Topic awaiting preservation: What's your favourite browser? (Page 1 of 1)

After finding that I was one of the few people left in the world still on IE6, which no self-respecting geek would have, I changed today to Firefox. This is a decision I now regret making.
Sure, the tabbing system works well, but other than that it's horrible. It's ugly, barely customisable, has renamed "Favourites" to "Bookmarks" (which is harder to get used than I thought) and is incompatible with so many sites.
Fortunately I didn't uninstall IE, so I can go back to that. But I would like another browser, you know, one that is actually better than IE. Which brings me nicely to my question, What is your favourite browser? And why? Thank you.

firefox....

Mozilla. Customizable, integrated email and IRC, loads quickly and runs great.

Opera would be my favorite, save for two problems: I don't like the interface and I don't like the ads. However, on the upside, it's really *really* fast and renders things pretty well.

I am also a fan of Safari (it's come quite far in a short time), but good luck getting that to run on Windows.

BTW - What sites is FF incompatible with? I have yet to find a site that doesn't render properly in FF (except those that make use of MSIE-only features, which shouldn't be used anyway). Besides, if you only tried Firefox for less than a day, I strongly suggest you stick with it for, say, a week, and see how you feel about it then. If you still don't like it, great, but basing a judgement on just a few hours with something is generally a bad idea.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

(Edited by Iron Wallaby on 10-28-2004 19:27)

Firefox!!

Do you have the Premere Edition 1.0?

I love my Firefox! With the downloadable extentions, and all the other nice things WITHOUT the huge security holes of IE...woooohoooo!

Nice pop-up blocker, with options to let which internet site install graphics, and very nice custom options to make my Firefox personally mine!

Sorry to hear that you don't like it.

Oh my.... This is going to be an interesting thread,

Firstly I think you'll find it's the sites that aren't compatible with Firefox, not the otherway round, and that's simply because they haven't been written correctly according to the W3C standards.

It is customizable you can add your own extensions (functionality) and theme it how you like, can you do either of that with IE? no...

Sure you can use myIE or any of the other IE shells that are out there, but that's not IE really is it.

Still I wouldn't say that Firefox beats every browser hands down, it's certainly got issues with it's javascript rendering amongst other things, but it's MY favourite.

Cheers,

Blaise.

FireFox.

AlterEgo: you should probably give Opera a try. Too bad that, like Iron Wallaby said, the interface is more complicated than it should be. One other hand I think you should try a bit longer with FF. It is really customisable, and if you find it ugly you can use another theme. Personnaly I use the Charamel theme by Alex W. in both FireFox and ThunderBird.

Hey, 5 replies in less than 15 minutes...not often that happens...
Yes, maybe I should try FF a little longer. No, the sites are incompatible with it, but still, they work with IE6 (or IE6 works with them) and not FF. Whoever is to blame, those are the facts. Often these sites are just ones I drop by once because Google found it for something I wanted briefly, and not ones I visit frequently, but it could still be a pain.
I'm not really concerned about security - I have NAV and a firewall and probably don't even need them. Security isn't a big issue as far as I'm concerned.
I didn't know about skins and themes for FF and might try them. Like some of you suggested, I'll stick it out a little longer and see if I come to like it.

I think your statement about it being "barely customisable" shows you haven't given it enough time. Like others have mentioned, there are heaps of extension that let you customize and add extra functionality and native support for skins/themes which leaves IE for dead. On top of that, you can re-arrnge, add, remove and edit any of the menu items, including the address bar, to suit your needs.

I currently use the default theme because it's simple. I have my bookmark toolbar up top right along side the "file edit view" menu, as it takes up less space there. Oh and "bookmarks" is the traditional term for ie's "favorites". Ever seen a website say "don't forget to bookmark this page!" ? Makes perfect sence to me, page -> bookmark... it's been a common term with browsers for ages. I think even ye old mosaic browser used the term "bookmarks".

I also find it easier to research with firefox. The tabbed browsing and middle-click-open-in-new-tab is simply something I can't live without now. It makes IE seem so dated (probably because it is, not having any feature updates except pop-up blocking in what, over a year now?). I love flicking through google spawning off tabs to pages that might contain the info I want. When I used to do this in IE I'd have to open a new browser window, then switch back to the google window to keep browsing the search results. Whilst I got quite good at the shift+click->alt+tab combo to switch back to the previous window quite quickly, if I opened more than 15 windows it'd usually crash and I'd have to start again. With firefox, it's not uncommon for me to have 2 or 3 browser windows with over 30 tabs open in each - you do the math.

