Current Generation Browsers

[Daryn]

One of the things that I'm always keeping an eye on are browsers. You spend a lot of time using them. You're using one right now to read this post. So I thought I'd link to the current best browsers.

Firefox
Version 4.0 of Firefox has just been released. There is a pretty big UI change along with a good performance boost. What I like about it most though is that it allows you to tweak the UI to look more like the old one if you prefer. THough I do have to say the new look is really nice.

Internet Explorer 9
IE8 was a disaster. There really is no nice way to say it. It was not very standards compliant and caused me a lot of headaches when I had to troubleshoot why some things didn't work right for some users. IE9 doesn't have that problem. It's got a lot of Windows 7 Integration features that are quite handy. Most importantly though, it's now the most standards compliant browser there is. Which I am sure is going to annoy the open-source advocates to no end. Unfortunately it doesn't work for Windows XP.

Google Chrome
Chrome is by far the fastest developing browser on the market right now. It is quick, light, and very customizable. If it weren't for the fact I need accessibility options, it would be my primary browser. For everyone else, it's worth a try.

And that's it for now. Enjoy the new versions!

[Brome Teks]

I personally use chrome, and in the rare event I need accessibility options, I'll hop onto Firefox, though a lot of the accessibility options are becoming compatible with Google Chrome. My university website no longer has any issues with it, for example.

[Samantha Arrow]

I use Firefox... Cause it has the word fox in it...

[Daryn]

I use Firefox... Cause it has the word fox in it...

LOL, well I suppose that's as good a reason as any. Firefox is a solid browser, no doubt about that. Oh if you want to see something cool, look at http://glow.mozilla.org

[SliceOfDog]

I would use Firefox as my primary browser, because it seems just as good as Chrome but, as said above, has better access (Not only can I watch American-only videos thanks to a little cheat Borg showed me, but also my University's system of turning in essays doesn't work properly with Chrome) except for one problem, and I've found this on every computer I try it on: Firefox seems to take bloody ages to start. I don't know why, it's only the first time, but it can honestly take upwards of a minute for it to open for the first time on my laptop, whereas Chrome is up and running in about 3 seconds or so (and that's on crappy Uni internet)
Sometimes Firefox won't open at all until I click it again, and then it'll open up two! Grumble. Minor inconveniences, I know, but it's important when you want to quickly check something, say Uni emails, when you're trying not to be late to a lecture.

[Daryn]

I would use Firefox as my primary browser, because it seems just as good as Chrome but, as said above, has better access (Not only can I watch American-only videos thanks to a little cheat Borg showed me, but also my University's system of turning in essays doesn't work properly with Chrome) except for one problem, and I've found this on every computer I try it on: Firefox seems to take bloody ages to start. I don't know why, it's only the first time, but it can honestly take upwards of a minute for it to open for the first time on my laptop, whereas Chrome is up and running in about 3 seconds or so (and that's on crappy Uni internet)
Sometimes Firefox won't open at all until I click it again, and then it'll open up two! Grumble. Minor inconveniences, I know, but it's important when you want to quickly check something, say Uni emails, when you're trying not to be late to a lecture.

I wonder if you've maybe got some extensions that are slowing it down? I can say that 4 is definitely better, so look at downloading that one and see how it goes.

[Rick Canaan]

I just grabbed Firefox 4 tonight, myself.

And... quite the rearrangement it has come up with. Gonna take pony a bit of getting used to, methinks. All of the tabs are now at the very top, there is no longer a status bar along the bottom, and they've gone and changed the positions of most of the function buttons. Looks a little like IE in the arrangement of those...

But, I have to say, it looks very slick, over all. Seems to load a lot faster, too. So we'll see. But for now, it looks like quite an improvement!

[Daryn]

The position of the tabs can be changed to go back to the bottom, and you can re-enable the menu bar if you want to as well. The stuff that would have been in the status bar now floats when there is something to show. It also now has an Addon-Bar that you can turn on with Ctrl+/ so if you had any addons that put stuff in the status bar, they will show up there.

It's all about flexibility with Firefox.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Happily my tabs remained unmolested, down the left like god intended.



> Firefox seems to take bloody ages to start

The trick is to never close it, and only ever hibernate your machine, never reboot (although i understand Windows may have a problem with this).

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Anyone else think it's probably a bad sign that Firefox have taken to bumping major version numbers for minor updates?

(Firefox 5 should by rights be called Firefox 4.1, they're just worried that if they did that ppl wouldn't update, and they really don't want to have to keep supporting version 4.0 re security updates. Probably they should just *force* people to update, like Chrome does, but that's not popular among the IT crowd because it essentially means allowing strangers to run arbitrary code on their machines, which seems like a potential vulnerability to hackers.)

This kind of shenanigans was what presaged the doom of Netscape Navigator (from which FF is derived, incidentally, by way of an Open Sourcing and a major rewrite).

Bonus pro-tip for people who's extensions keep getting needlessly disabled by pointless version number changes:

* type "about:config" (without the quotemarks) into the address bar
* if necessary, assure the browser that you know what you're doing
* right-click anywhere on the list of preferences, select New > Boolean
* name the new boolean value "extension.checkCompatibility.5.0.0" (or whatever the new version number is)
* set the value to "false"
* when you next restart FF it will no longer check version numbers

Of course if the add-ons really are incompatible this will break things, it's just that the current default behaviour is overly cautious in my book. They should wait for a crash, and only then start disabling things.

Expecting extension authors to keep updating compatibility data with every browser update is a bad idea imho, most programmers are very lazy (or else they wouldn't be in the business of automating stuff) and would rather write and then forget about extensions, only modifying them when there is an actual problem.

Edit Of course if they do start acting very badly the project can always just fork, but that sort of thing usually leads to acrimony and strife and needlessly reduplicated effort (see: XEmacs).

[Dusty]

I'm personally using Chrome right about now, and I've been using it for a couple years. I also have IE9 (its a windows machine so its kind of hard to avoid xD) but I only really use that on websites that don't seem to like Chrome's Java like my Bank's deposit@home.

[Daryn]

I'm not overly worried about Firefox's numbering. Unlike Netscape Navigator, Firefox isn't charging for these updates. That's part of what did Netscape in. So far it may be a bit weird to see major number changes for minor updates, but at least they haven't screwed the browser up in the process. Firefox 5 still works just fine, and likely will continue to unless they do something really stupid.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Wow, i never quite realised Netscape charged for major-numbered updates, from a modern perspective that does sound weird. All i know is that it gradually got worse over time, some of the old Sun machines at uni still used various different versions of it.

I'm not so positive about the future, web browsers have become slower and demanded ever more CPU and RAM for as long as i've been using them. That's mainly Flash and JavaScript's fault of course, not the browser's, but still it's not a promising sign.

(Nor is needlessly bumping version numbers solely for PR purposes (the main reason i resurrected this thread was to post my fix for the add-on disabling thing, which really fucking bugs me, as you've no doubt guessed).)