xkcd

by **Mach1ne** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 5:54 pm UTC

Which is the favorite, Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or something else? I've heard Chrome is nice, but it had some security issues and well Friefox is popular. Haven't heard much abotu Opera, but what are your opinions? Please comment and fillout the poll. (I personally would like to know)

by **Berengal** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:31 pm UTC

If you want "something else" to be an option, you should've put that in the poll as well.

Firefox is my favorite, but I've used Konqueror since I switched to KDE (in october, I think...) because it doesn't clash with the window manager like firefox does. It works mostly the same.

by **Mach1ne** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 9:55 pm UTC

Hmm yeah "something else" would have been a good idea...wish I thought of that before :roll:

by **Minstrel** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 10:17 pm UTC

Iceweasel! Because I use Debian...

(voted for Firefox)

by **Doodle77** » Fri Feb 27, 2009 12:38 am UTC

Firefox, but only because I can't tolerate the Adblock-equivalents on other browsers.

by **ash.gti** » Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:14 am UTC

Anything webkit based.

Safari 4 is AWESOME.

by **OOPMan** » Fri Feb 27, 2009 12:31 pm UTC

I use a couple of browsers. Firefox for web development, a custom-built Epiphany with the latest SVNed Webkit for alternate testing.

But for day-to-day use Opera still serves me best of all.

by **Mach1ne** » Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:15 pm UTC

What features does Opera come with that seem to be better than Firefox and vice versa? I've never tried Opera and I'm considering giving it a shot.

by **Qoppa** » Fri Feb 27, 2009 5:12 pm UTC

I like Firefox, but I can't get it working 100% on my Debian box (actually, it's Iceweasel, but still...) It keeps segfaulting when it tries to access the soundcard. but not always... it's weird. I'm thinking of trying Opera because of this issue.

by **idlehandsrome18** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 7:39 am UTC

Firefox. I'll sometimes use Safari, but I like Firefox's web developer toolbar, no more damn meta redirects

by **J the Ninja** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 4:39 pm UTC

I've been a long time FF fan, but I've found myself using the Safari 4 beta since it was released. It seems to load pages crazy fast compared to FF (and even more-so compared to the current version of Safari, which I can't stand).

by **someguy** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 6:19 pm UTC

I used Firefox for a long time until sometime last year, when I switched to Opera on a whim. Haven't switched back yet. I'm kind of wanting to try out Chrome, but I feel uncomfortable about giving up one more aspect of my privacy to Google.

Anyone else with the same concern (more properly worded, perhaps)?

by **ash.gti** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 8:04 pm UTC

I'd rather give it to Google than Microsoft...

Plus, its open source under the BSD license. You can download the source code and remove anything you don't like if you really want to.

by **someguy** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 8:11 pm UTC

ash.gti wrote:I'd rather give it to Google than Microsoft...

Good thinking.

by **Comic JK** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 2:37 am UTC

I use Chrome, because of the uncluttered interface and, more importantly, the fast start-up. I like programs to just pop open as soon as I click them, and at least on my system, Chrome does so while Firefox involves a little wait.
Problems I've had on Chrome: sometimes the main window controls change color or stop working. But since you can easily control everything through the tabs, which is what I do anyway, this hasn't been a deal breaker.
The single navigation/search bar, as opposed to separate ones, is also very good.

by **Mach1ne** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 5:53 am UTC

I found this article in Life Hacker ... http://lifehacker.com/5160709/browser-speed-tests-how-safari-4-stacks-up?skyline=true&s=i

Out of all the test I feel like Chrome did decently well. They tested cold start ups, warm start up, some javascript functionality, and the load times for a no tabs and with 9 tabs (Chrome obviously did poorly here due to the fact that every tab is a separate process). Check it out.