As for Opera, I used to like it alot for some of the neat "validate source" features and the like, but with firefox and the webdev toolbar, who needs it! The way it's middle-click page scroll re-positioned the mouse was also intensly annoying. Heh... however, I quite like the default opera theme. It has an odd way of making my web pages look much nicer and cleaner.

AlterEgo: I don't know what's your primary usage of a browser, but if you're a web developer/designer, FF and its extensions are a bless. Is it necessary to mention the User Agent Switcher, Live HTTP Headers, Edit CSS, URIid, the DOM inspector, plain text URL, the built-in search engines ( that you can make point to any online documentions e.g. PHP, Dictionnary, WikiPedia, ... )

More and more Safari, at least when I'm on my mac.
I like firefox as well, but somehow I havn't made the switch in full on pc.
I'm guessing that it will come the more I'm getting used to the tabs of Safari.

For now it's mainly IE6 on win by habit, it's just... there... but the resons against it keep piling up.

Done Mozilla, to big, don't need the mail features and so on.
Done Opera, good, flexible, fast but... no...
IE Mac... barf...
IE clones, not interested...
/Dan

{cell 260} {Blog}
-{ ?Computer games don?t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we?d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.? (Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989.) }-

quote:

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AlterEgo said:

No, the sites are incompatible with it, but still, they work with IE6 (or IE6 works with them) and not FF. Whoever is to blame, those are the facts.

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I couldn't agree more, infact... that's what I said!

You see any monkey can write HTML and put up a website, but they won't necessarily do it right, the thing is IE parses the code and allows it's mistakes in, just to show something. Firefox and Opera don't allow these mistakes, or don't try and cover them up. If something doesn't look right or work right in Firefox or Opera, it's simply because some monkey wrote it (or the website is old).

monkey's are ok by me, but they shouldn't be writing websites, they should stick to Shakespear.

Alter: There's an extension you can get for FireFox that puts a "View page in IE" in your right-click menu. That way if you run across one of those offending pages you can quickly open it in IE without cutting/pasting the URL.

Here you go:

http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=35

:::11oh1:::

quote:

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Blaise said:

Firefox and Opera don't allow these mistakes, or don't try and cover them up. If
something doesn't look right or work right in Firefox or Opera, it's simply
because some monkey wrote it (or the website is old).

---

Hold on. What if I code up something that is W3C compliant and validates as such and Opera renders it beautifully but FF chokes? I have a much higher opinion of Opera at the moment than I do FF from my personal experience.

: . . DHTML Slice Puzzle : . . .

Try the new FF, Bugs! I'm using it now, and aside from a few small things (not compatible with some of my extensions, due to it being too new), it seems to be very smooth, very fast, and I haven't had any problems yet with something choking.

quote:

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Fortunately I didn't uninstall IE, so I can go back to that.

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What? Is there some way to uninstall IE that I don't know of? If so, I'd like to know about it.

-----------------------------------------------------
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Ozone Asylum KILLED my inner child.

You know AlterEgo I've been using Opera for almost 3 years now and I'm not regreting the switch from Netscape for even a second. I've used Mozilla and find it too netscape like and actually not very interesting to me although for a developer I think Mozilla would be the best choice. But lately I've installed FireFox and as everyone says its very nice I agree, FireFox is defintly a winner but if you've used Opera as long as I have and switch to FF obviously you wouldn't like the changes. Just as you didn't like the features of FF when you switched.

Give these browsers a chance and then decide which one you'd want to keep and which ones getting uninstalled! If you just want to surf nothing very developing like then I'd go for Opera because of it's speed and versatile customization also if you learn all the gestures you'll never leave your hand off the mouse!

On the other hand if you're into developing then FF would be a better option. Opera does give a lot of features for development but the various setups make the browser incredibly complicated while FF has a slim trim look and would suit this type of surfing the best.

Head on over to the browsers "Why ..." pages to find out more:
Why Download Opera?
Why Download FireFox?
Why Download Mozilla?


PS: Since you've downloaded FF you'd know its barely 5 MB in size although it also comes with barely any features. Mozilla and Opera are around 11-14 MB but jam packed! Now you decide, which one?


