A Browser War Preview

Yesterday's link to a review comparing three modern browsers is only a taste of what is sure to come when the final versions of the new versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox hit the Net, but it offered some insight into what users actually want and expect from browsers. Readers seem for the most part to have strong favorites of the current (and upcoming) crop of browsers, and much of the discussion really boils down to a comparison of features and compatibility. Read on for the Backslash summary of the discussion.

Bogtha offered one of the most insightful comments on the issue of Web standards

"Browsers are lousy in terms of supporting the various specifications people have published that define useful things web developers want and need to do. This has numerous effects:

• It slows down and frustrates web developers.
• It raises the costs of web development.
• It makes some things impossible.

"All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?"

"The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them."

The more browsers that pass the Acid2 test, the better support there is for web developers. The better support there is for web developers, the higher the quality of the work they put out. And you, as an end-user of that work, benefit."

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

"I like Opera. I use Opera. I read the comparison, and Opera looks to come out favorably. Then I read the comments. Firefox compared to IE, again and again. Reasons why Firefox is better. Reasons why IE is better. Reasons why more people use IE. But there are fewer comments on Opera. I can't understand why. It has lots of things that Firefox needs extensions for built right in (and without significant differences in resources), and some things, like bittorrent support, that aren't available in any extension. It has better standards compliance than the other two. It has Widgets (like extensions) if you want to expand it more. But yet, a 3-way comparison is treated as a 2-way comparison. I thought this would be more of an eye opener, 'Wow, I didn't know Opera did all that and did it better than the other browsers!' But instead, the comments read like the posters glanced at the IE and Firefox pages of the article (if they read it at all) and hopped right back on the IE vs Firefox war. I find it sad that a competitive browser receives to little consideration, especially from a group that is supposedly early adopters.""

"Me, too," wrote reader lee1. "I think there is a reflex to ignore Opera because for so long it was pay- or ad-ware."

Reader bartkusa also spoke up for Opera

"Opera's UI is extremely customizable [opera.com]. Skinnable interface and lots of flexibility with toolbar and button placement, on the output side. On the input side, you can set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures if you don't like the default ones."

Dan East pointed out a glitch in the linked story as originally displayed:

"Their memory usage charts cannot possibly be right:

• Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
• Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
• Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
• Opera 9.0: 52K
• IE 6.0: 155K
• Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K

A single image on one of those pages could require more RAM than what the entire program is consuming. That's way, way off. What's even more amazing is, going by their charts, Opera actually consumes LESS ram with 6 pages loaded than when it first starts up! 53k -> 52k"

Reader dtfinch had another complaint: "The "Features at a Glance" table is very inaccurate with respect to Opera. For one, Opera has very good theme support."

Several readers offered rationales for the continued popularity of Internet Explorer; among these, according to reader chiller2, is better printing support compared to Firefox.

"e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.

"Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print."

Reader fuzzandwater complained "It's ridiculous that [the linked review's authors] defend IE by claiming 'no pages seem horribly messed up,'" writing "Clearly the author is not a web developer. If he were, he would know that the reason the pages display correctly in IE is javascript hacks, css workarounds, web developer headaches, Dean's IE7 javascript library, a separate stylesheet for IE, etc... It's not that IE is inherently displaying the sites correctly, it's that the site developers were forced to make them play nice with IE."

LWATCDR piles on the Explorer complaints, writing "It seems like a good number of people use Firefox now. So unless you want to exclude 1 out of 10 users from your site can not support just IE. I will not due business with a company that has an IE only site. Now the rub is this. IE doesn't support current standards. Yes, web developers have every right to complain about Microsoft ignoring standards and making their life more complicated. Because of IE I can not use PNG files with an alpha channel on websites I design.

"Just because most people use junk that is no reason to
a. Not tell them that is junk.
b. Try to get the producers of said junk to make it better.
c. Try to get people to use a better product."

Yvan256 raises the interesting point that as Windows changes, whether a browser is backward compatible makes a difference:

"Will Internet Explorer 7 run on Windows 95/98/ME/NT4? If not, then MSIE7 won't be ... And with Nintendo going with Opera for both the Nintendo DS and the Wii, Opera's marketshare might soon explode beyond 1-2%. Just keep that in mind before jumping into the 'MSIE7 has nice proprietary features' train."

Reader El_Muerte_TDS asks just what a "Favorites button" is, asking "Is it like a bookmark button?" To this, readers responded that "favorites" (in Internet Explorer) are equivalent to "Bookmarks" in most other browsers.

