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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...
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think part of it is that building browsers on Trident has fallen out of favor. There used to be quite a few such browsers out there, but most of them have disappeared. Probably because they are unable to compete against the IE == The Internet mentality. Mac users seem to have less of that Safari == The Internet association, so they're more open to alternative browsers.
Personally, I'm not really sure this article adds much. You still have four major browser engines: Trident (IE/Microsoft), Gecko (Mozilla), Webkit (Apple), and Presto (Opera). Nearly all web browsers are based on one of those four engines. Which limits the choice based of better web experience to primarily the user interface. Since the major browser makers are already tussling over the best interface to wrap around their engine, there's not much to differentiate the third party browsers.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Trident based third-party stuff really caught a triple blow: Over time, Trident has become less of an asset, since its performance has been mediocre for quite some time and the number of IE only websites has fallen fairly sharply. At the same time, though, the relative quality of IE has improved somewhat. Things like tabs and something resembling a popup blocker are no longer exotic features. Third, of course, is the existence of good and fairly well known non-trident browsers on Windows.
I don't expect non-IE uses of Trident to disappear, since MS makes it fairly easy to embed in programs that could use some basic HTML-fu(though I was interested to see that Adobe's help program is now based on bits of Opera, presumably so they can reuse more of it on the mac side); but the case for the longterm survival of non-IE trident browsers is pitiful. IE is the default, and has a bunch of useful features for corporate type environments, so it gets all the corporate and clueless users; and how many of the people who actually comparison shop for browsers like Trident?(particularly with the existence of IEtab for FF)
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.
No offense, but if you are going to talk about the top three, and only three, browsers, it would have to be Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Explorer is bundled with Windows, Safari with Mac and iPhone, Firefox with many Linux distros. Who was bundling Opera with anything? Embedded devices, some mobile phones... all of which were overshadowed by Mobile Safari.
You might be disappointed, but you shouldn't be surprised.
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".
About $500
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.