A little something if you become an Opera user, you get free space to upload files on a dedicated server provided by Opera and a free blog/journal, I know it's much of a bribe but you getting a good browser!



(Edited by templar654 on 10-29-2004 02:52)

If you're comfortable with Internet Explorer's security flaws and prefer it to Firefox why change? You don't have to follow the hype over FF if you don't want to.

i still use i.e. when i stumble upon cross browser issues i'm too lazy to resolve, but for me it's still firefox ...

[insert fabulous sig here]

quote:

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You don't have to follow the hype over FF if you don't want to.

---

That's a damn lie.











-----------------------------------------------------
funny websites | funny signatures | funny jokes

Ozone Asylum KILLED my inner child.

Cameron: Yes, you're right, I've adopted new themes now and will no doubt discover more features as I go along. I guess I didn't really give it long enough to make a fair decision. I've set it as my default browser now, so there you go.
Poi: I didn't understand most of what you said, but I get your point (I think)

quote:

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DmS said:

Done Opera, good, flexible, fast but... no...

---

So what's actually wrong with it? Anyway I'll consider what you said.
Blaise: ...oh. Fair enough.
Krets: Please don't call me Alter.
tntcheats: Yes. Well, you can block it so that you can't get to it by going to Start->Windows Access and Defaults on WinXP. But as far as I know you can't really uninstall it, so...no.
templar654: Thanks for all the advice, it's really useful.
Jestah: I was just seeing what I was missing (if anything).
LaSun: Yeah, I guess it'll be the same for me too.
tntcheats: True

Anyway thanks for posting everyone!

I mentionned some must have extensions. Once you tried them, you wonder how you managed to live without them so far.

• User Agent Switcher : let's you specify any User Agent string. It may sound useless at first, but it can it help go through lame browser detections, or better you can you use that as a quick way to identify yourself on your own sites
• Live HTTP Headers : shows the HTTP headers sent and received. It can be usefull to check the headers you send when you're tuning an .htaccess or a PHP script.
• Edit CSS : opens in a sidebar and let you tune the CSS of a page and see the result in live.
• URIid : put an ID based on the domain name ( replacing the dots by hyphens ) to make sure that every site you visits has an ID. You may wonder what's the use of that. Easy. That way you can use that unique ID to customize the CSS of any site via the userContent.css file in your profile. For instance, for the Asylum, I've changed the aspect of the CODE blocks, and added a little gradient and an arrow in the top left corner on :hover of the TD tags to increase the legibility of the QuickChanges page with a wide resolution. On another site, I've used the cite attribute in the markup to flag the trolls ( with a brown background and a little shit ) and highlight the moderators.
• plain text URL : let you select any plain-text URL and provide a "open selected URL" and "open selected IRL in new tab" items in the contextual menu

(Edited by poi on 10-29-2004 11:06)

Ah...I gotcha now. Thanks.

[Edit - corrected typo]

(Edited by AlterEgo on 10-29-2004 12:02)

Hey Poi, you forgot the Web Developer toolbar!!!!

It let's you outline elements, edit Css, do allsorts of things with images, resize the browser, do stuff with forms, just about everything a web developer would need and want!!

Blaise: Indeed it's really usefull. Nonetheless I prefer to use EditCSS + ImageZoomer ( which adds the "+ Zoom In Image" and "- Zoom Out Image" in the contextual menu ) + the rulers on my wallpaper + the bookmarks in toolbar to validate the markup and accessibility ... they take less space on the interface. That's just a matter of taste.

Btw I've always wondered what could be the practical uses of the form features in the Web Developper Toolbar.

Ah about taking up space on the interface (one thing I don't like about the Wed developer toolbar), you can actually remove the bar under View>Toolbars, you won't lose the functionality because you can access all the tools on the right click menu, that's how I use it

mmmm...safari.

chris


KAIROSinteractive | tangent oriented

AlterEgo
Opera? Nothing wrong, I simply don't like it very much, I think it feels a bit like firing up another desktop or a huge application just to browse. But that's just my opinion

/Dan

{cell 260} {Blog}
-{ ?Computer games don?t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we?d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.? (Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989.) }-

Poi: I've downloaded some of the stuff you said and more. I'm finding especially (sp?) Edit CSS very useful indeed.
I may be beginning to convert...

All your base are belong to Firefox.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

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