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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.
Finally I can browse the internets on the Mac, it was the one thing missing from that experience...
I find it interesting that they checked out 4 for the Mac and only 2 for the PC. Isn't there at least one other PC browser they could have looked at? Maybe not, I'm unsure. Interesting read either way.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
opera
ie
mozilla (firefox/ netscape)
webkit (safarit/ chrome)
am i missing any (competitive, comprehensive) engines?
aren't all of the browsers here variations on these engines?
maxthon, for example, is ie based i believe
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
And no love for the nice Seamonkey...
Maybe a better approach is to take the engines they use (ie/webkit/gecko/opera/khtml) and show what makes different from the best known browser using them.
The interface gives bells and whistles mainly, but the engine in the end is what makes a site you need work or not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Needs a catchier, web 3.0 name. Line seamon-k.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
Wasn't maxthon also discredited because it had spyware in it? Or has that been addressed? It was linked to t35.com which is a known purveyor of spyware.
Incidentally, the maxthon wikipedia entry -- like so many wikipedia entries for products -- is just a PR piece, clearly written by someone with marketing links to the browser. After all, if wikipedia entries also come within the first 10 results on Google, then making sure your message is in the wikipedia entry is the best and easiest form of SEO there is.
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)
Please don't use the term "CSMatt" when you mean to say "pedant".
recently i was tasked with upgrading a bit of inhouse web 2.0 data entry software, and i had to add spellcheck, which of course is extremely easy: just use firefox. which floored longtime msie users
but then, upon further research, i found out about dynamic textarea resizing, a useful little feature for lots of data entry, while using chrome. you just click and drag the corner of the textarea to make it bigger (or smaller). very nifty
and upon even more research, i found out safari supports both dynamic resizing and spellchecking, AND a grammar checking feature (underlines green, as well as red for misspelt words like in firefox)
all of the mac users in my office were all smiles when i proposed we switch to safari company wide
so, for data entry with lots of textareas on the webpage, i summarize the following for you:
firefox: spellchecking
chrome: dynamic resize
safari: spellchecking, dynamic resize AND grammar checking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.