In Over Your Head

My own personal browser wars

There is a browser war going on inside my Powerbook. It is a veritable deathmatch, happening real-time, with my short attention span as the prize. Here are the contestants:

Safari
Pros: It’s fast – damn fast. Its speed makes my mind scream in rage (accompanied by pulsating forehead vein) whenever I use anything else. Also, it looks great and includes Saft, which rules (despite having to pay for it).
Cons: Like the hare, Safari has been stalling repeatedly to chill out, usually when passing data (like login information) to servers. I haven’t figured that out yet, so I’m not using it right now.

Firefox
Pros: Compliant to all W3C specifications. Shows websites the way the majority of the users I want to reach are seeing them. Has nifty plugins like Aardvark and the development toolbar, as well as the Google toolbar. I’m using this for website development right now.
Cons: Our foxy friend does not deal well with multimedia and Flash. Since I visit stuff like YouTube and labels’ websites pretty often, it has a tendency to crash – a lot more than I’d like it to.

Camino
Pros: Tried this one because it had the advantage of being neither. It is a Mozilla build, like Firefox, but made for OS X, so I figured its loyal choir had something to harp on about. I’m using this as my primary browser right now.
Cons: Slower than foreplay with a retarded lesbian quadruple-amputee. Just slow. Otherwise does fine, I guess, but the fact that I can’t save tabs doesn’t help, especially after getting used to the Firefox extensions (or Saft on Safari).

Insert your browser here!
If your browser solves my problems, email me! I’ll try any browser for at least a couple of weeks, and report back. I’m seriously desperate at this point, and so is my girlfriend, who has similar opinions to mine. She’s considering Opera, but I’m not that desperate (I think).

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Joe Gannon

Comments

6 responses to “My own personal browser wars”

  1. Nico Avatar
    Nico

    I *love* Opera. The mouse gestures are something you can’t live without once you get used to them. Tabbed browsing, plugins, etc. And you can even get a version for your cell phone (so 21st century…) I’m not sure if it’s as W3C compliant as Firefox, but it’s pretty good. I can watch flash and multimedia with no problem. It crashes sometimes but i think it’s this computer, because the other computer where i have it never crashed.

    And most important, it is now free, like the rest of the browsers.

    Reply
  2. zack Avatar
    zack

    http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/en

    this is Shiira, its an open source version of Safari pretty much, with a few extras added on. ive used it for awhile and it doesnt appear to crash as often as Safari. Safari crashes alot for me on poorly coded pages (gack (myspace)) and tends to stall alot.

    hope this helps!

    Reply
  3. Chris Mack Avatar
    Chris Mack

    I’m with Nico and Opera, rarely, I’ll come across a site that won’t display properly, but the pro’s heavily outweigh the cons.

    Thanks for the kick up the backside I got from listening to show 111, am at the getting up off my arse and getting my shit together stage of actually doing something with my ideas.

    Reply
  4. jason Avatar
    jason

    Why would forplay with a mentally-challenged quadreplegic lesbian be slow exactly? More to the point, why would you be having sex with one in the first place?

    Sounds illegal.

    Reply
  5. Slipstream Avatar
    Slipstream

    Shiira is my main browser, althought I’m switching to Firefox once in a while for certain sites.

    http://hmdt-web.net/shiira/en

    Reply
  6. Tom Avatar
    Tom

    I have an old WIN98 system I got for free back in 1999 from http://www.freepc.com and am still using it (I have upgraded to a 550mhz chip). I discovered Firefox in Nov. 2004 and used it until about March 2006. I found various extensions significantly impacted my system performance and got tired of trying to figure out the right permutations to keep my broadband acting like broadband. I switched to Opera 9.0 (beta at the time) and found my speeds increased but things still were not “lightning fast” as various people make references of their browsers. I recently made the switch to K-meleon 1.01, a mozilla based browser designed for Windows. My load speeds are finally “lightning fast” (as much as a 550 mzh chip can be). I am very pleased. Configuring the broswer is a bit awkward and the themes for the new version are a bit limited (older themes for the pre-1.0 release seem to make it crash) but once it is set up it has much of the basic functionality of Firefox and/or Opera. I think I’ll stick with K-Meleon for a while.

    Reply

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