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[Virex]

I donīt know how I feel about using a browser that doesnīt display images as my main one...


Anyway, Iīve been using Opera for about two years now. Having a lightweight mail client and IRC client at your fingertips while browsing is pretty useful and Opera is pretty fast to boot.

[Fenrir]

I donīt know how I feel about using a browser that doesnīt display images as my main one...

I am fairly sure that he was mocking me by recommending Lynx.

[RedKing]

If the structure of modern Webpages allowed it, I'd go back to Lynx and Gopher in a heartbeat. Lynx was the shizzle.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I use Internet Explorer 8, and have for a while now. Problem, Firefox users?

[PenguinOverlord]

I heard Internet Explorer 6 is pretty cool.

[qwertyuiopas]

It has a nice UI, but horrible broken CSS, no PNG transparency, and supposedly many security flaws. And web devs hate users who use it and then complain when a site doesn't work. But, if you don't mind broken pages, an ugly blue rather than transparency, security risks, and do NOT complain when a site breaks, it's a decent browser. Probably far better than IE5 and IE4! (That is like saying win98 is far more useful and stable than win95 and win3.1, however... But they still work! (Theoretically...))

[Derekristow]

(That is like saying win98 is far more useful and stable than win95 and win3.1, however... But they still work! (Theoretically...))

Don't be dissing 98!  I have a laptop that runs that, and it's the most reliable computer in the house.  Even if it is so ancient that it's entirely useless  .

I've tried chrome (ugly, slow, no options menu or bookmarks),

lWhat?  It's pretty fast in my opinion, although I don't use other browsers enough to have a good reference point for "fast".  Beauty is too subjective to comment on, but you can reskin it if you want.
As to the other issues, wrench = options, star = bookmark button.

[futility]

On my comp (which is by no means old or outdated) FF4 takes like twice as long to start up as 3 and hangs ALL THE TIME.  I'm trying out opera. So far I like it

[Sean Mirrsen]

I've had no problems whatsoever with FF4. Handles like a dream. I've already gotten used to the tab strip up top, but I set most other options to be similar to the previous FF. In fact, I had more problems with FF3.5 - the Speed Dial page kept periodically crashing my GPU driver. Now all I miss is the ImgLikeOpera plugin (though not much now that I'm on unlimited internet).

[ILikePie]

If you need speed dial, give this a try, it works with Firefox 4.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I already have it. Like I said, it was causing problems on FF3.5, but works (so far) on FF4 without issues.

I guess the only "issue" I have with it is that its page address is "chrome://speeddial/content/speeddial.xul", mentioning Chrome for no good reason.

[Starver]

If the structure of modern Webpages allowed it, I'd go back to Lynx and Gopher in a heartbeat. Lynx was the shizzle.

And thus the triumph of style over content...  Pixel-perfection and fancy graphics that don't work at all without is not the aim, but the number of man-hours that have been spent to bend style code to ensure that as many different browsers render it exactly the same, as opposed to making it merely flexible with a "sliding windows" method...  And then they completely don't work if you view with any zoom-level at all.  (I speak, in this latter case, as someone who occasionally assists the elderly start to use computers and, as you might imagine, occasionally they find it useful to have larger text in their browsers on top of reducing the whole-desktop screen resolution...)


I'm not sure if the first browser I used was Lynx (on PCs and various VT100esque text-only terminals) or Mosaic (on X Windows graphical terminals), but I used both quite regularly in the very earliest days of the web[1].  And also Gopher slightly before that, albeit mostly for frivolous stuff, like finding out the bus time tables for Wollongong University.


As a datum point, I'm currently on FF3.0.7 and it's not pestering me to upgrade.  (But my Thunderbird 3.1.9 does suggest to me that it wants to update, but last time I updated it ruined several things, so I'm holding back for a while.)

There's several things about IE9 I don't like (and I configure IE8 without all the MS-built 'accelerators'), but then I'm a bit of a technoluddite about some things.  But for a lot of people using a half-way competent freeware non-MS solution would be the best answer to dealing with most computer tasks, compared with whatever solution MS provides (premium or otherwise).  By that philosophy, avoid IE.  Beyond the FF brand that the OP doesn't want to stick with, however, I really have no particular reason to suggest any of the obvious alternatives.  Chrome just doesn't do it for me, but I can live with both Opera and Safari.  The "smaller browsers" (beyond the first page of five in the Select Your Web Browser(s)[2] thing that MS gives us) might be worth a look.  They'd be glad of exposure, at the very least.



