Browser wars revamped?

[Tranquility]

Looks like the browser wars this year and the next will be in full swing.

As you can see here, it looks like AOL is intending to revive Netscape, and basing it on the Firefox framework, and extending its capabilities.

This is aside from Fireferrit's (:P) official 1.0 version being released last week. As well as a very miniscule increase in the share market of Opera and Mac OS X Safari browser, and the Firefox version for Macs. Firefox's market share in the browser arena has been steadily increasing, and they hope to reach double digits by the end of the year, taking a chunk out of IE's user base. Serves Microsoft right for neglecting to offer meaningful upgrades to the browser for a long time.

May be the start of a new era in the browser wars which have sort of stagnated.

[ComputerTech]

My favorite browser, that I've used for 2 years now or so, is Avant Browser.

Tabbed browsing, fast and simple. Though it uses IE, I don't particularly have anything against IE. It does everything I need.

http://www.avantbrowser.com/

[Tranquility]

I don't mind IE much as a browser either, especially after it's recent improvements (for WinXP users) that improved its usability a lot, but its security flaws are a constant annoyance. I still have it on for the occasional website that doesn't work with Opera, but I hardly use it anymore because Opera has better security, and more mature features than those IE is currently trying to integrate.

[Lycus]

Steve Vamos of Microsoft claimes, after being questioned about the rise of Firefox, that the reason they don't update IE with Firefox and Opera's features is that their users don't want them. He also says that IE is just as secure as any other browser.

LINK

[Tero]

I have found Firefox and Mozilla to be quite unstable on Mac OS X. Now I use Safari and it never crashes. I wish all the best to Firefox though and I do use it on Windows PCs.

[Demigrog]

I switched to Firefox recently to finally avoid the dreaded "Your current security settings prohibit running ActiveX controls on this page" messagebox. IE's ham-handed handling of ActiveX controls is its main security flaw (particularly for non-techie users), and if you turn them off you have to put up with the annoying messageboxes.

And I love tabbed browsing-- Microsoft is missing the boat on that one.

[semi-sentient]

They just need to let Netscape die already. The last thing we need is another browser war... then we are back to square one, coding a different web page for every browser that has "special" needs. Sheeesh...

[Tero]

Steve Vamos of Microsoft claimes, after being questioned about the rise of Firefox, that the reason they don't update IE with Firefox and Opera's features is that their users don't want them.

That's an interesting statement. That might even be true, but I'm sure many IE users would love tabbed browsing, for example, if it was introduced to them.

By the way, the fact that users haven't really wanted new features hasn't stopped them from bloating their Office products into feature monsters...

[Ut]

Steve Vamos of Microsoft claimes, after being questioned about the rise of Firefox, that the reason they don't update IE with Firefox and Opera's features is that their users don't want them.

That's an interesting statement. That might even be true, but I'm sure many IE users would love tabbed browsing, for example, if it was introduced to them.

By the way, the fact that users haven't really wanted new features hasn't stopped them from bloating their Office products into feature monsters...

Tabbed browsing is avaliable for IE, through third party plugins.

I switched to FireFox due to the extreme customizability of it. All the different plugins have entirely chaneged the way I browse.

[zebo-the-fat]

My favorite browser, that I've used for 2 years now or so, is Avant Browser.

Tabbed browsing, fast and simple. Though it uses IE, I don't particularly have anything against IE. It does everything I need.

http://www.avantbrowser.com/

I use Avant, it works great (but 3 updates in the last 3 weeks is a bit much!)

[Tranquility]

By the way, the fact that users haven't really wanted new features hasn't stopped them from bloating their Office products into feature monsters...

Well IE is free, so....

[Gullible Jones]

IE isn't free. Take a look at the EULA. There's a lot of weird stuff in there, and I wouldn't be surprised if, encoded deep in there by some as-yet unknown means, is a clause about having to give up your soul to Microsoft...

(I dunno what my favorite browser is, really. Lessee... Well, Epiphany is fast and lighter than Firefox, but it has a heck of a lot of dependancies (though Portage can take care of that problem to some extent), and lacks configurability. Konqueror is quite nice, though not as fast as Gecko-based browsers. My favorite is still Firefox, even if themes do bloat it up a bit - I swear I have never seen a faster browser.)

(Oh, and I won't touch Netscape. I don't care how good the next version will be, if it's being developed by AOHell it's as welcome on my system as a trojan.)

[Maksutov]

Steve Vamos of Microsoft claimes, after being questioned about the rise of Firefox, that the reason they don't update IE with Firefox and Opera's features is that their users don't want them. He also says that IE is just as secure as any other browser.

LINK

Hey, Vamos...ˇvamos!

[Gullible Jones]

Go to www.secunia.com and take a look at the number and severity of Firefox's warnings. Now take a look at IE 6. Biiiiggg difference.

(BTW, you might want to take a look at the info on Konqueror. It looks like the KHTML engine is ridiculously secure, despite its occasional quirks...)

[ToSeek]

Go to www.secunia.com and take a look at the number and severity of Firefox's warnings. Now take a look at IE 6. Biiiiggg difference.

The Goddard folks working on JWST have been specifically instructed not to use IE unless they absolutely have to.

[AT]

FireFox is the way to go. Its light, mostly secure (easy to crash with malformed code) and infinatly customizable.

My roomate uses Avant, but it seems to me like almost having a safty on your gun, or fencing with almost dulled swords. The whole security issue is becuase of the Windows IE API's, not because of the little window that says IE.