Does Chrome still have security issue?

by **Xanthir** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 5:54 am UTC

I've always used FF at work, because with addons it qualifies as my IDE. I switched to Chrome here at home, but I just downloaded 3.1b today, and it is *sexy* fast. I'm switching back.

by **inhahe** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 10:48 am UTC

Mach1ne wrote:Which is the favorite, Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or something else? I've heard Chrome is nice, but it had some security issues and well Friefox is popular. Haven't heard much abotu Opera, but what are your opinions? Please comment and fillout the poll. (I personally would like to know)

I use Firefox. My favorite thing about it is the way the find feature is designed. The most annoying thing about it is that the bookmarks menu doesn't put folders at the top of the list. It also has performance issues when many tabs are open and apparently memory leaks as well. It has really nice plugins available, for example DownloadHelper and IE Tab, which I use whenever I need to use IE because IE itself just stopped working on me, which is no big surprise knowing Microsoft.

Opera is okay. It's supposed to be the fastest, and a friend of mine mentioned to me that it's extremely fast, but I couldn't tell which was faster between Opera and Safari. Anyway I ended up uninstalling Opera because I couldn't unset it as my default browser for certain things.

Chrome is just too minimalistic for me. There aren't enough options or features. The thing that really did it for me though is that it always crashes on facebook apps. I never use Chrome.

Safari I use sometimes, like for example when firefox is being homoerotic on me. Its find feature works kind of like firefox's except that the graphics are more fancy. I actually don't like that. The way it highlights the words doesn't give me the intuitive feeling that I'm focusing on the highlighted word. It makes me feel like i'm using some fancy-smanshy application that comes with some obscure peripheral more than like I'm exercising control over the document. The textually shown features below the address bar also look odd with no icons associated with them and too confusing to figure out what they generally are in 2 seconds and I haven't bothered to try to custumize it, which is another reason I don't use Safari. Another retarded thing is that it often opens up links in a new window rather than a new tab. But lately firefox has been pissing me off in that regard because apparently I hit the wrong key or move the mouse in the wrong way all the time and it removes the current tab and opens it as a separate window. I recently downloaded Safari 4 (beta), and the "top sites" feature is really awesome; it makes me feel like my monitor has 5 times as much screen space by way of being expanded in some inner dimension. But the feature can make it really slow. Also I think I tried setting Safari as my default browser before and it didn't have any effect. I think I only started using Safari because stickam.com didn't seem to work under firefox or IE. stickam.com doesn't really work well in general.

by **Minstrel** » Sun Mar 01, 2009 4:07 pm UTC

someguy wrote:I used Firefox for a long time until sometime last year, when I switched to Opera on a whim. Haven't switched back yet. I'm kind of wanting to try out Chrome, but I feel uncomfortable about giving up one more aspect of my privacy to Google.

Anyone else with the same concern (more properly worded, perhaps)?

I downloaded Chrome on my office PC (win xp) and stopped using it after I realized the google updater was installed alongside with no notification. While Chrome is OSS, the updater is not. I doubt there is anything terribly harmful there, but the blind install of an always-on application rubbed me the wrong way.

That was when Chrome first came out though; maybe things have changed since. FWIW I thought Chrome was dead sexy and ran nicely.

by **OOPMan** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 7:17 am UTC

Mach1ne wrote:What features does Opera come with that seem to be better than Firefox and vice versa? I've never tried Opera and I'm considering giving it a shot.

Er, the standard at this point really. Back a few years ago tabs and all that were new but not anymore.

I'd recommend downloading it and giving it a go.

by **CrunchyFoodstuff** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:13 pm UTC

OOPMan wrote:
Mach1ne wrote:What features does Opera come with that seem to be better than Firefox and vice versa? I've never tried Opera and I'm considering giving it a shot.

Er, the standard at this point really. Back a few years ago tabs and all that were new but not anymore.

I'd recommend downloading it and giving it a go.

