Picking a Web Browser

[More Cowbell]

I always used to be one who used Internet Exploder, but for some reason it got continuously slower on my computer. I then tried Chrome, and haven't looked back ever since. It took some getting used to, but now I'm familiar with the interface and all, it is better than IE in every aspect.

 

[Umbreon Dan]

i feel like we did this fairly recently...

those of you who know me will probably expect me to vote and evangelize for opera -- which i still use sometimes -- but i've stopped lying to myself about it. to anyone web-literate, the simple truth of the matter is that every major browser sucks.

my change of heart began in the summer, when i updated to version 12.00 and learned that the slim, text-free UI i valued was broken and left a hideous grey bar at the top of my screen. there was nothing i could do about it -- opera doesn't even let you disable the 'opera' menu. i wouldn't really have minded (all software has bugs), except that two months passed without an update. upon installing 21.01, and now 12.02, this issue persists. my resolve to use only FOSS was restablished. (opera doesn't even release their bug list to the public.)

despite this frustration, i still use opera as my "heavy, fully-featured" browser. to find out why, let's compare it to the mainstream alternatives:

firefox has many things going for it. in my eyes, it is currently the most reliable and secure browser in this poll. however, it lacks default features and even with third-party extensions it can't do some things that opera does very well (for example, there is no good mouse gestures extension). and let's not forget, it still has memory usage problems and has a hard time dealing with 15 or more tabs. i use firefox as my 'safe' browser. no plugins or extensions, tor-configured, the whole deal.

google chrome: i'm not going to talk about google chrome itself because it's inferior to chromium in virtually every way. a quick summary of the differences:

• google chrome comes with proprietary third-party plugins like adobe's flash player and pdf viewer built-in instead of using your system's default;
• google chrome installs its own updater instead of using your system's default;
• chromium is slightly smaller;
• google chrome comes with *FREE* user tracking;
• chromium isn't plastered with the google logo.

since none of these changes are good ones, i don't think it's wise to treat google chrome as a serious browser. so why don't i use chromium?

chromium's developers did some seriously lazy work. instead of linking standard system libraries, they forked them, hacked them to shreds, and included them in their browser. this has a number of consequences, such as not integrating well with any environment other than the one it was intended for. here's an example screenshot:

chromium on dwm

i use a dynamic, tiling window manager called dwm. what this means is that windows are arranged and manipulated automatically. there is no concept of 'minimizing' or 'maximizing' and closing a window is done by ending the process (not vice-versa). the title is displayed in the status bar you see at the top. that means the bar at the top of the chromium window (where chrome expects the title to go) is wasted and the three buttons at the top right do nothing at all. no other browser has these sorts of problems handling different environments.

for comparison, firefox integrates seamlessly.

if you use the factory-standard windows installation, then chromium might be for you -- just don't be fooled into believing it's 'lightweight':

[dan@arch ~]$ pacman -Si opera firefox chromium | egrep "Name|Size"
Name           : opera
Download Size  : 12920.07 KiB
Installed Size : 44508.00 KiB
Name           : firefox
Download Size  : 15842.91 KiB
Installed Size : 40340.00 KiB
Name           : chromium
Download Size  : 27257.98 KiB
Installed Size : 104740.00 KiB

i won't comment on internet explorer or safari too much, since they're windows- and mac-exclusive (but i will say that they are a web developer's nightmare, courtesy of microsoft's and apple's apparent apathy for web standards). they also suffer from the same problem that made me give up on opera: proprietary licensing and closed source code.

so, what now? i've been experimenting with a truly minimalistic browser called surf. it doesn't have tabs (although that can be provided by tabbed) nor does it have much of a user interface at all -- it just draws a window and renders web pages. it definitely takes some familiarization. so far, i have to say that it still kinda sucks. but, it does suck less.

just for fun:

[dan@arch ~]$ pacman -Si surf | egrep "Name|Size"
Name           : surf
Download Size  :  11.26 KiB
Installed Size :  72.00 KiB

/me whistles

 

[TEA_DEMON]

i use chrome, since firefox started randomly freezing on me, which is weird as it had never done that before. i would go back but i just can't really be bothered transferring bookmarks over, and chrome is pretty much the same anyway.

