or less
With some others thrown in.
Opera is a fine and often innovative browser, but its share of the market is negligible. Luckily, it's standards support is good, so it works with the same pages that Firefox and Safari work on.
Being the premier browser on a gaming platform doesn't do much for market penetration.
This is true. I use lynx (and links) alot on headless servers, or when they dont have X. Otherwise,
$ lynx www.google.com
"Xorg.conf"
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
Safari is probably a few tenths of a percentage point ahead of Opera, but both of their market shares are pretty insignificant compared to the top two.
I didn't realize that 59 tenths a percentage point was "a few".
The usage share of web browsers described in this chart. Source from Net Applications[1] Internet Explorer (71.11%) Mozilla Firefox (20.06%) Safari (6.62%) Opera (0.75%)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Especially since one of the PC entries is Maxthon, which is just IE with a whole bunch of crap added to it. For those looking for alternatives in the Windows realm I would suggest Seamonkey for those who want an "all in one" complete with HTML editor, IRC client and Email client. For those looking for speed, especially with older hardware(works well on as little as 400MHz with 128Mb of RAM) or simply want a quick, no frills web browser I would suggest Kmeleon. For those who like social sites such as delicious and flickr I would recommend Flock. And finally for those that would like a tiny browser, one that takes up almost no space and can simply be dropped on a flash drive I would point out OffByOne.
Any one of these IMHO would be better choices than the ones given for Windows in this article. And Maxthon is IMHO just too dangerous due to the fact that IE is still the #1 target out there for malware writers and in XP and below IE is too easy to hit to make it a safe browser for everyday use. But if anyone here hasn't tried the above browsers, give them a go. I have used all of them at one time or another and they each have their uses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.