The Seven Hidden Browsers In the Windows Ballot

Barence writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft started rolling out a Windows update within the European Union, giving every Internet Explorer user the option to switch browsers. As well as the five big names, anyone who scrolls the ballot window to the right will find seven further browsers, none of which is exactly a household name. There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area. But what are these unknown browsers actually like? To find out, seven PC Pro staff installed a browser each, used it exclusively for a day, and ran a variety of tests. The browser-by-browser verdict on the hidden seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."

Comments

Lynx?

[sunderland56]

Hey! Where's Lynx?

Re:Lynx?

[icannotthinkofaname]

It's in the repositories, like everything else.

Re:Lynx?

[somersault]

Hey wait! I just noticed that the name is a pun. It only took 8 years..

Ho ho ho.

Re:Lynx?

[pla]

Hey! Where's Lynx?

Oh, look at Mr. Fancy-pants with his text all neatly positioned on the screen for him!

Real men use Wget or Curl. Bonus points for doing it all with netcat.

Re:Lynx?

[sopssa]

You kids with your fancy computers. In my days we used to serve web pages to each other with letters and postal mail!

Re:Lynx?

[Toze]

Skin! In my day we dreamed about having skin! We walked around everywhere holding our insides in with our hands. Didn't have blood, either- we hand to pump oxygen into our cells by hand, and that was no easy task, let me tell you. Gripping an oxygen atom without skin on! And web pages, hah! We had to wait for our elders to die and arrange their corpses in pictograms! Those were the days. "Corpse-lying-on-its-side-with-one-arm-outstretched, corpse-half-buried-upside-down, corpse-with-fingers-up-nose. I see the Joneses have been accessing our network again."

Re:SeaMonkey?

[Pojut]

"Hey Sea Monkeys! It's time for the 'I Hate Marco' Show!" ::high-pitched female choir:: "IIIII Hate Marco! Hate Marco! Hate Marco and his mailbox head!"

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend downloaded Firefox and installed it, then moan to me how Firefox looks and runs just like IE did and still does a bad job of rendering the web pages he looks at. I went over to investigate what he meant and the stupid fool was still double clicking the IE "E" icon on his desktop. When I asked why he was doing tjhis instead of the Firefox icon he said "But this is how I get the internet by click on the E" Doh

Re:SeaMonkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Howlin' Mad Murphy, is that you?

Re:SeaMonkey?

[Pojut]

"Hey Sparkplug, did you see the ratings? Number eight, baby!"

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You're kidding, right?

Give us credit for getting quieter when the claims that FireFox invented everything good about web browsing died down.

Re:Avant browser == front-end for IE

[thelexx]

Not to worry, we still have plenty of real facts upon which to base our hatred of MS.

Oh, I forgot, none of those count when you're whining about people bashing poor little unloved MS.

We're just whoring for karma, yeah, that's it.

I don't need /. karma to hate, hate, HATE MS. Trying to use COM objects from Java is enough.

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[clone53421]

*Whoosh* to you too.

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[shutdown -p now]

You’re kidding, right?

Of course he is. Everyone knows that Opera was the first web browser to have zealots - Firefox totally ripped that off.

Re:And thus the folly is proven

[clone53421]

Yeah, but Firefox totally did it better.