Internet Browsers... Which is Best?

Discussion in 'Software' started by Harvey, Jul 19, 2003.

  1. Harvey

    Harvey Private E-2

    Harvey here once again....
    Forgive me for asking because I believed that I have read a thread on this website or another site about internet browsers but I am not sure. Seeing that ol' Billy Gates seems to have a monopoly on the computer industry, and all we hear about is Microsoft and IE. I am not sure if the hype about IE is on the up&up or just a marketing ploy.
    Now, my question is this: Is there another browser out there that works better and faster than IE? I am not too familiar with any others so please explain why they are better than IE. I would like to have a browser that would make me so "WOW ---that really is fast".
     
  2. Ryanrk

    Ryanrk Private E-2

    Mozilla Firebird, Give it a shot.. you might grow to like it just like me! Load just as fast as IE, stops popups, can block images. Still in beta state so it crashes occasionally but not as often as IE did for me.
     
  3. NICK ADSL UK

    NICK ADSL UK MajorGeeks Forum Administrator Staff Member

    hi Harvey the fastest browser is probably opera. Most people enjoy as it is very clean and easy to understand. give it a try

    http://www.opera.com/
     
  4. Dimension4

    Dimension4 Private E-2

    I've tried them all...Opera, Netscape, Mozilla (firebird), IE, and I still like IE the most. I tend to have problems with Netscape based browsers, especially when it comes to shockwave and macromedia. Some sites still don't have complete compatibility with it.
     
  5. ArchAngel

    ArchAngel Sergeant

    Avant Browser. Free and you can get it at MajorGeeks. I have tried others but keep coming back. Even MyIE2. I love the tabbed pages, right click, etc. Only thing it's lacking is right click on favorites. It uses IE's components.
     
  6. †T-Rex †

    †T-Rex † Specialist

    Well... in my opinion, use anything but Microsoft Internet Explorer, and you'll be fine. Mozilla and Opera are two great alternatives, and I highly suggest you not use IE... my reasons are, other than the vulnerabilities they constantly find with IE:

    http://sillydog.org/mshidden.html

    If you're not too paranoid of a person, this probably wouldn't be of relevance to you, but personally, I'm not too keen on the fact that Microsoft does things like the above site mentions.
     
  7. frybo30

    frybo30 Master Sergeant

    Dumb Question No. 1: Can I have more than one browser on my system? (Win98 1st Edition.) I'd like to try those others mentioned, but do I have to remove my IE6 to do so?
     
  8. Major Attitude

    Major Attitude Co-Owner MajorGeeks.Com Staff Member

    Sorry, they fnd vulnerabilities with everything, browsers, Linux, everything. More popular it becomes, more people look for exploits. I prefer IE, though neither Opera or Mozilla are bad. You can try those, or as mentioned, a third party interface to IE. I use Avant, its my favorite. MYIE2 is popular as well.

    Yes, you can install, Mozilla, Opera, Nescape and IE will be fine :)
     
  9. lejarretnoir

    lejarretnoir Private E-2

    I tried several and it seems they have one or two things that I liked about them all, but I still like IE6. Yes, I know that doesn't sound too geeky, but I like IE6 the best. As to mail clients, The Bat! rules.
     
  10. millwall

    millwall Private E-2

    I just keep to whatever comes with my computer
     
  11. da chicken

    da chicken MajorGeek

    Avant and MyIE2 are both nice UI enhacements, but they are just overlays for IE6. You're still using IE6, but you get some nifty UI widgets. A large portion of Windows web browsers are such IE overlays.

    Mozilla is a browser in and of itself. It doesn't use IE at all. There are two versions out right now, RC 1.4 and Firebird 0.7 (IIRC). Firebird and normal Mozilla will be integraed within the next 6 months, though. Firebird is stripped-down, but smaller and faster. Mozilla RC 1.4 is fairly full-featured, but very bloated and moderately cumbersome. Mozilla is the browser core that also runs Netscape, but you'd be well advised to avoid Netscape as much as you can. Mozilla has some problems with sites designed explicitly for IE (since, well, it isn't IE). Mozilla is designed to comply with W3C (the people who define web page standards). IE 6 (and MS in general) doesn't comply with these standards, so IE-targetted sites come out funky from time to time.

    Opera is very fast and, unlike Mozilla, is designed to mimic IE. Like Mozilla, it is very fast, but IMX the browser just hasn't improved in several years. It still has random layout problems, and still handles cookies badly from time to time. Also, the browser has been targetted by Microsoft, and MSN in particular. Opera will not display msn.com correctly, because Microsoft purposefully serves badly formed pages to any Opera browser. Hotmail and MSN also yell at you for "not using a compatible browser", but, again, only when you've got Opera. This is not a problem with Opera. Those sites just purposefully give it bad pages (and yes, that can be proven).

