Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera or Firefox

[felix]

I personally kind of like the new Opera theme.

[Felliko]

Firefox FTW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Xion Valkyrie]

Is it just me or does every time Opera come out with something new Firefox copies it a month later?

[TurkeyPotPie]

I like Chrome's speed and had been using it for a while in place of Firefox, but there is a repaint bug in Chrome on XP (which I used at work) that has driven me back to Firefox. The bug happens when switching from Chrome to another application (Excel in particular for me, although it happens with other applications as well). The other application will not repaint its window properly leaving Chrome "residue" all over the screen. I've been watching the bug reports on Chromium, but it still hasn't been fixed yet.

[sa547]

^
What version of Windows you're using there?

[TurkeyPotPie]

Originally Posted by sa547

^
What version of Windows you're using there?

XP Pro SP3. It's not consistent, but the bug happens enough to be extremely annoying. There's still an open bug for it on the Chromium bug tracker. It doesn't happen when I use Aero on Vista or 7, so I think it's an XP thing.

[sa547]

Looks more like an GUI issue; in Win7 we can see Chrome with nifty Aero effects, but on the other hand I've yet to see this problem on my SP3 installation, except on occasion when I have Winamp open and I see fragments of its interface shortly before Chrome's window gets refreshed; sometimes the scroll bar wouldn't move for a while.

But I wound up with Chrome because for some strange reason Firefox and the most recent version of Flash would crash the PC or totally black out the monitor after picking a fight with the nVidia video drivers (the last version made for the FX5600 series of cards).

Guess that I'll have to start saving up money for a new PC.

[GHDpro]

I'm not 100% certain this is the right place to post this, but it beats reviving threads that are years old or creating a new one (which would be a bit overkill).

Anyway, it occasionally bugged me when downloading multiple .torrent or .nzb files in Firefox that certain sites pop-up a "Do you want to open or save this file?" dialog box and that "Do this action from now on" checkbox never bloody worked.

Until now.

The reason Firefox (and other browsers presumably) pops that window is because the webserver sends back the header: "Content-Disposition: attachment". The "attachment" status basically forces the browser to offer the user to save the file, even if he always wants to open it with his favorite application like a torrent client or usenet downloader.

The solution would be to ask the webmaster to change the script to return "Content-Disposition: inline" instead, which "solves" the problem from a user point of view. In case however the webmaster does not respond or is otherwise unwilling:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...nedisposition/

Voila: a plugin that rewrites the header to always have Firefox interpret "Content-Disposition: attachment" as "Content-Disposition: inline". This saves me a lot of extra clicking.

[Irenicus]

Today my Firefox updates to Firefox 6.

Wut. I thought 5 was new.

[demonix]

Originally Posted by Irenicus

Today my Firefox updates to Firefox 6.

Wut. I thought 5 was new.

Don't you mean 6.0.1 as firefox 6 has been out for a few weeks now.

[calorie]

Lately I've been using Safari (for Windows).

Reasons: thick font rendering which I love, interface, has all the add-ons I need (some I like better than their Firefox versions), can't stand the Firefox 6 thin-ass font rendering

[Archon_Wing]

Originally Posted by cyberbeing

I would normally be all for the easy interpenetration if it wasn't for the fact that Firefox 5 doesn't even exist yet. No code branch, no concept, no nothing. Combine that with Mozilla's slow release schedule of the past, and you'll see why releasing a major version of in a 'few months' is completely unrealistic and impossible. Beta testing alone takes a few months.

Firefox 1.0		November 9, 2004
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1	September 9, 2005
Firefox 1.5		November 29, 2005
Firefox 2.0 Beta 1	July 12, 2006
Firefox 2.0		October 24, 2006
Firefox 3.0 Beta 1	November 19, 2007
Firefox 3.0		June 17, 2008
Firefox 3.5 Beta 1	October 14, 2008
Firefox 3.5		June 30, 2009
Firefox 3.6 Beta 1	October 30, 2009
Firefox 3.6		January 21, 2010
Firefox 4.0 Beta 1	July 6, 2010
Firefox 4.0		Hopefully February 2011

You can't magically turn 2-4 years of development time into few months. Just expect something like Firefox 4.1 in a few months, which alone would be 4x faster than normal.

If they decide to rename Firefox 4.1 as Firefox 5 with no new features or design, so be it. A new major version every few months?!?! We would have Firefox 8 by the end of 2011.

Man, I just came across this old post and it is visionary, in retrospect , because in 2 years we have had 16 new versions of Firefox. (Arguably each version worse than the last.) They seem to have had put getting bigger numbers over releasing something that doesn't actually suck.

It's not 2004 anymore, where Firefox was usable because IE was terrible, and Firefox was less terrible. It's no wonder why Chrome just came in and took it all in so fast.

[Wandering_Youth]

I've been using Firefox for a long time now and I still like or have not found any issues with it that has made me look for a different browser.

