Savvy Web Surfers Catch New Wave of Browsers

Reuters News Service ^ | Sun Sep 26, 2004 | Adam Pasick

[Popman]

The tagline says it all

[Terpfen]

Firefox hit 2 million downloads in 10 days, double their original goal of 1 million downloads in 10 days.

Get Firefox! Definitely the world's best browser.

[TruBluKentuckian]

I've tried all the recent versions put out by Mozilla and while they are better than I.E., I still prefer Opera.

The Mozilla browsers, to me, all feel "clunky". Opera seems to be smoother and better looking, besides being faster.

Just my opinion thought I'm a bit biased. I've used Opera for going on 3 years now.

[Popman]

http://www.mozilla.org/

[kylaka]

Mozilla does rule. I've been using it for two years now. In those rare instances that I'm forced to use IE I find myself asking "why would anybody choose to use it".

[Moonman62]

I use Firefox, but it still has bugs that are years old, and unlikely to ever get fixed. Of course, bugs never stopped Microsoft.

[Popman]

The Mozilla browsers, to me, all feel "clunky".

I had the same feeling for about the first day. I downloaded some very neat extensions and have been in love every since.

[Popman]

I have yet to find a spell check extension for FireFox.

Do you know if there is such an animal?

[humblegunner]

Running Mozilla with no complaints.. or pop ups, or spyware, or system outages.

The plug-ins to view animations are not so hot, I switch to Exploder for animations or clips of video.

I guess that would be one complaint, huh?

[DaGman]

at one time netscape had 100%. things change.

[Terpfen]

Back when I used Opera, it was at version 6.50. It was alright, but it didn't feel solid. It was very configurable, but the browsing left something to be desired. 7.50 is much better, but I'm sticking with Firefox (which has a couple of tweaks you can implement to make it even faster than Opera.)

Mozilla itself is meant to be a web application suite, so a direct comparison to Opera doesn't quite work.

Any of the three programs (Opera, Firefox, Mozilla) are better choices than IE, but Firefox's customizability wins the day, IMO.

[JoJo Gunn]

For saving web pages as .mht's, and because Java for Mozilla is a crash prone mess.

[Popman]

I use Firefox, but it still has bugs that are years old,

I have yet to find a bug, can you elaborate?

[Terpfen]

Try this. I don't know if that's what you're looking for, as I don't use it. But it seems to be what you want.

[kylaka]

Do you get any IE pop-up ads, when IE is not running? I've gotten a few lately, but can't seem to see any pattern to them. If you have gotten any, do you know a way to block them?

[Popman]

In those rare instances that I'm forced to use IE I find myself asking "why would anybody choose to use it".

I had the exact response.

It's like upgrading from a old rotory phone to the newest cell phone.

[Moonman62]

Slows down and crashes after long periods of use. Intermittently, will scroll up a few lines when I click a link or a dropdown box instead of the expected action. Will not return to the same point in a long page when I return to it with the browser's back arrow.

[Grut]

I've tried Opera off and on going back to v3.something but it has never worked very well for me - and problems don't seem to get fixed.

The feeling I get is that Opera's answer to features that don't work is to add new features that also don't work. It's a pity, because on paper it ought to be a world-beater.