    To answer the second question, you can have as many browsers installed as you want. They're like Word Processing programs. I generally use MyIE2/IE 6 for browsing, and I have Mozilla RC1.4 and Mozilla Firebird that I use for sites that load funky or when I want to do JavaScript debugging (which Mozilla handles better).
     
    Last edited: Jul 21, 2003
  12. Cyber-Spanky

    Cyber-Spanky Private E-2

    Mozilla 1.4 here.

    I can't wait when Firebird and Thunderbird are complete! Until then it is Mozilla for me.

    I still use IE only for Windows Updates.:D

    Compared to IE, Mozilla has a list of features that IE + OE totally lacks

    - full WC3 compliance
    - per-site pop-up block
    - per-site image block with option to allow
    - images from current website only
    - per-site cookie block with option to allow
    - cookies from current website only (meant to block tracking cookies from third party sites)
    - tabbed browsing
    - data prefetch
    - password encryption
    - trainable junk mail filter
    -search engine configurable, not limited to MS nor AOL engines. I set it to Google of course.

    When I browse in Mozilla, I right-click on banners and choose "block images from this server" and it blocks all GIF-based ads. Unfortuantely it doesn't block Flash-based ads.

    As for Shockwave and Flash, just download the plug-ins for Netscape/Mozilla and install. Most if not all popular plug-ins have another version for Netscape/Mozilla. Even MSN chat has wrapper plug-in for Mozilla/Netscape, which is rather ironic..
     
  13. Fw190

    Fw190 Lt. Anti-Social

    have you tried v 7? I love the new opera. Between 4 and 6 there wasn't much improvement, but V 7 is using an allnew engine and has a lot of new features, not to mention that many of the page rendering issues are fixed.

    You're completely right about Microsoft and MSN, it's a bunch of crap that they target Opera. Did you see the "bork edition"
    http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/
    At least those guys have a sense of humor.
     
  14. spaz

    spaz Specialist

    Hey all...

    I was an avant browser user for quite a while, but the latest build won't shut down properly on my xp pro or 2003 server... So, I tried Mozilla and it was fine then just got really sluggish and had crashed on me a few times so dropped that for MYIE2, which, so far, seems pretty nice.

    Two problems/questions, tho...

    1st one is most important... For some reason my security settings got changed through all the browser installs and uninstall and now I'm not allowed (logged in as admin) to click a link from MS Outlook to directly open the page. I get a Windows error that the security settings on this machine don't allow me to do that and contact an administrator.

    Anyone know where that setting would be? That's a new on on me...

    The other issue I have with MyIE is that I cannot figure out how to disable the "sure you want to close all pages" warning at shut down.

    thanks in advance,

    spaz
     
  15. Major Attitude

    Major Attitude Co-Owner MajorGeeks.Com Staff Member

    What does Microsoft have to do with it? Its still a good browser, but falling behind the times because it needs popup blocking and tabs at least, ill give you that. I cant get into the interfaces of the others, but if I had to, I also agree Opera is excellent, I cant stand the Mozilla based browsers, personally.

     
  16. Aurelius

    Aurelius Private First Class

    †T-Rex †, thank you very much for that link.
    Now I added some lines to Autoexec.bat that automatically delete the contents of History, Temp.Internet Files and Temp folders at startup (incl. index.bat). With Win98se it works fine.
     
  17. †T-Rex †

    †T-Rex † Specialist

    Hey... why didn't I think of that? That's a damn good idea, man... besides your profile name, what lines did you add? And so... we learn from each other.... :)
     
  18. Aurelius

    Aurelius Private First Class

    Well, the lines that define my Temp folder and delete its contents I have been using for years. Now I added the lines that delete the contents of History and TIF folders. I checked the notorious index.bat before deleting it: it contained 3.5 MB of visited URLs!
    Here are the lines that do the trick:

    @cd \windows\tempor~1\content.ie5
    deltree /y *.*

    cd \windows\history
    deltree /y *.*

    @echo off
    set temp=c:\tempfile
    set tmp=c:\tempfile
    cd \tempfile
    attrib -r -h -s
    echo y | del c:\tempfile\*.* > nul
    echo.

    ---------------------
    I hope others will find it useful too.
     
  19. Fw190

    Fw190 Lt. Anti-Social

    You can't blame the opera programmers for some websites that dn't work. I've looked at how things are done and Opera follows the very strict guidelines for HTML and such. THe problems with certain websites are generated from the website using improper code or code that has not yet been approved. Personally I haven't been able to find a website that doesn't work properly in V 7.11 except for Microsoft pages for the obvious reasons.
     

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