Blimey85 asks "What about extensions?," arguing that "Comparing stock Firefox with anything [isn't] very relevant. You need to compare Firefox loaded with some extensions to show the true power of the platform. Same with the other browsers and their add-ons or widgets."

"One example of not doing this is in the feature comparison table where it says that Firefox can't remember open tabs for the next session. My copy of Firefox not only does that when I want it to, it also has crash recovery so when I restart I can choose to reopen all of the tabs or not."

Yvan256, among others, thinks this is a double-edged sword: "The problem with Firefox is the extensions. People want a good browser, not fiddle around hunting for what exists. Power users do that, sure, but not regular users."

Reader Tet took issue with the reviewer's assertion that "the address bar is for URLs, not searches."

"I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unnecessary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it."

Reader GigsVT explained the appeal that a separate search bar has for him, though:

"If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search. We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be."

---

Thanks to all the readersa who took part in this conversation, especially those quoted above.

What everyone seems to be forgetting...

...is that real men browse the internet with telnet to port 80.

Re:What everyone seems to be forgetting...

I have just realised that someone is shortly going to be along whining about binary formats and ajax and whatnot.

This is why we are anticipating shortly the release of TELNET 2.0 for the Web 2.0 generation. It includes such amazing new technology features as:

Renders Flash into meaningless symbols.
Decodes Java into meaningless binary.
Turns javascript powered websites into impossible to understand hex clusters that don't do anything when you click on them.
Dumps MP3 data to beep()

In this way we feel that all the key features of Web 2.0 are adequately recreated for an authentic experience as the website creators intend and TELNET 2.0 is a whole new competative browser platform for the 21st century.

I don't get backslash

Can someone explain this to me? Slashback, with story updates, etc, is useful. This, however, just appears to be a random collection of posts from the original article. What is the point?

Re:I don't get backslash

Because Slashdot isn't about the stories, it's abou the comments. And by doing a Backslash, they can get a new crop of comments about a previous topic without A)Duping or B) finding a tangentially related story.

I like it.

Re:I don't get backslash

You forgot it also allows people who missed the first topic to continue the discussion and still see their posts modded.

One problem with Slashdot is after a few hours no one mods a story, so if they can make it fresh again 24 hours later we get fresh modding and debate continues beyond the usual level.

IE7

I actaully installed IE7 last night, I'd been impressed with how it sounded but I never boot into windows so I had to make a special effort to get it, it is also the first thing I've installed in ages which wasn't free (in both senses), and I was amazed at the licence terms; it might just be that I'm not used to seeing them but on IE7 it was so restrictive about what you could do and they kept the right to do anything, including (if I remember right) the ability to change the contract without telling you about it. It actually said that you should re-read the agreement regularly because they might change it at any time, needless to say I won't be installing a final version of it.

As a browser it was ok, nothing really special but not too bad.

but still I want to know

I still have not found out the 2 things that I want to know about IE 7. Does any one have the answerers?

1. Will IE 7 handle PNG's with alpaha channel transparency like every body else. As in no Active x controls and proprietary scripting methods in the html. Can I drop my browser detecting code and separate servings of markup or css based on the browser?
2. The Box Model, is the math 9in IE finally not backwards from every one else, does it now make sense? Will 'Border' not be full scree when I just set them to '30px'?
3. Oh one thing I am happy about in Fire Fox that is a long time coming for me is the spell check, I wonder how it will work with online WYSIWIG editors?

Anyone Know?

Transparent PNG in IE

I'm not sure if it was posted yesterday or not, but there is a quick and easy javascript fix for transparent PNGs in IE.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/ [ntlworld.com]

I know it isn't perfect, and is a hack, but it is useful for using PNG graphics on sites displated in IE.

/. Navel Gazing

I'll admit that like most people here on /., I find that the comments people make are more interesting than the articles themselves. However, do we need the recent proliferation in Slashback articles? Usually the /backs are for discussions that have already been disscussed to death. Someone once described /backs as 'the dupe that isn't a dupe'. I feel that he's right.

Opera bit torrent support

Am I the only one who doesn't see any need whatsoever for a bit torrent client built in to a web browser? There are a million free bit torrent clients out there that are way better than Opera's. Not only that, but its surprisingly difficult to turn it off. I personally lost intererst and opened the torrent from firefox before I figured it out.

That said Opera is my favorite web browser by far.

