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Opera Dominates CNET Survey of "Underdog" Web Browsers
An anonymous reader writes "Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against 'underdog Web browsers' Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests."
Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond.
I looked at that like a year ago, and it looked as if it hadn't been updated in years then. Are they back to work on it? It was quick, but it was also very crashy when I tested it out. Now that KDE4 is in Ports, Konqueror works nice and fast on OSX also, however it crashes way too often too.
...checks site... Yeah, looks like Shiira has seen some activity since February of this year. Prior to that the previous news item on their site was Jan '08, and before that, July '07. Could be nice.
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The Acid3 test sort of bugs me. Yes, it's nice that browsers are fast, but even the most complex pages have lower kilobyte counts than most internet connections allow for, which means servers are the lag points, not your browser. I'd love to see a usability test sometime, rather than a flat-out speed rating. Webkit's neat, but with so many people using their browsers as a primary operating base - and we see proof of this approach in Google's development of the Chrome OS - usability is being sorely ignored in many technological benchmarks. I can't tell you how annoying it is to have Firebox' Live Bookmarks fail to load every ten minutes, it breaks the RSS experience. And while IE has its flaws and benefits, it's emulated, not inovating and old hat. Chrome is nice, I like how my computer treats it, but it's still in the works. Who's going to decide to pick up a new browser based on a speed test? Yes, CNet included some key features and noticed bugs, but Shiira and Arora both get termed works-in-progress, which does not make them underdogs now, it makes them next year's underdogs. And by the time they're ready for mass adoption, all of their good points will likely have been emulated as thoroughly as anyone cares for. Acid3 is like telling people your browser has 700 horse power, instead of the 300 horsepower their browsers have. No one cares if you top out at 200mph, the speed limit's still 60, folks.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
5 browsers than render Slashdot with just as much broken CSS as every other browser! Download today and see what you can('t) see!
Netsurf is a little known, low resource browser that's worth watching. It started life as a RISC OS (Acorn) browser but it's now cross platform. The show stopper is that it doesn't yet support javascript, but they're working on it.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
but I guess my browser wasn't that fast!
Personally, I hope Opera doesn't gain any further market share, because it is not open source. It is becoming less and less relevant.
Woulda been nice to add the reasons these browsers exist - e.g. Arora was created specifically as a test wrapper for the Qt WebKit component. In fact, right now I'm compiling the current git of Qt so I can compile the current git of Arora because Ubuntu 9.04 only includes Arora 0.5, which is rather old and rickety ...
Camino exists because AOL made an abortive move to make a lightweight Mac Gecko browser and it's still around from that. K-Meleon exists because there was no lightweight Gecko browser at the time, i.e. it's before the mozilla/browser internal fork that became Firefox.
So what's the story behind Shiira?
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Sadly, it's riddled with bugs. The current full release wouldn't run on our Mac, and although the latest developmental build would, it suffered frequent crashes, making it hard to recommend.
I think that qualifies as a showstopper. It is, after all, a browser for a computer touted as "it just works".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It has a few interesting features, like being able to have the browser refresh a page every x seconds instead of having to code that in. Useful for the web-based admin panel that lets users request 3 hours of internet time at the coffee shop. We use it with Google Docs and Gmail as well as Pandora. Seems to use less memory than FireFox and it's not IE. It also seems to be stable enough to last days before having to be restarted. It even has a bittorrent client built in.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Do I get a Firefox prize in the mail if they hit 72%?
This is the nerd equivalent of celebrity gossip.
I'm not sure if a browser like Opera, which is available on many many [many many] platforms - from set-top boxes to game consoles to mobile phones to actual PCs - can responsibly be called an underdog browser by anyone - regardless of the opinion of the submitter. And it runs pretty well on all those platforms too. The only thing I've seen Firefox, Chrome or IE run decently on is a PC (Fennic? Mobile IE? Surely you jest!). (Disclaimer: I never use Opera on my PC's, but I do use it on all my mobiles)
None of this speed thing matters to anyone but this small enthusiast crowd who actually care about a few nanoseconds of difference. I mean, seriously, have you ever switched to a browser because of it's javascript performance before... y'know, Chrome?
But, in my opinion, if you switched to Chrome, your reasons probably included that Google was backing it, and therefore it stood a chance in a "market" (I use this term as loosely as possible) dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox? Oh, and Safari if you just HAPPEN to use a Mac.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
internet skelator operasucks browsersonplanets tech software story
Wait, what? Also
in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc.
When I aim loosely, I usually miss.
It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC platform even though it's probably the best browser available. But still, compared to all the other browsers mentioned, it has a huge lead in market share and use, I think it's like the 4th or 5th most popular browser on the Internet.
