What's your browser of Choice?

Originally posted at: http://www.jrwrestling.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56
Thought Id see what you guys thought:

With so many good browsers out there, it makes me wonder why people still use IE. You can get Mozilla, FireFox, Opera and Netscape for mac or pc, not to mention all the ones that are made just for one OS.

So what do you use? And why? Maybe we can spread the news and find you a better browser.

Here are my top 3.

1) FireFox - Why? Free, tabed browsing, themes, extensions, based off mozilla so it renters pages correctly, smaller than mozilla w/o loosing the power, built in pop up blocker, add blocker via the 'AdBlock' extension, powerful 'Web Designer' extension that shows you what any page is doing, rich text support, and it renders pages pretty fast. Since it's not completed yet it has a lot of potential.

2) Safari - Why? Because it is free, small download, has tabs, fav icons for every site i surf to and in my bookmarks, spell checking as i type in any form, built in pop-up blocker, ad blocker via PithHelmet, it's small and launches really fast, has good bookmark organization and an 'easy on the eyes' interface.


3) Camino - Why? Free, small download, based of the Gecko rendering engine so it loads pages almost quicker than Safari, has tabs, fav icons for every site, good bookmark management, very small and good looking.

 

I run (and alway have) OS/2. I don't know if Safari or Camino have OS/2 distros--I used to be right on top of OS/2 stuff, but haven't followed developments for a couple of years.

But with Firefox, who cares? This thing defines good. It is at, I believe, 0.8, and has been solid and perfectly stable and usable (by my experience and by report) since at least several versions back. I can scarcely imagine what 1.0 will have or do that, say, 0.7 didn't.

My only "problem" with it is that it is so nicely standards-compliant that I have to go to the library in town to see what my 100%-XHMTL-compliant pages look like in IE, which is only rarely what they look like in a standards-compliant browser.

 

Netscape 7.1. I think the browser is fine. I like the tabs in particular, but why I really stay with Netscape is for the email client.

I think it is the best damn email client there is. I actually tried to switch to Outlook one time. I lasted 3 days and had to give it up and returned to Netscape. The current version of Netscape email had a spam filter/junk mail feature built in several month before the lastest version of Outlook got one.

I just couldn't live without it.

 

Safari

 

Compar,

You might give Thunderbird a try as an Email client -should be pretty easy migration path from Netcape, and I've liked using it so far ...

alek

 

Try out Opera version 7.50, it just came out

I've tried hard to like Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox for the last 5 years but I always find myself returning to Opera for the incredibly well thought out interface and the cohesiveness of the whole thing. All the Mozilla variants continue to feel like they were designed by a bunch of people throwing in individual cool features without a care to how the overall thing integrates. Firefox is just plain clunky

 

What are the advantages of Thunderbird that would entice me from Netscape?

 

Does the Google Toolbar (or Teoma's or Yahoo's) work with browsers other than IE?

 

Nothing specific - again, the interface is fairly similar, although the Junk/Spam mail filtering seems better. In fact, the reason I suggested it was because it looks quite similar. Also, Thunderbird is undergoing active development (they just released version 0.6), whereas Netscape is pretty much end-of-lifed (although I've heard rumours we might see a Netscape 7.2).

alek

P.S. Bernard: Unfortunately, most toolbars do NOT work with anything other than IE - market share speaks! While there are web pages out there that can show you a lot of that toolbar data, I agree it's nice having it all there. For specific search engines, you should check their toolbar page, but I'm 99% certain that Google is IE/Windoze ONLY.

 

not that I know of bernard

 

Thanks schlottke, that's reason enough for me to stick with IE.

 

MyIE2 (a tabbed interface that uses the IE engine). It's free and has tons of features. I stick with IE because I want to know what my site looks like for most people out there (as well as being able to use toolbars). I only use Netscape/Mozilla once in a while to see if there are any differences in the way my sites look.

 

Firefox/Mozilla has a great advantage: it isn't too strict. IE isn't very strict, but Opera is.

The Gecko engine renders pages with HTML errors very well. (i've discovered this when I was working on a PHP program with lots of HTML errors and IE was displaying a blank page and Mozilla displayed the right page ).

 

Why do you need that? Just wondering.


Ohh and it's nice to see my topic over here. Safari for me 90% of the time, FireFox or Camino the rest. However all Mozilla browsers are having issues on my work machine right now and I can't figure out why. Any mozilla smart people around here?

 

I like Opera!
Probably use IE more though...

Geir

 

Opera is kinda cool, i'll have to admit. But the idea of paying to get rid of the ads bugs me.

 

TwisterMC, I actually like the convenience of the Google Toolbar and use the search quite a bit every day. I use the PageRank checker once in a while when I'm evaluating the SEO potential of some small directory that I'm considering submitting to. It helps identify directories that hoard PR on the homepage, for instance. I consider these types of directories to be just e-mail harvesters.

I've used the Teoma toolbar in the past on a hunch and sure enough, two weeks after installing it, my site which had languished 6 months in Teoma's index was re-spidered and re-indexed. It may have been coincidence, but I'm willing to bet that there is a connection.

I have not yet tried the Yahoo toolbar, but my sites are already indexed in Yahoo, so I'm not too concerned about it right now. Should I launch a new site, get good links, and not see Yahoo come around, I'll try the toolbar and see if it helps.

 

Ok i see. As far as the search functionality, Mozilla browsers and Safari both have google built in. But no pagerank stuff.