[1] Do you guys remember the "Netscape Incompatible" phase, and then nice ol' Microsoft saying it would give its Internet Explorer away for free..?  Mind you, I think I decided it started to go downhill about the time of DHTML's wide acceptance.  And, yes, I know that a lot of the features of this post-editing field rely on some of the things that I have just decried.  I'm just rollin' with it...

[2] Which annoyingly pops up on machines you upgraded to an IE8-level of Windows Updates even after you've installed and set as default something like Firefox.  And the number of machines I've seen brought into be repaired (generally for virus downloads) which as well as IE have also had their owners manage to install Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox without even knowing that they had done so...  "So, which browser do you normally use, then?[3]"  "Browser?  What's that?"

[3] Have to ask this, because even if Chrome is set as default, they tend to still use the IE icon in the quicklaunch bar to open "BT Yahoo" or "Sky" or whatever home-page their ISP's normally unnecessary 'broadband installation' software has set their browser to and which they assume is both the name of the program and their only portal on the Internet.  "Internet Explorer - Provided by NTL Broadband", indeed...  Internet Explorer was already there, it was just rebranded by a quick registry entry change!  Sorry, this "grumble grumble, mutter mutter" could go on into several more fetenete if I don't stop right here...

[Interus]

I use FF 4 and I guess I have problems with it, though it's probably my computer, and the fact that I have too many tabs open.  Occasionally it's a bit slow when I'm typing text, like it'll stop updating long enough to be noticeable and then add the few letters I managed to type all at once.  Also, every once in awhile it'll just freak out if I try to change tabs.  Showing sections of screens from other tabs that I've looked at at some point in the current session, whether they're still open or not.  It'll also sort-of update this ghost screen, so that over time it becomes an amalgamation of several websites.  And that's something I don't remember ever happening before I updated.  And I'm pretty sure it's because I tend to run more things than my computer ideally should.

[Starver]

I use FF 4 and I guess I have problems with it, though it's probably my computer, and the fact that I have too many tabs open.  Occasionally it's a bit slow when I'm typing text, like it'll stop updating long enough to be noticeable and then add the few letters I managed to type all at once.  Also, every once in awhile it'll just freak out if I try to change tabs.  Showing sections of screens from other tabs that I've looked at at some point in the current session, whether they're still open or not.  It'll also sort-of update this ghost screen, so that over time it becomes an amalgamation of several websites.  And that's something I don't remember ever happening before I updated.  And I'm pretty sure it's because I tend to run more things than my computer ideally should.

That seems like a problem, to me.  I've got 23 tabs open (currently) on this Portable version of FF3.0.7, most of which I retain between sessions (saving all tabs on close, getting them back when I re-open them, regularly using each and every one of them in some way or another, if only for reference), and this particular computer (XP with a 'mere' 1GB of memory) doesn't have many problems with that, although another one I open it on (XP with 1GB, also, but a slightly slower processor) I get the problem of it taking a couple of minutes where, if you keep an eye on the process list, after visible closing of the window the memory usage goes up for a couple of minutes before it finally stops and you can unload the memory stick it resides upon.  No other machine does that.

(On top of that, I've got a good few IE tabs, a number of OpenOffice documents, mid edit, and a few things (charmap, several notepad windows, numerous explorer windows, half a dozen DOS prompts), that I don't think use that much memory in-between them.  Oh, and the Thunderbird I opened a while ago to check what version I was using, plus the PortableApps launcher and some networking tools.  Works decently, though.)

I might have to get (or make) the Portable version of FF4 and see how that handles my particular (ab)uses of the browser.  Or at least emulate what I do, prior to actually migrating properly.

[Patchouli]

If I have a billion tabs open, I use one of the older versions of Firefox. I don't know if I hate 4, I just don't feel like updating.

If I only need a few tabs, I use Chrome.