Re:Opera bit torrent support

You know, ten years ago, I remember people saying the same thing about FTP. Who needs an FTP client integrated into their browser? You can get a hundred stand-alone FTP clients. The one in the browser doesn't even handle browsing directories or uploading! And yet, most people just wanted to click on things and have them download.

Five years ago, people said the same thing about integrated download managers. If you wanted to download more than one or two things at a time, or you wanted support for resuming downlaods, you installed GetRight, or similar. But, it turned out, most people just want to click on things and have them download.

If you are a heavy BitTorrent user, then the integrated support in Opera may not be for you. If, however, you just want to be able to click on links and have things download, without having to worry about whether they are HTTP, FTP, or BitTorrent, then the Opera BitTorrent client might be the right tool for you.

Turn off backslash

Anyone figured out how to turn off these silly backslash articles?

If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.

For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on /.. I can't find that in my preferences any more...

Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.

Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.

Separate search bar

FTFS:

Reader GigsVT explained the appeal that a separate search bar has for him, though: "If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search.

I disagree that you need a seperate search bar.

1. Just right click on any search field (for example, Google's).
2. Click "Add a Keyword for this Search".
3. Name it, then add a keyword "g".
4. (optional) put it in the Quick Searches bookmarks folder

Now all you need to type is "g Jessica Alba" to search google for Ms. Alba. You can then safely get rid of your extraneous search bar. And as a bonus, you can move the address bar and navigation buttons up on the same line as the menu bar, and free up some extra screen real estate.

Right now...

...I'm viewing this with Opera. I have all 3 of the browsers on my computer. Previously, I was a dedicated firefox user. However, I've come to find that Opera uses less than half the RAM of Firefox and that Firefox and IE use about the same amount of RAM as one another when idling on a page (e.g. Google). If your RAM and speed are important to you, go Opera. If your extensions are critical, go Firefox. IE is only worth using if you need to go to an IE only page. To do my own little backlash: Opera is the most efficient. Firefox has the most utilities. IE has the most pages catering to it.

No more browser wars!

Face it guys, a lot more "normal" people use the internet now compared to the 90s, when the last browser wars happened. And those people don't know what a browser is. They maybe have heard of the IE, but never of Firefox. They just click on the blue "e" to use the internet. I educate some, you educate some, but the userbase is growing faster than the number of people we can educate. Also Firefox is not faster or does anything better for said user than the IE, because all they do is click on links and take their time to use webmail and read some webpages. The only thing Firefox has going is that it is saver. But the only reason it is saver is because less people use it and malware writers target the largest userbase. Maybe Firefox is saver, but they have zero day exploits none the less. So it wouldn't make much difference IMHO.

Wither SeaMonkey?

I prefer SeaMonkey to FireFox. I have tried FireFox, but I did not like the interface.

Any stats on how many hits come from SeaMonkey, or do they use the same signature?

IE v Firefox

Why does it always seem that Mircrosoft will come out with the same features as everyone else, and then make it look clean pretty wrap it with a windows bow and say "look what we can do now"

Why no Opera Category/Icon?

I think Opera has long ago passed the Slashdot threshhold so as to deserve its own category or icon! IE, Netscape, Mozilla, AND FireFox each have one, even though the latter three are all branches of one entity; Is there some deep-seated reason why, despite all the Opera news, there is not even one Opera category?

what's so hard about typing http://?

I do searches a whole lot more than I browse to single word domains without any periods in them. Is it that much harder typing in the http://porn/ [porn] on the off chance that you need to browse to a single word domain rather than clog up the top of the screen with yet another bar?

Opera couldn't be used in enterprise

until recently as it didn't provide NTLM proxy support (am I saying that right?). I've tried it in a couple environments that used some MS proxy server, and Opera couldn't authenticate. Who's fault is that? Opera 9 *does* support that authentication, but considering it's only a few weeks old, I hardly expect a massive uptake to Opera in the corporate world.

Opera may support a lot of tech standards, but that was a pretty big business standard they didn't support.

I used to care

I used to care. Now I don't any more. I consider the whole batch of so called standards collectively known as the web pretty primitive and backwards. CSS is a horrible standard not suitable for defining moderately complicated layouts (or even certain trivial ones). It's not the best we've got it's just something put together in a hurry independently from the (surprise!) independently evolving implementations, ten years ago. Attempts to steer browser development through forward defining new revisions of this standards have largely failed. And browser developers after spending most of the last decade interpreting CSS 2 seem to slowly settle on an interpretation of a significant subset of this standard from 1999 (or was it even earlier)?. CSS3 can now safely considered to be as dead as a doornail with browser developers cherry picking the little bitts and pieces that are more or less finalized.