Easily manageable tabs (better than Firefox IMHO), very customizable without having to add add-ons, fast, runs on older systems just fine, build-in content blocker that can block content per site and per type (eg. just Flash), can masquerade as other browsers to fool stupid websites, easily manageable bookmarks, build-in RSS, can be used to debug websites easily (since you can switch off bits of code selectively), step-less zoom, offline mode, etc.

by **Mach1ne** » Tue Mar 03, 2009 5:22 pm UTC

Interesting, thanks for the list. I'll have to download Opera and look into it.

by **berandeve** » Thu Mar 05, 2009 9:18 pm UTC

Firefox with the NoScript add-on. I love NoScript. Complete control over what happens in your browser.

by **zerohero** » Thu Mar 05, 2009 10:09 pm UTC

I swear by Opera. From my experience, it is the most stable, most efficient, and most compatible.
Firefox is nice, I'll happily use it (and I do, in addition to opera), but it's not the best.

by **inhahe** » Thu Mar 05, 2009 10:37 pm UTC

I just installed Opera on this computer (someone else's computer I'm currently using) because IE broke and I couldn't ftp into mozilla.com but I could into opera.com. And so far I have to agree, it's so much better than firefox, mainly just because it's so much more efficient. But I do wonder why some of the buddy names in meebo.com don't show up. I guess Opera has a few kinks.

by **idlehandsrome18** » Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:27 pm UTC

I love how IE hasn't received a single vote.

by **Mach1ne** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 6:16 am UTC

I noticed that too.

by **Angelbaka** » Sat Mar 07, 2009 8:00 pm UTC

I'm gonna have to say firefox because it's so much easier to manage filetype preferences with it (i.e., defaults to windows) then it is in Opera. Opera continually thinks it's my torrent program. Although, if you're willing to use 2 browsers (I do) then Firefox+Opera hasn't failed me yet.
Opera:Fast and smexxy (great for most causual browsing)
Firefox: +AdBlockPlus +NoScript +Tor +IETab = most secure browser on the web. +downthemall(or whatever DLM you religiously follow) and you have an Internet Tank. Plus, if you're good at modding, have the time, and know the settings, firefox can be a faster browser then Opera. Problem is, most of the settings are a pain in the ass to get to, and even worse to actually correctly edit (screw string values) but there's a great support base out there for all that stuff. Also, easily customizable.

by **Amnesiasoft** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 12:08 am UTC

Preferences>Advanced>Downloads.

by **inhahe** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 12:25 am UTC

On my machine Firefox has a setting to automatically send .torrent files to freedownloadmanager instead of utorrent, and apparently there's no interface for resetting download extension settings, which is pretty annoying. I looked on the web for some way to change it, and the instructions were a little complicated, but I tried to follow them and no luck. I think a couple of the things it said to do didn't apply, and the rest I did to a T and no luck.

I'm using Firefox now again instead of Opera, though.. Opera seems to be a little bit quirky. With the meebo buddies not showing up, and my friend who's designing a website said that there are some CSS things you can only do in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and he can't get his fieldsets to show up rounded in Opera. But i stopped using it after Oprea randomly decided to stop responding to anything I did and I had to kill it.

by **headprogrammingczar** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 1:11 am UTC

Tools->Options->Applications->Search->.torrent

by **Xanthir** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 2:40 pm UTC

inhahe wrote:my friend who's designing a website said that there are some CSS things you can only do in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and he can't get his fieldsets to show up rounded in Opera.

All browsers have differing levels of CSS support. In general, IE is always way in the back, Safari is a bit in the front, and FF/Opera/Konqueror are somewhere in the middle.

Opera for some reason dropped its experimental support for the border-radius property. Right now you can use it in FF and Safari/Chrome with -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius.

by **eviloatmeal** » Sun Mar 08, 2009 4:25 pm UTC

Berengal wrote:I've used Konqueror since I switched to KDE

I never got my back/forward mouse buttons to work in Konqueror. Not that I tried very hard.

I'm thoroughly addicted to Firefox though. Iceweasel also does the trick on my Debian, just because it seems appropriate.

by **HawkDesigns** » Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:30 pm UTC

Firefox FTW.

by **phillipsjk** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 12:51 am UTC

Posted using Lynx (using vim as external editor)

Current user-agent string:Lynx/2.8.6rel.4 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/1.6.2

It (the web) hasn't been the same since the DOM requirement of HTML 4.01.

No, Lynx does not support style sheets.

