What browser do you use?

Proud Mac user

Safari is the first Mac program that doesn’t suck.

Use Opera, Mozilla, or Safari to experience all the fancy advanced CSS stuff.

I never knew IE was so bad till I got Safari. Safari renders pages more quickly, plus I'm now a complete convert to tabbed browsing. Integral pop-up blocking, too.

(that should be their slogan)

Opera has paid for and advertising supported versions.

That's actually a fantastic bit of advice. I'll have to track that one down and see if it's worth dling. I'd seen on a tech-themed program how tabbed browsing works and it looks as though it's exactly what I'd need.

Use Opera, Mozilla, or Safari to experience all the fancy advanced CSS stuff.

I don't particularly care for Opera, Mozilla is essentially Netscape innit?, and I'm not a Mac user so Safari's out of the question. But here's this thing -- isn't there an equivalent to Netscape's Firefox that's for IE? If so, what is it called? I'd be seriously interested in checking that out.

other than that, chalk up another point for firefox.

and, occasionally, links or lynx.

Let me guess, Autumn Almanac -- you have a newer computer, right? One that runs relatively fast? Right, because my computer is an ancient beast and if I tried running Netscape on it in the same manner that I run IE, I would never get anything done. Not only would every single page load up at an agonizingly slow pace but I'd invariably suffer from a massive slowing of my system. I have to use IE. I even had to give up using Netscape's mail program because it slowed my system. If you had my system, you sure as hell would use IE.

And Ed, I would love to try something new out, but unfortunately very few programs out there want to cooperate with the version of Windows I have, i.e. Win98 First Edition. It's ironic that the one upgrade I've been able to make that hasn't given me any grief for holding onto this OS is the one for QuickTime, which would be an Apple program. So if you've got any suggestions (not Netscape, please, because as I said earlier, it really slows my system down) for other browsers I might want to try out that would actually work with my OS, I'd be grateful.

IE runs well, doesnt crash under XP, and I cant be bothehred dloading anything else on a 56k modem at home to install, so feh.

(and it isnt that old is it? Wasnt there an update only last year?)

IE needs more than updates. It needs streamlining, and tabbed browsing, and a major interface overhaul.

tabs = viewing more than one page in a single browser window. each page is under a separate "tab". Makes it easier to manage your browsing session. Don't know how it works in ie as I don't have ie8, but in firefox you can open a new tab with ctrl-t and type an address as per usual, or clicking on a link with the middle button will open the page in a new tab. This was a firefox innovation which has now been copied by ie.

This was a firefox innovation

actually not true but firefox did have tabs long before ie.

thank you for taking the time to provide all that technical information. It will take me some time to try to understand it.

it just struck me that maybe different 'browsers' are like different editions of books - the differences are really rather minor, though experts in the field might make a big deal out of them (or: experts might insist that the differences make a big difference to them, because of the detailed and specific work they have to do with them) - but in any case, the average punter can read a novel from a £1 edition as well as from the latest revised edition. (I am not necessarily the average punter, here - and to me, how a book looks, including the actual layout of the text on the page, counts for something. but of course one does not always get a choice with these things.)

The big driver behind firefox uptake was that is was perceived as (and was), much more secure than IE 5 and IE 6. There were other ways of taming the security issues but switching to alternative browsers was a good step. I'm not sure that IE 7 + patches provides a particularly less secure environment than current versions of firefox.

xpost you could argue the same for any discipline. Guitars, say - a keen guitarist might swear that only the latest rickenbackerfenstercaster is good enough for him, but someone who is only just starting to play and doesn't have an ear for such things might get by with any old axe.

I suppose though that unlike guitars, most people use browsers. And the expert community is quite vocal on the internet, so yer average layperson might feel more complusion to use the "right" or "best" browser even though in the end it might not make much difference to them.

I just tried to follow ledge's description and pressed CTRL + T.

I got a page saying:

--

You've opened a new tab

With tabs you can:
Use one Internet Explorer window to view all your webpages.
Open links in a background tab while viewing the page you're on.
Save and open multiple webpages at once by using favorites and home page tabs.