Acid2 is not about CSS compliance but about supporting the documented ambiguities in the standard correctly (many undocumented ones remain). These ambiguities include weird parser behaviour, browser quirksmode hacks for non standard pages etc. In short, it test the browsers ability to fuck up the rendering in a consistent way. Of course the biggest fuck up of them all (IE) fails the test so the test is pretty much worthless in practice. It even fails rendering incorrectly :-).

Then there is HTML which evolved from a naive attempt to capture semantics of certain documents by Tim Berners Lee to a slightly worse specification (HTML 4.x) which isn't really good for anything it is designed to do (ranging from layout features to representing document semantics). The successors in the form of XHTML 1.x and 2.x drop the layout stuff (which sucked anyway) and tried to preserve most of the flawed semantics whilst adding new constructs and increasing complexity so much nobody really understands it. Market apathy has ensured that these xhtml standards never moved out of the lab. XHTML documents actually served up as application/xml (alledgedly the correct way to serve them up) are extremely rare although well formed versions of html 4.x are now commonly served up as xhtml 1.0 transitional (or even strict). Other than forcing the browser into a somewhat better defined way of rendering, this has little effect in terms of layout features compared to html 4.x.

Let me see what else have we got? There's crappy SVG which slowly seems to replace gifs for sclable icons on some systems and also leads a double life as a poor mans graphics exchange format. There's the hopelessly underpowered javascript language and the accompanying APIs (DOM *shudder*). There's MATHML which remains ever popular in very small niches. Most of the mentioned technologies lead a double life in the form of how they are supposed to work and how they actually work in practice. Pragmatic web developers just copy paste and adapt what works and ignore the rest. The smarter ones build up some knowledge of how things are supposed to work and where the bugs are for each implementation. All the graphics designers seem to have standardized on non standard flash. With standards nazis mainly telling them not to use flash, instead of providing an alternative, this is unlikely to change in the forseeable future.

But as said, I no longer care that much. Increasingly tools take care of generating the exotic hacks to make it all work. Handcoding something like gmail would probably drive programmers mad, which is why the nice google people embedded the difficult stuff in a nice library so they can focus on application functionality.

OSX firefox tab preview broken?

http://fosterburgess.com/kimsal/?p=89 [fosterburgess.com]

Can anyone here help with this? Yes, it's a bit offtopic, but I can't be the only one with this problem!

Thanks!

what about safari? konqueror? camino? seamonkey?

Interestingly enough, there is no mention of browsers such as Konqueror, Safari, Camino, SeaMonkey... Yes, this is a relevant point, because most of the discussion focuses on attributes such as bookmarks management, style, extensions, and the like, and not on the underlying rendering engine. Camino and SeaMonkey each take different approaches to the user interface but still use the same rendering engine as Firefox. And then we have both Konqueror and Safari, good web browsers that get very little mention. I would expect at *least* slashdot to discuss this more, but none was apparent in the slashback summary. Go figure.

Sigh...

Why does everything have to be a "war"? Can't it be a browser competition?
Let the indoctrination to the culture of war end.

Opera compatibility vs the other two?

Maybe I'll grab the latest Opera and try it out this weekend, but how is it's page compatibility with the greater web out there when compared to Firefox and IE? I know it's touted as having the "most" standards support, but I tried Opera way back when and it hosed up or just plain wouldn't render correctly a number of sites I went to. Does it work on bank sites? Most popular websites? You can say it's a problem with the web designers, but if everything works on Firefox with the IETab extension, but doesn't render right on Opera, where does the problem lie?

Opera 9

I've been using Opera for the last few months and I have to say I really like it a lot.
One major issue about IE and Firefox that turns me off is that both Firefox and IE have seemingly an infinite memory cache (as in RAM (physical and virtual) as opposed to Disk cache, which works well in all browsers) which I cannot control or limit. Opera on the other hand lets me limit the memory cache to under 60MB. And it works pretty well; with about 40 tabs opened, for the last 3 weeks, I am only using about 200MB physical and 220 Virtual in Windows XP and it drops when I close tabs.
IE and Firefox never seem to release the memory used, and I've seen Firefox use up to 800MB of virtual memory, with the same number of tabs.

Opera 9 is just a better browser for me. It's highly customizable, the zoom feature is sweet, the tab preview is nice, it renders most pages well, it supports major plugins like Flash and Quicktime, and it's fast too! Firefox has a slight stall when opening pages, and takes a long time to open when I restore a tabbed out session. IE 6 is well... IE6. Only useful for when I need to use ActiveX websites.