It's good to see Arora getting some more attention now. I've been using it now for more than half a year and I must say it's the first webbrowser I have actually liked in several. I would definetly consider it the best OSS webbrowser on linux right now, particularly if you're running KDE (although Arora is desktop agnostic, it is Qt). I've been fed up with Firefox's bloat (ever try comparing Firefox and Seamonkey these days? Guess which is heavier...) for some time and Arora is a nice change from that.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
This is a good survey to show what kind of people care to take CNET surveys.
Opera's desktop has almost 4% market share and is bigger than both Chrome and Safari. Check the latest numbers at www.statcounter.com. Even Net Applications, which is more skewed towards US and western Europe, show Opera's global market share at 2%. CNET's visitors does obviously not represent the Internet population so it's a bit weird to compare Opera, the world's 3rd biggest browser, to small unknown providers.
Besided this, Opera's mobile browser is the biggest in the world, still bigger than iphone. Worth mentioning is Opera as the only browser available on Nintendo Wii or DSi.
And Opera has no equals in this regard (yeah, it's not that much visible on pimped-up latest PC, or if not opening more than few tabs...but this is /., we don't deal with normal usage patterns here)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Opera, Firefox, Safari/Chrome ... these are the underdog browsers. Everything else is irrelevant, sorry if your random fork of something else browser isn't a major browser, but if you're a fork or use the rendering engine of one of the 4 main browsers then you are irrelevant at this point.
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You should all run Amaya, the OFFICIAL W3C browser. By definition, this is the only 100% compliant browser
As with any set of statistics, it depends on where, when, and how the measurements are taken. Visit this page, and play with the various settings to see how well Opera does in different countries. It seems that anyone who uses eastern European languages prefers Opera.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-RU-daily-20080701-20090808
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Opera grew beyond whatever you could imagine in just last past 2-3 years. Opera says they support web standards and they actually do, even in cost of market share. Their development model is nobody's business. As far as I have experienced as a user since 3.62, it works.
Perhaps, one day, they may decide to follow Apple's model but I don't see a reason for it. Just 1 question: Where is Firefox for Symbian S60? If you check the reason and the fact that Opera has a S60 application since first S60 Device (NOK 7650), you can understand why they don't want anyone inside code -yet-. What if they open the source and decline 99% of impossible to scale, unprofessional code? Wouldn't they be flamed even more?
What is wrong with Kmeleon? The "little lizard" as my customers call it is GREAT for older hardware, and if you use the new CCF ME build it comes with ABP built in, and even can be run straight from a thumbstick without modding!
So I don't know what your problem with the lizard is, but I have found both the stock and CCF ME builds to be faster than FF3, especially running on older hardware, easy to run on OSes as old as Win95(there is even a quick tutorial on the Kmeleon site and links to the two files you need to add), it isn't flashy or bling bling, but that to me is a virtue. If you need a super fast browser with ABP support, you can't go wrong with Kmeleon CCF ME.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Firefox, Safari, IE, etc
I consider Safari an underdog one too. And there's no "etc"
There are things I dislike, though:
That's a load of crap.
After I told you how idiotic it is to use the hosts file for "blocking" you come back and tell me how to use it to "speed up" DNS? Are you living in the 60s or what?
Also, you don't resolve URLs. Go read up what a URL actually is.
Please, never reply to one of my posts again with your junk advice.
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Is it? How so?? HOSTS files do not use up CPU, or other forms of I/O, or even RAM, like DNS programs do locally...
Yeah, but noone argued that. The point is the sheer stupidity of abandoning the usefulness of DNS for a locally held hosts file. You even stir some totally uncalled-for phobia by referencing DNS poisoning or compromised DNS servers to make your "point".
But of course, if I were also too stupid to setup a local resolver, then I would come up with such crude ideas as well. Each according to his abilities I guess.
Just try to think about what happens when a server is using CNAMEs pointing to host names with multiple addresses for load-balancing reasons or changes addresses, how you are going to track that manually and how much time you waste doing that instead of spending _milliseconds_ to do it the right way.
I'm not even mentioning the time you spend defending this ridiculous ideas of yours and the lifetime you lose by boiling your blood because you are too stubborn to acknowledge your lack of technical understanding.
And regarding URLs, this is one: http://www.slashdot.org/
This is not one: www.slashdot.org, this is a host name. URLs contain host names. DNS is used to resolve host names, not URLs. I hope those details don't confuse you too much.
If you're replying, please keep it to personal attacks. Those are funny. You faking know-how, not so much.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6