To get started:
Press the CTRL key while clicking links (or use the middle mouse button).
Click any tab with the middle mouse button to close it.
Press ALT+ENTER from the address bar or search box to open the result in a new tab.

Learn more about tabs

Show more tab shortcuts

--

but I couldn't see what to do with that page - the arrows wouldn't go back or forward from it - and don't really get the concept, I don't think. It let me get away from the page, somehow, and back to this one.

... wait a minute - what's this 'middle mouse button'?? My mouse only has two buttons, and a sort of wee rolling thing between them... which, when I move it, makes this page scroll up and down.

Ledge: reading once again your comments above, it sounds like the people who like the firefox thing are people who write / create internet pages / websites / programs of their own?

I use firefox and I don't create web pages. It's quicker than IE (or feels it) and has historically been more secure, although as Ed points out, that may not still be the case.

Press down on the wee rolling thing when clicking on a link instead of left clicking - does it open the link in a new tab? You can click between them.

that blank page when you hit ctrl+t page was just an empty browser window. no forward or back cause you hadn't been anywhere in it yet. typing an address in the address bar would load the page in that tab, with ilx (or whatever page) still present in the other tab.

it's just like having multiple browser windows open, except they're all stored under one window so your task bar doesn't get cluttered up. I hope that casual reference to "task bar" hasn't opened another can of worms. Ultimately, if you never have more than two or three explorer windows open at one time then i wouldn't worry about any of this.

Johnny B: hey - I think you're right! who knew that was a 'button'? but it does seem to work.

so, I have just discovered, I think, how this Tab thing works - there is only one www thing marked at the bottom of the page - but there are two pages 'tabbed' at the top.

does Task Bar mean the bottom of the screen?

one thing I have found is the computer saying 'close all tabs?' - it doesn't seem to want to close just one www page down and leave another open? this seems to happen even when I have two www things at the bottom of the screen. or maybe not. I will try again to close this and see what happens.

how come (leaving aside the 'middle button' thing) - how come sometimes, if you click on a link, it opens a whole new sort of www screen, and leaves the original one open too; whereas sometimes it goes to the new page and leaves the first page behind? (not to do with anything different I've done, just the way the www pages themselves work, somehow.)

its just doing what the person who built the page told it

I was trying for months to open a certain webpage, but kept getting domain name not found. Turned out it was because I'd already had a tab up with the webpage open running in the background, for all that time!

you know what? I just tried Firefox again, and ilx is a different colour on it. the blue is sort of darker and brighter, at once.

yahoo, on the other hand, seems to be the same colours, though the two browsers do seem to show things slightly differently, somehow - higher / lower up the screen or something. hard to see, though, how one would conclude that one looked better than another.

also the Firefox thing doesn't seem to have the mail updates that make a little red number appear in the corner of the screen. it doesn't seem to have as many things on it in general, really.

Safari 3 is kick-ass fast, and I'm using it more and more, but i keep running into weird quirks. I ran into a problem yesterday where it was losing styles (and images), because they were linked three or four stylesheets deep. Move it all up a level or two, and it saw everything again. It all worked perfectly on Firefox no matter where I put it. A head-scratcher.

Lack of Greasekit for Safari 3 windows is all that is stopping me from using it on the work laptop, safari's renderer is pretty shoddy by comparison.

god pinefox you are funnie

pinefox, i think Lynx is the way you want to go. Trust me. *Great* browser. It's got it all.

Check it -- bells and whistles.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/Picture1-1.png

hey look, there's me!

Pinefox reminds me of an elderly woman I was trying to help with the basics of modern computering. I showed her how to logon to one of the Suns in the lab and was explaining how to focus windows by clicking on them with the left mouse button when she said to me,

I'll call that thing over there a "mouse", and I'll agree that pressing it is called "clicking", but there's no way in hell I'm calling THAT (pointing at the display) a WINDOW!

lol I CAN'T GO FOR THAT NO CAN DO

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is really good, or at least they now seem to be taking the OS X platform seriously. Its memory and CPU usage (on my G4) are lower than Safari and it seems to load some sites (e.g. flickr, a good test of browser performance) more capably. Horrible system resource usage led me first to Camino and then to the new Safari, but Firefox seems to be on the up after years of unusability.