Opera 9 makes it easy to change things like user agent for websites that complain about non IE (or the occasional non-IE or non-Firefox websites) by pressing f12.

Opera doesn't show up on the radar

...because it has been, until recently, a niche browser.

The backslash complains that the comments on TFA mainly degenerated into FireFox vs IE regardless of the fact that TFA included Opera as well. This is because Opera's still working to extricate itself from the tiny niche it crammed itself into for the first part of its life.

1) Opera is not the standard browser for any major distribution of a popular desktop OS, including GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, and Windows. This means users have to specifically search it out and install it.
2) Opera, until relatively recently, was adware. You had to either purchase it or browse with an ad bar. This basically killed any chance of it getting heavy use on corporate workstations, as well as alienating the majority of people who were using Free OSs and/or would consider using an alternative browser.
3) Opera is not Free Software. This tends to make it less attractive than Free browsers such as FireFox and Konqueror to users of Free OSs. This has also been a major factor in preventing Opera from being the standard browser for any major distribution of a Free OS.

Opera has rectified #2. It will probably need to rectify at least one of #1 and #3 in order to gain more market share outside its current niche.

Better Printer Support or cluless users?

"e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.

"Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print."

What are you talking about? If you change the setting in Firefox printing preview you can easily see that it does in fact scale the content and not just widen the margins. You might come up with other issues that Firefox has in printing pages but this is not one of them. The fact is all browsers suck at printing webpages. The reason? Most make the assumption that you do not want to waste ink and by default turn off background graphics and some formatting. The other reason is that most users screens are wider then plain white paper (8 1/2 X 11) is.

Most importantly the main theme of your argument revolves around the fact that the webpage you tries to print from uses frames. Ever try that from IE? I just did and one page that fit on my screen without scrolling printed at 5 seperate pages and it didn't even show that way in the preview. The point is that browser suck and frames and really web developers should not be using frames. Frames suck and they confuse all modern browsers.

Who cares about RAM anymore?

I use all three browsers on occasion, with Firefox being my favorite.

Sure, the interface and speed of Opera are great. And the plugins and widgets are neat. But Firefox has EVERY extension I could possibly want, and I really see no need to switch. This is the single reason I stick with firefox. My system has 512 MB of RAM, which isn't all that much these days, but I can run Firefox along with several other programs and my computer flies. So memory usage isn't a dealbreaker either.

To each his/her own, I guess.

I can predict this one!

Firefox wins! Game over! Seriously, is there a point to using any other browser, for me or the 100 people I help admin on a daily basis? Firefox is awesome. It's stable, fast, has a small footprint and renders just about everything correctly. What rare sites don't render properly (mtv.com, others), I advise people not to browse, as they may not be safe, since they are clearly not w3c compliant.

Just stop being a fatuous minority opera users, and stop being lazy and uninformed, IE users. I gladly welcome our new dinosaur overlords.

rhY

Hey, where's the rest of them?

I'm browsing now via elinks, which is my default. If I need graphics I use Dillo and if I need JS, Java, or (gag) Flash I fire up Opera. I don't really see the benefit of always using a "full-featured" browser when the primary result is singing, dancing, blinking ads every-flippin'-where I look. But apparently I'm rare; good ol' text is still my preferred method of acquiring information...

It's an easy choice for me...

I use Linux. That narrows it down right away. However, IE6 works very well for me with wine [winehq.org]. I keep the latest version of Opera installed. So, how is it an easy decision for me? Well, for one thing, only one of the three browsers in question is open source. But that's really a separate topic. To use the article that inspired the conversation as an example, here is how it is displayed by Opera 9:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126'

Include file not found

/article2/0,1697,1990852,00.asp, line 400

The include file '/component/util_generate_article_discussion_info/ 0,1460,a=183694,00.asp' was not found.

The article displays properly in Firefox.

Now, I'm sure someone can finish a sentence that starts with "That happens because ...". You might even tell me that it's a problem that happened on the server. Does it matter?

Must people tweak their browser to view all Web pages properly? Must developers test in IE, Opera, and Firefox? Poor compliance with standards is one problem. But I think I read somewhere that Opera was the first to pass the Acid2 test. Problems at the W3C [slashdot.org] are another problem. Microsoft's slowly-loosening strangle-hold on the browser market is another problem.

