Browser Bias

Today, I want to tell you about my recent quest to find a new web browser (Firefox just wasn't cutting it for me). About a year ago, I switched over to Firefox when the release client of version 1.0 came out. Before that, I just used Internet Explorer (IE) because it was there, and I had tried Netscape and never really liked it. Firefox is clearly superior to the 6+ year old IE in terms of features, extensibility, security, etc. IE, frankly, just isn't very good and doesn't follow a lot of the W3C standards, uses ActiveX (creating a HUGE security hole), and all that other stuff. For all of you who already know this stuff, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph; however, I am including this rant about IE for those readers who aren't as knowledgable on the subject. Some anectdotal evidence of the insecurity of IE comes from my family--we have 4 computers in our house and with the exception of my computer (which nobody touches other than myself), I had to clean spyware and viruses off of them every 1-2 months because they became infected fairly quickly. However, after I switched all computers to Firefox (and deleted all links to IE--since it's impossible to uninstall IE due to Window's dependence on the software)the spyware and viruses have stopped showing up (nothing found in any scans for the past 6 months). In short, "Friends don't let friends use IE". HOWEVER, I should note that if you're SMART about how you use the Internet and only go to pages you KNOW are safe and don't click on all sorts of random links, you can be fine even if you use IE (my girlfriend uses IE, but she has yet to get a major virus or spyware on her laptop in the past 2-3 years. I had the same results myself--I switched for the features of Firefox over IE).

So now for my quest to find a new browser. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I had grown disenchanted with Firefox as of late as I've found it to be resource intensive in terms of eating up RAM and being slightly slower than other browsers as well. I really liked all of the extensions you could get for Firefox and the RSS bookmark feature. However, I use my system for a lot of resource intensive work (video encoding, sound recording, video recording, etc.) and I try to minimize system resources where I can. Not having a Mac, Safari was out of the question. I knew Safari was based on Konqueror, but I had used Konqueror in Linux on several occasions and it just lacked the functionality I was looking for in a browser. I had also tried Opera earlier this year and made it my default browser for awhile (mostly just to try out the voice recognition), but I ended up switching back to Firefox because I wanted a GMail notifier and RSS bookmarks, plus there were a few other Firefox extensions I enjoyed--and I wasn't too happy with the way Opera rendered some of the pages on my system (they were hard to read). I had also tried a few other Gecko based browsers (Gecko is the engine created by Netscape used by Firefox and several other OpenSource browsers). However, none of them had all the features, functionality, and system footprint I was looking for. Then Opera released a Beta for version 9 of their browser. It had built in Bittorrent, widgets (extensions that work sort of like the Apple Dashboard), RSS feeds (this may have been in the previous version, but if they were then I missed it), and even an automatic GMail notifier/button that appears in Opera after you subscribe to your GMail RSS feed. It also appears to have fixed most (maybe all) of the rendering issues from the previous build (although things still look nicer in IE and Firefox). It's been about 2 weeks now since the beta was released, and I have to say I'm enjoying Opera (and it is once again my default browser). For me, it is the perfect balance of speed, resource use, features, and extensibility. But that's just my personal tastes, I know some people prefer lighter browsers that just show web pages. However, if you share browser preferences similar to my own, feel free to check out the Opera 9 Beta yourself. One word of caution though, I have had fairly consistent crashing problems with this beta, but almost all of those crashes were while closing the browser (I think it may have to do with the Slashdot widget I'm using though), but still, just a word of caution that this IS a beta release.