I love the fact that you can tweak the hell of Firefox with about:config settings. Sure, it was a little when I first used it ages ago but that was because I didn't know how to properly tweak it for max speed.

I also like the fact that there quite a bit of useful add-ons for Firefox such as Ad Block.

[felix]

Originally Posted by Wandering_Youth

I've been using Firefox for a long time now and I still like or have not found any issues with it that has made me look for a different browser.

I love the fact that you can tweak the hell of Firefox with about:config settings. Sure, it was a little when I first used it ages ago but that was because I didn't know how to properly tweak it for max speed.

I also like the fact that there quite a bit of useful add-ons for Firefox such as Ad Block.

All you've just said is in chrome, and arguably many things are better.

[Renegade334]

In case other fellow Opera users haven't heard it already, Opera Software will be dropping the Presto Engine in favor of WebKit.

From what I hear through the grapevine, a lot of the developers that were previously working on Presto (remember the last time we had 11.x and 12.x Pre-Release and Final builds pushed forward every couple days or weeks? Seems like a lifetime ago) left the company and now it seems they're either completely stuck with Presto's development or they've gotten lazy and are trying to drop the potato while it's still relatively hot in their hands.

Anyway, the Internet's browser biodiversity just took a hit.

In other news, well, IE 10 for Windows 7 was released a couple weeks ago, and Firefox 20 has just made landfall today.

[felix]

Didn't know about the developers jumping ship part, thanks.

[creb]

I use Chrome, but that's largely out of habit (and being so tightly wed to the Google ecosystem; I started using Chrome when it first came out, and its initial simplicity was a real difference compared to the bloat of the rest of the browsers back then).

I'm not much for extensions other than an adblocking one. A css extension is nice, but I could live without it.

Objectively, I wouldn't have any issues with using IE 10 on Windows 8, but there does not appear to be any free adblocking addons (just a paid one). It's certainly fast, and I prefer the way it renders fonts over Chrome.

That said, Chrome is still the only browser that doesn't waste space with the generic Windows title bar. While I like how IE 10 gives you the option to put your tabs inline with the address bar (the address bar is so much wasted space on any decent sized monitor), the space it saves is lost by having a title bar at the top of the window).

I know Safari, in one of its betas, tried to do away with the title bar, and there was so much gnashing of teeth they brought it back. Haven't used Safari in years, so no idea what the state of it is now. Imo, there's no purpose to a title bar for a web browser, but Google appears to be the only people that believe that.

I've never found much use for Firefox, even in its heyday, mainly because I don't really care about extensions, and back in the IE 7 days, there was a free adblocking addon, so I never bothered with Firefox, and only switched from IE when Chrome came out as a beta.

Opera was always too gimmicky for me, as again, I don't require all the bloat these browsers seem to think people want (and, hey, maybe people do want all the gimmicks and I'm a weirdo). That said, I do use Opera Mini on my smartphone, but only because it has proxy servers built into it directly, allowing you to bypass your corporate/etc firewall with no hassle. I think the purpose had to do with compression, not to bypass corporate firewalls, but it's the firewall bypassing that makes it my smartphone browser of choice, even if I'd like to use Chrome instead. I guess I have blind faith that Opera isn't skimming my personal info for nefarious purposes when doing so.

About the only thing I wish Chrome had that it doesn't is the ability to render font the way IE 10 does, and perhaps a more jazzy new tab page, ala Safari's/Opera's. There are extensions for Chrome that try to "prettify" the new tab page, but I find them all lacking in one way or another as they all try to add functionality to the New Tab page, rather than simply making it "pretty". I don't need more functionality.

Which brings me back to IE 10. A free adblocker would likely make it far less likely that people switch away, as I imagine, discounting "geeks", that's the main reason "normal" people would bother going through the effort of switching.

[spikexp]

I don't use Chrome because I don't like the google ecosystem, it's way to big... Don't want to give to much thing on one company.

Originally Posted by creb

That said, Chrome is still the only browser that doesn't waste space with the generic Windows title bar.

Wait what? Chrome is barely smaller than my opera and my firefox...

Originally Posted by creb

Opera was always too gimmicky for me, as again, I don't require all the bloat these browsers seem to think people want (and, hey, maybe people do want all the gimmicks and I'm a weirdo).

Many (almost all) feature of opera won't do anything if you don't want or know them. They are simply option (and the mail client is awesome).


Doesn't matter, linx is the best, content over style

[creb]

I just downloaded and installed Firefox to check, as I hadn't used Firefox in years, and yup, it still has a title bar, which again, makes zero sense in a web browser, wasting space for no reason.

[blaze0041]

Originally Posted by creb

I just downloaded and installed Firefox to check, as I hadn't used Firefox in years, and yup, it still has a title bar, which again, makes zero sense in a web browser, wasting space for no reason.

Huh? The title bar hasn't been around (by default) since version 4 (it's now version 20). Perhaps you still have a leftover Firefox profile in your AppData folder, or you're using Windows XP.
Uncheck "Menu bar", and the title bar will disappear as well.