These are the problems I can identify, but I'm sorry that I can't offer solutions. So, I comment in hopes that someone with possible solutions will read it.

-- Ghodmode

(OT) Backslash

Congratulations to whoever renamed Slashback; the new term makes much more sense, as it can invoke a similar, appropriate word. It is also confusing for those that vaguely recall what to type a few years ago. Even better!

Plus, what goodies can the millionth Slashdot username expect, a free T-shirt? I seem to recall that the millionth post [slashdot.org] said something appropriate for a lot of the people here.

I tried telling them

I've succeeded in getting only one friend of mine to use Opera, and thats because I fixed his computer and told him that from now on, he was going to "use a grown-up browser". I remember using Firefox on another friend's computer. I thought to myself, "Wow, this looks and feels just like Internet Explorer, but with a download manager and some room for extensions. Meh, I'll stick with Opera." I'm starting to be able to back up my incredible smugness. And as for people complaining about earlier versions which had ads, they took up very little space, were easily ignored, and could be configure to display generic rather than targeted ads. And when it was set to that, it pretty much just advertised Opera.

I can see it now...

"hey, look at this Brian...I can open up multiple pages in one window. It's called tabs."

"Wow, I've been doing that for years...Microsoft is trying to catch up to all the other browsers."

"well screw you."

I can guarentee I will have that conversation at least 3 times in the next 12 months.

Reduce firefox memory requirements!

Hi, Well, i am a big fun of firefox but i always had a problem with firefox memory consumption... until stumbled upon this http://pc-tunning.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] ...its sure worth to check out!

The browser that'll win the war...

For me the browser that will win is whichever secure, tabbed browser that adds in an audio toggle. I want to be able to cut off all access to audio devices from the web browser, but still be able to get music from my audio player. I want an end to background music on websites, an end to having to figure out which of the 15 tabs I loaded in the background started playing music when it finished loading, so I can kill that one. I want an end to web annoyances, and that's my biggest one right now. I'm not bothered by blink tags anymore, animated gifs are no more, pop ups are almost gone, and now this remains as my biggest peev about a web browser.

Opera isn't open source

Whether it's fair or not I leave as an exercise for the reader, but I think the reason Opera doesn't get the attention or respect of Firefox is that it's closed source, pure and simple. After all, how many years did people put up with early versions of Linux simply because it was open source, rather than using more polished but closed tools?

I like Opera, and I hope they succeed, but I will never want to rely on them because in the end they are closed source, and if their company should die Opera would die with them. That's why people support open and inferior over closed and superior - the open software can be improved upon, and won't go away. There are cases (CAD is one, at least so far) where the difficulty of writing the software is such only a commerical model has produced reasonable tools, but Firefox and Konqueror are proof that web browsers are not in that category. So source code ultimately matters, and there Opera looses.

Now if we look at Opera vs. IE, there I would agree I don't understand support for IE.

William T. Sherman, internet user:

Browser war is hell.

Re:w00t

Go into your profile, turn off Backslash, and stop reading them. Drivel comments like these are the reason Backslash exists - to improve the signal to dumbass ratio.

Re:Quick firefox help please...

Sounds like the uninstall didn't revert some settings in the registry (or Firefox's config files) try a clean reinstall of Firefox.

That does bring up a very god point though; while Firefox does have extensions to give it almost any functon or feture at least half of them tend to break when you update to the latest offical version and somtimes they are never repaired.

Re:Quick firefox help please...

Solution: always test new browser versions on a new profile [mozilla.org].

Then you don't destroy your bookmarks, extensions, settings, etc.

Re:Quick firefox help please...

Any ideas?

Close Firefox, find your profile directory, and delete the extensions.rdf file. This will be rebuilt by Firefox the next time you run it, and your extensions shall be functional again.

Re:Why I won't use Opera

Any browser that costs money, or used to cost money, is ridiculous.

You're kidding right? You won't use Opera because it used to cost money? If car dealerships started giving away Toyota Camrys, would you decline because it used to cost money?

Re:In regard to Opera

Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.

I think separating appearance configuration out is a good thing, rather than cluttering up a single window. I guess it's a matter of opinion. Are there some options you wouldn't be sure in which of the two they would be kept in?

Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.

I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you, but middle click for new window works fine here. Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts->Middle Click Options.

I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)

Well mine are at the bottom. And this is a subjective thing, not a "bad UI" issue. (Er, try rightclick on tab->Customize->Placement.)

The sad part is

This will probably be the most insightful comment a slashback will ever generate.