Konquorer has a really tight rendering engine (even supports multiple engines) but most people don't use Linux (it's the filebrowser in KDE) .
Or do alot of people use linux here?

[Ut]

FireFox is the way to go. Its light, mostly secure (easy to crash with malformed code) and infinatly customizable.

My roomate uses Avant, but it seems to me like almost having a safty on your gun, or fencing with almost dulled swords. The whole security issue is becuase of the Windows IE API's, not because of the little window that says IE.

Konquorer has a really tight rendering engine (even supports multiple engines) but most people don't use Linux (it's the filebrowser in KDE) .
Or do alot of people use linux here?

GJ is going to jump you like a thief in the night

Presentation is important to me (call me a consumer so-and-so), so I've developed a resistance to linux. Slowly but surely, I'm sure I'll get there, but until someone can write a readable tutorial telling me how to, you know, install software without also performing dentistry and solving fourth order differential equations, I'll stick with Windows.

[Yoshua]

FireFox is the way to go. Its light, mostly secure (easy to crash with malformed code) and infinatly customizable.

My roomate uses Avant, but it seems to me like almost having a safty on your gun, or fencing with almost dulled swords. The whole security issue is becuase of the Windows IE API's, not because of the little window that says IE.

Konquorer has a really tight rendering engine (even supports multiple engines) but most people don't use Linux (it's the filebrowser in KDE) .
Or do alot of people use linux here?

GJ is going to jump you like a thief in the night

Presentation is important to me (call me a consumer so-and-so), so I've developed a resistance to linux. Slowly but surely, I'm sure I'll get there, but until someone can write a readable tutorial telling me how to, you know, install software without also performing dentistry and solving fourth order differential equations, I'll stick with Windows.

Well depends on the distro you use. With Redhat you get a RPM manager tool that gives you a menu'ed or GUI with which to add and remove stuff from your system. It's pretty easy and doesn't involve editing makefiles or any such thing. It's no more difficult than using the Add/Remove Programs utility under Windows.

There's a time it took some know how to get linux up and running. These days it's been made pretty easy to do actually. It'll take awhile to master everything, but you can get the basics very quickly.

[Robert Andersson]

Presentation is important to me (call me a consumer so-and-so), so I've developed a resistance to linux. Slowly but surely, I'm sure I'll get there, but until someone can write a readable tutorial telling me how to, you know, install software without also performing dentistry and solving fourth order differential equations, I'll stick with Windows.

I realize that many people have a fear of command lines. But really, I can't understand why launching a terminal and type "./configure; make; make install" is so horrible compared to the Windows way of browsing to the setup file, launch it and click through a million windows.

However, as mentioned, most modern distros have package managers. In Debian, for example, you just launch the manager and search or browse for what you want, click "install" and done! Since any kind of programs your typical desktop user will ever need is available from the distro's repository, you seldom need to turn to the terminal. Although, I would encourage people to get more familiar with the command line; it is so much more expressive.

[AT]

I don't think its that installing stuff really is that hard; the issue is that it is different for each package. While I swear by the nice (and usefull) GUI of such managers as Synaptic (which do EVERYTHING for you) sooner or later you try to install something that you don't have a package for. Then, you get into all sorts of compile errors, library out-of-date-ness, and god forbid dependency hell.
However, for main-stream desktop apps, Linux isn't scary at all (or mostly not.)

And CLI rules.

[Gullible Jones]

Hey Ut, Linux isn't actually that hard. Yeah, even Gentoo. Sure, Slackware makes you solve all the dependencies, but you can download Swaret or Slapt-get and you'll have package management, and easy access to a vast number of packages (from both Slackware mirrors and unofficial repositories). Slackware also lets you install RPMs, but I don't think there's a tool to let you update from RPM repositories.

Synaptic is easy to use, yes. It does have a few problems though... It won't automatically download all dependencies, and if apt-get is told that 2 things depend on each other, it may be impossible to download either of them. I've only seen that happen one time though.

With Gentoo, you set the USE flags and "# emerge foo". (Firefox without GTK support, for example, would be "# USE="-gtk" emerge mozilla-firefox".) You can easily set USE flags for specific applications, as global values, or for one time use like in the above example.

I suppose the command line can be a little intimidating at first, but it quickly becomes natural. In many cases, Linux users come to prefer using a command line to wading through a GUI.

Oh, and AT: I would not really call Firefox "light". Total RAM consumption is a bit higher than IE, although RAM per additional page (or tab) is lower. It feels a lot more responsive than IE, though, and it's a lot faster.

(Hmm... I wonder if you can compile Konqueror with GTK instead of QT? Or if anyone's making a GTK-based browser using the KHTML engine... Because I would definitely try it. KHTML isn't quite as fast as Gecko, and it has a few quirks here and there, but it's still very fast and very secure...)

[Theta Orionis]

I've been using Firefox for some time now (before the official 1.0) and it is a good browser. I recommend it. I also use Thunderbird for e-mail.

[Gullible Jones]

Thunderbird's nice... Needs a bit of work though.

[Ut]

It's not the command line that's intimidating. It's that it requires more effort than I'm willing to put into revamping my already perfectly operational computer. The advantages of Linux are negated when distros try to make it look user friendly without actually making it user friendly.

The command line I can deal with. Being denied access to every directory on the disc and not being told why (you know, they really should explain the whole root user thing during installation), I can't.

[zebo-the-fat]

I have tried several versions of linux, they seem good until something stops working.... it seems almost impossible to sort it out without a full re-install!