 

[Matthew]

Dan try Aurora browser, as I said earlier it's the nightly of Firefox and has less of the stable releases issues oddly

 

[omgocd]

I used IE up until early 2008 when I tried Firefox and then I just stuck with it. I know it sounds ignorant to say they're all the same, but for my purposes they pretty much are.

 

[Woodchuck]

chromium's developers did some seriously lazy work. instead of linking standard system libraries, they forked them, hacked them to shreds, and included them in their browser. this has a number of consequences, such as not integrating well with any environment other than the one it was intended for. here's an example screenshot:

chromium on dwm

i use a dynamic, tiling window manager called dwm. what this means is that windows are arranged and manipulated automatically. there is no concept of 'minimizing' or 'maximizing' and closing a window is done by ending the process (not vice-versa). the title is displayed in the status bar you see at the top. that means the bar at the top of the chromium window (where chrome expects the title to go) is wasted and the three buttons at the top right do nothing at all. no other browser has these sorts of problems handling different environments.

this should fix your issues

 

[Mr.Pooh31]

I went from Firefox to Chrome and then now I use Opera. I like Opera a lot because I find it faster than Firefox and better looking than Chrome.

 

[Exarius]

Started using FF around the same time as pluff, originally stuck because there were tabs which made browsing so much easier. Nowadays I am sticking with FF mainly because I am used to it, and I've yet to be given a real good reason to switch over.

 

[ck49]

I use firefox. I don't really have anything against chrome other than the fact that all my tabs and bookmarks are stored on firefox, and I'm used to it. I tried Aurora after reading this thread, and it really is better than Firefox normal (I actually ran beta, which is 6 weeks behind Aurora). I can't say I care much about the browser, and always have chrome up as well because it means people see it and assume its the browser I'd prefer them to use (which is good because it means I don't have to delete my history).

 

[pookar]

changed to firefox a long time ago from internet explorer, obviously never looked back, but also tried chrome a bit and just didnt adjust well, so i always went back to firefox. the rapid release "thing" is really helping the progression of the browser.

its good. sometimes gets pretty big but a simple reopening w/ session restore fixes it pretty well/quickly

 

[Dan Dan]

Used to use Firefox at home until an update to it caused frequent crashing while live streaming, like hourly. That's when I changed over to Chrome and so far so good. Still use Firefox at work where it is the default browser!

 

[Zacchaeus]

So I tried out Maxthon 3 and it's great. It runs Pokémon Showdown much better than IE and it has very cool tools like the Resource Sniffer and compatabilities like being able to upload an image to imgur straight from the clipboard. However, it can't stream video well, it's very choppy and interrupted. And Maxthon is lacking in shortcuts and things that IE has which makes browsing the internet that much faster, such as just typing in the first few letters of a web address into the address bar and hitting enter to go straight there. So I'm sticking to IE for basic browsing, but for dedicated tasks like PS or imgur, Maxthon is my go-to

Update: On Maxthon you can highlight something and drag it to create a search window for it, or drag things like Pokémon Showdown tabs to open them in new windows

 

[Ampharos]

I've tried both Chrome and Firefox, and I've found that Chrome is slightly more stable and faster for me (the interface is pretty good for both of them). Internet Explorer barely runs on my computer, I don't like Opera's layout, Safari is ok but I prefer Firefox and Chrome for some reason (dunno why), and what the fuck is Seamonkey

 

[Woodchuck]

also, are there any good browsers specifically made as a "ten-foot interface", i. e. used with a TV? trying to set up an old computer as a media center and I'm curious about other options as opposed to just running Opera.
Though I bet you could probably do something strange with Firefox's uber-configurable interface to make it more TV-friendly, lol.

edit: so far I've found Kylo, I'll report on its quality in a while.

