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browsers galoreI switched to Mozilla in August last year and never looked back. (Although--rarely-- I have to see IE to look at some site that doesn't behave properly in Mozilla). Between the tabbed browsing and the ability to control what JavaScript does in your machine, using Mozilla is a no-brainer. It is just better. I've recently tried out Opera 7.x and Mozilla Firebird as well. Opera is very good, but there are a few things that are a problem. For one, its management of tabs feels a bit strange (at least to me, being used to the Mozilla way) but more importantly it has serious issues when doing scaling on an HTML page (changing the text size I mean). Both Mozilla and Firebird work perfectly for that, but Opera seems to keep the some of the original CSS settings and the letters overlap each other, making the text unreadable and the feature unusable. Too bad. Firebird, on the other hand, is great. It's what I'm using right now, it seems stable and lighter than mozilla, with a less-cluttered interface (although we'll see how long that lasts). And it's fast! XUL is very good apparently. Firebird seems like a good candidate to replace Mozilla at the moment. I've also tried out IE on the Mac (nice, but a resource hog) and Safari, which I like quite a lot. Very simple and fast. The Mac I have is not fast enough to do work on it (except finish clevercactus builds--and believe me, I've tried). Not enough memory or speed. But Safari would probably be my choice if I was using the Mac all the time (maybe I'll give Firebird on the Mac a try later, even though Mac support for Firebird is preliminary). Since IE won "the browser wars" there has been zero innovation, particularly in IE (for example, how come IE doesn't have tabs yet?). But that's too be expected I guess. It's great to see that things are still happening (and getting better) in the browser-world, even if it's at the edges. Categories: technologyPosted by diego on May 21 2003 at 2:49 PM Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).
You probably want to try Camino (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/) (formerly known as Chimera) on the Mac. It seems to hold the niche Firebird does on Windows. Posted by: Matthew Walker at May 21, 2003 4:10 PMI've been forced to use opera under linux for the last couple of weeks due to the fact that a) the company I just joined is big and slow when it comes to upgrading ram and b) redhat 9 + gnome on a machine with 128 mb ram is *not* a good mix. That said Opera has some nifty features. The fac that it scales the entire page, including images, it pretty cool. I have noticed some strangeness in the text overlapping, but that hasn't been that much of an issue. The font display on it sucks though (probably my setup though). Integrated mail in v7 was nifty as well, especially on a low memory machine that doesn't handle evolution/moz-mail well :) Firebird is pretty cool, but I want to give it a couple more version bumps to calm down. I've seen some strange things, like losing favicons and minor things like that, but overall it's fast and clean. I still miss a couple of the features of galeon though. I also just spent a couple of days using a borrowed powerbook g4-400, and I used mostly safari. Other than only realizing that the reason it didn't have tabs was it was a very old (build 60 or something) version that wasn't updated properly when I thought it was, it was a pretty good browser, but was still missing a couple of things I liked from mozilla/galeon/opera/etc. There were some strange things with the keymappings, some of the standard GNU/Readline CTRL+[key] mappings worked, others didn't, but I'm going to blame that on the apple "we have 18 different modifier keys" philosophy :) Posted by: Arcterex at May 21, 2003 7:58 PMAbout tab support in Opera, we can be sure it's different than Mozilla's. I've been a happy Opera user for almost a year, but always download every important release of Mozilla, just for curiosity. Every time I try it, it always happens the same: " its management of tabs feels a bit strange" ;) As you, I can't get used to the other way. But it's sad, because I really like mozilla's rendering. About IE's lack of improvement in years, sometimes I wonder if MS still has a team dedicated to that particular product. They should be ashamed of being number one :) In regards to Firebird seeming like a good candidate to replace Mozilla, it's probably worth noting that Firebird *is* going to replace Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html Copyright © Diego Doval 2002-2007.
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