I'm not sure that IE 7 + patches provides a particularly less secure environment than current versions of firefox.

firefox doesn't support activeX, therefore it remains far more secure IMEO.

Developer develops a website, tests it ONLY against IE, user accesses it with Firefox, site doesn't work, user blames Firefox. THIS FUCKS ME OFF.

srsly all web design should be tested against IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx &c. There is no excuse.

IE apart from being shit is not the be-all and end-all of browsers, and only works on one platform anyway.

Developer develops a website, tests it ONLY against IE, user accesses it with Firefox, site doesn't work,

That's your prob right there (underlined).

HAHA so so true.

And yet it's this eternal problem. At work I'm always stuck in the middle -- I'm officially part of the art department, which means that my bosses on some deep, ingrained level stubbornly continue to think that my job is to mock things up in InDesign, print them out on paper, and hand them to the developers so they can put them together in the most fucked-up way possible. Not only is that not web design, it's not even a real job. Meanwhile the developers (using MS software exclusively, it must be stressed) say things to me like, "You can't use png images. It's not supported." And so I show them the little piece of javascript that I linked upthread, and that it really does work just fine, and they look at me like I just found some sneaky backhanded way of telling them they're morally inferior. Every day is a fight.

Ha ha your bosses have been flown in from the late 90s.

if not the 70's.

art-department-wise, anyway

kenan, get better coworkers

I was using pngfix on wizardishungry.com in like 2003!

no joke, pngs are indispensable.

get better coworkers

oh, it's on the to-do list, make no mistake.

Google flexing some muscle! For the good of the world, it seems.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/

I'm not ready to pop the cork yet, but the champagne is chilling.

I think almost no-one using ILX must be using IE, in that some of the stylesheets were screwed on IE until recently, as was the apostrophe in thread titles and first post problem, which has now been fixed, but few people mentioned it (to be fair to IE, it's the other browsers that don't follow the standards in making apostrophes work).

On that subject, I'm going to run a job on the database to fix all the old ones soon; I'll need to take it down for an hour or so to do that, but in the next month or so.

Anyone using maxthon - as mentioned here?
Indeed does anyone know what the authors are talking about when they say - If it stays "hip in China" it could reach a large global audience.?

I ask, because their website claims it's so secure you can throw away that blanket., which would be appealing. Although maybe they all claim that now?

If anyone uses a multi-browser setup where each is used for a different purpose or set of sites -- what do you have separated?

This page shows its image upside-down on desktop Safari and Firefox but correctly in Safari mobile

http://www.batterypark.tv/real-estate/photo-of-ice-inside-a-gateway-plaza-apartment.html

I'm using Orion right now and I really like it. Very fast, a nice way of handling tabs and tab groups, and slightly psychotic about tracking and privacy which suits me very well.

"But what about my extensions" you wail, well, they're working on making Chrome and Firefox extensions compatible - many already are. Sadly Workona is not, but I've had my issues with Workona so I'm mulling just exporting everything over somehow..

okay I'm all in on Orion. I did this once before with Arc and decided I hated it a week later so we'll see, but I think it will stick this time. Mainly because it looks and feels pretty much exactly like Safari, which I was already using as my main browser, with the only real difference is a much better way of handling tabs and tab groups (or at least, a way that my brain can actually get to grips with).

It will even do "profiles" which act as separate app instances, so you can have "Work" and "Home" profiles, each with their own tab groups, permissions, settings, preferences, cookies etc

Essentially I decided I didn't need all the features of something like Workona - notes, libraries of bookmarks, sharable spaces etc - I just needed a good way or organising different tabs in a form I was already familiar with

I can't stress how much better for my brain it is to have vertically stacked tabs in a sidebar rather than along the top

Oh also built-in ad blocker that BLOCKS YOUTUBE ADS

really cannot emphasise enough how much I prefer a sidebar of tabs stacked vertically. And links originating in a tab will nest/indent under that tab!!

Also the per-site content blocking etc is extremely easy to do

oh, it's macOS/iOS only, wanted to check it out but not for me then

if it's the vertical tabs you're interested in, firefox has the tree style tabs add-on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

duckduckgo app on android is now autofilling websites as i type.......this is not what i need from duckduckgo