Update: Kylo is extremely meh. It has potential with an on-screen keyboard and large buttons/etc on the interface, but it's really useless unless you have both a wireless mouse (which I do have) and a wireless keyboard (which I do not). Oddly enough, Kylo doesn't seem to support using the Windows Media Center remote at all either.

Maybe I should get a wireless keyboard...

 

[Matthew]

what browsers have decent adblock aside from Firefox? Chrome's adblock, last a checked, sucked a thousand cocks, doesn't stop Youtube ads at all. Is Firefox the only browser that can have this kind of addon?

EDIT:

Apparently I just found a way cooler browser than Aurora/Firefox http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/
It even has adblock!

 

[Tayla]

what browsers have decent adblock aside from Firefox? Chrome's adblock, last a checked, sucked a thousand cocks, doesn't stop Youtube ads at all. Is Firefox the only browser that can have this kind of addon?

I have Chrome, and its AdBlock works great for me. I haven't seen any YouTube ads since I downloaded it a couple months ago. Maybe you had an outdated version or something?

 

[Woodchuck]

AdBlock Plus also works perfectly for me, but you can always try "Youtube Options for Google Chrome", which also blocks YouTube ads. (As well as doing some other neat things.)

 

[Firestorm]

I use Firefox because I couldn't find a suitable mouse gestures extension for Chrome and Firefox's address bar has far superior history/bookmark search capabilities.

Yeah. At first it was FireFTP and AdBlock Plus keeping me on Firefox. Now it's Awesome Bar.

 

[Metal Bagon]

I use Safari because it's the browser that came with my Mac and as long as i get to a webpage without waiting for ages i don't give a

 

[ShortsTheory]

Oh, web browsers are my pride and joy. Out of all of them, my favourite has to be Firefox.

I've been tracking Firefox's development ever since FirefoxMinefield 3.7a1. Now, I don't think I really have the guts to use a nightly build, so I stick with Firefox beta. It's ahead of the stable release and it's much more stable than the Aurora (I've used Aurora extensively) channel builds. The Nightlies probably have the best feature set I've ever seen on a web-browser (all the fancy web-dev tools), but its instability puts me off.

And, Chrome isn't really to my taste, though I use it sometimes to check website rendering. Chrome probably has the best rendering capabilities of web-browsers, but Firefox's JaegarMonkey JavaScript engine seems superior (and faster!) to Chrome's.

Oh, and I have a change of OS as well: Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. Yay, Linux!

 

[red_kryal]

Just switched to Seamonkey, and I'm loving it.

 

[some hero]

Have to go with Internet Explorer 9. Mostly because that awesome new commercial telling me how great it has become.

 

[Bowl Cut]

Google Chrome or GTFO.

 

[Umbreon Dan]

Dan try Aurora browser, as I said earlier it's the nightly of Firefox and has less of the stable releases issues oddly

i thought about it after reading your other post, but i checked the repos and it's not there so i just can't be assed...

this should fix your issues

yeah, this solves that problem. i'm not sure why that isn't the default setting. in any case, chromium's other issues still prevent me from taking it seriously.

what browsers have decent adblock aside from Firefox? Chrome's adblock, last a checked, sucked a thousand cocks, doesn't stop Youtube ads at all. Is Firefox the only browser that can have this kind of addon?

i've been impressed by opera's adblocker, which has the best default settings in my experience. most advertisements are covered without the user getting involved. (sometimes when i use surf i notice websites that i forgot were supposed to display ads because opera blocked them without my intervention. smogon, for example.)

Apparently I just found a way cooler browser than Aurora/Firefox http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/
It even has adblock!

"web" (formerly known as epiphany) is pretty good (except for the new name). i'm surprised you didn't know about it because it comes installed by default on fedora!!

 

[ShortsTheory]

i thought about it after reading your other post, but i checked the repos and it's not there so i just can't be assed...

If you mean the ubuntu repositories, you'll need to run this in the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/firefox-aurora

more help here :) Have fun with Aurora!