I have been using Mozilla (Firefox/iceweasel) for the past year or so. I am thinking of going back to lynx. I am tired of using a buggy, insecure, slow browser. I don't bother disabling JavaScript: if the site is too annoying, I cancel my visit instead.

I started using lynx in ~~the 486 dial-up~~ Telnet to a "Freenet server" days. Several things make lynx stand out:

Fixed-width font text-only. (Let's see Opera work on a VT100 terminal!)
Fast (Single-pass rendering B*tch*s!)
Does not download clutter such as banner Ads (sucks when the content actually IS image-based)
Does not run client-side scripting (I decided this is STILL a good thing even after seeing Google maps)
Somebody mentioned debuging. It has a "Trace Mode" that tells you everything the HTTP and rendering engine is doing.

Edit: Damn, shouldn't have told it to wrap the lines to fit the display

Edit2: Set editor to nano since I don't know how to remove line breaks with VIM. Typos fixed.

Edit3: Now using emacs, the official editor of the forum, everything is fine. (nano auto line-wraps)

PS: Stealing my CPU time counts as annoying; especially with an interpreted language like JavaScript. (to post below next)

by **inhahe** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 1:09 am UTC

phillipsjk wrote:Posted using Lynx (using vim as external editor)

Current user-agent string:Lynx/2.8.6rel.4 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1
GNUTLS/1.6.2
It (the web) hasn't been the same since the DOM requirement of HTML 4.01.
No, Lynx does not support style sheets.
I have been using Mozilla (Firefox/iceweasel) for the past year or so. I am
thinking of going back to lynx. I am tired of using a buggy, insecure, slow
browser. I don't bother disabling JavaScript: is the site is too annoying,
I cancel my visit instead.
I started using lynx in ~~the 486 dial-up~~ Telnet to a "Freenet server"
days. Several things make lynx stand out:
Fixed-width font text-only. (Let's see Opera work on a VT100 terminal!)
Fast (Single-pass rendering B*tch*s!)
Does not download clutter such as banner Ads (sucks when the content
actually IS image-based)
Does not run client-side scripting (I decided
this is STILL a good thing even after seeing Google maps)
Somebody
mentioned debuging. It has a "Trace Mode" that tells you everything the
HTTP and rendering engine is doing.

Edit: Damn, shouldn't have told it to wrap the line to fit the display

i simply couldn't do without javascript in the things i do on the web. though lately there seems to have been an insurgence of complete incompetency in web programming, because it seems every site i go to nowadays insists on having 90% of my cpu usage. and that's in firefox, safari, etc.

one thing i'll give you is that firefox is buggy. it seems it's had unsolved memory leaks for years, having many tabs open is slow as heck, and lately it simply will not actually stop when you close it, that happens for both me and a friend of mine. it only actually stops running if you kill it.

i was thinking about features i really like about firefox the other day, and one of them is 'recently closed tabs' (complete with their back-button histories). another one is ctrl-z when you're editing something in a text field. there's nothing like hitting the wrong key and having the last 14 paragraphs you've just been writing disappear. (i don't know what other browsers have that, but I know IE doesn't, unsurprisingly).

by **hotaru** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 3:55 am UTC

inhahe wrote:though lately there seems to have been an insurgence of complete incompetency in web programming, because it seems every site i go to nowadays insists on having 90% of my cpu usage. and that's in firefox, safari, etc.

not all of that is incompetence... i've actually set up a few pages to borrow some cpu cycles for brute-forcing some hashes, and i'm sure i'm not the first person to come up with that idea.
i've not actually gotten any results from it, but it only took a couple minutes to write the code.

by **icewind** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 10:28 am UTC

Firefox of course?

(posting this using Lynx XD)

by **Chfan** » Sun Mar 15, 2009 1:05 pm UTC

IE!

Just kidding. Firefox as well.

by **awec** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 2:10 am UTC

Firefox. I would use Chrome though if it had autoscroll (you know when you middle click in firefox it brings up that very nifty scroller), but alas it doesn't, so firefox it is.

Which is your fav (any version)?

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