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Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers

Posted by timothy on from the hit-the-internet-button dept.

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.

12 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Re:aren't there only 4 engines? by Andr+T. · · Score: 3, Informative
    From TFA:

    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.

  2. Re:aren't there only 4 engines? by whyloginwhysubscribe · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some more:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Layout_engines

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_layout_engines

  3. Re:aren't there only 4 engines? by danhuby · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. There's a reason they were 'lost in the shuffle' by twistah · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:aren't there only 4 engines? by thermian · · Score: 3, Informative

    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. No they don't by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:No they don't by larkost · · Score: 3, Informative

      OmniWeb (my browser of choice) has been blocking adds very well for a long time (much longer than other browsers). It even allows you to set per-website preferences for that (and most other preferences). It started out just blocking certain image sizes, then expanded to off-site images, then got regular expressions. And it has held those for a while. The only issues I have are that you can't selectivly block flash images, and that it does not offer the ability to reflow the document as if there was never an image there.

      And there are a number of features that OmniWeb has ad for a while that FireFox is just getting around ot copying now: saving the windows that were open when you quit, per-site prefereences, replicating bookmaks/history/etc to a WebDAV server, etc...

  7. Re:Windows != PC by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 3, Informative

    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)

  8. Re:Mac over represented? by phillips321 · · Score: 3, 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)

  9. Re:Mac over represented? by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

  10. 100% IBM-PC Compatible by cromar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Not by stats by ThrowAwaySociety · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.