Savvy Web Surfers Catch New Wave of Browsers

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

[NewMediaFan]

LONDON (Reuters) - Since Microsoft won the browser wars in the late 1990s, its Internet Explorer software has been the way most people surf the Web. But with some slick new challengers on the scene, that may be about to change.

While Internet Explorer has remained largely unchanged for years, alternative Web browsers like Opera, Apple Computer's Safari and especially Firefox are wowing users with innovative features and the promise of increased protection from hackers.

Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, the first popular Web browser, which kick-started the dot-com boom before being vanquished by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape was then purchased by America Online, which donated the software's code to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

After nearly three years of fits and starts, Mozilla has turned out a sleek, fast-running browser. While numbers are hard to come by, more than five million copies of the software have been downloaded in the last two months, and more than a million in the 10 days since its 1.0 "preview" version was released Sept. 15.

Most estimates put Internet Explorer's overall market share at about 95 percent. But a shift can also been seen among the early adopter crowd, which picks up on technology trends months or years before the mainstream...

[Terpfen]

Tabbed browsing takes multiple browser instances and puts them in one window. Let's say you're browsing the latest FR headlines, and there are three that catch your eye. With Internet Explorer, if you wished to load all three simultaneously, you'd have to open two new windows--adding two instances to your taskbar. With a tabbed browser, you can open the pages in new tabs--everything stays in one browser instance, but you can browse each page as if they were a separate window.

This screenshot has an example of tabbed browsing. There are three tabs open: Google.com is loaded in the leftmost tab, "Cal State San Marcos Home Page" is loaded in the center, and the currently-selected tab is the old mozilla.org home page.

It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it makes quite a difference in practice. Get Firefox and try it out. The default implementation is pretty basic--you have to open tabs manually by hitting ctrl+T, or going to File -> New Tab. If you download an extension (add-on), such as Tabbrowser Extensions to fully-implement tabbed browsing.

[unspun]

Opera user for years --and never stopped using Netscape/Mozilla.

[unspun]

With Firefox, can you drag and drop a tabbed page from one instance/window of Firefox, to another (as can be done with Opera)?

[Terpfen]

Yes, you can. I just did it to verify. Keep in mind, I have Tabbrowser Extensions installed, so I can't say if this is enabled by default, or if TB enabled it. But it's there, one way or the other.

[Terpfen]

"When you reload on a message board, after new messages have been added to the thread, you do not end up in the same place you were before you reloaded."

Actually, this is probably less of a bug and more of a feature that hasn't been coded in (it IS a pretty minor feature.) If you're that passionate about it, post a report on Bugzilla and the Mozilla guys will at least read it.

[Terpfen]

"How does Firefox differ from 7.2."

Completely different products. Netscape is put out by AOL now. Firefox is a completely new product, with its only relations to Netscape being that Firefox is worked on by many former Netscape coders, and it uses a suped-up Gecko rendering engine. Give it a whirl.

[Terpfen]

"I find the the Firefox "bookmarks" system very slow. Seems like "its forever" while I wait on it to place the bookmark in the dialog feature."

Sounds like a system problem on your end. This is the first I've heard of such a problem. You can reinstall and see if that helps, or run a spyware/malware/virus scan and see if anything is slowing down your PC.

[KneelBeforeZod]

I've found firefox crashes on some pdf stuff. another freeper mentioned that too.

so I have to go to IE to look at some pdfs

[KneelBeforeZod]

I've found that my bookmarks scroll all over the place on their own (sometimes)

[Terpfen]

Of course, Opera also has rendering issues of its own. Just take a look at gamespot.com to see what I mean...

[KneelBeforeZod]

one thing that bugs me about firefox is that pop up blockers will stop some firefox windows from opening, like manage bookmarks and download manager

[Terpfen]

Which blocker are you referring to? Using the built-in blocker, combined with the Adblock extension, does not stop native Firefox windows from opening. The point of pop-up blockers is to stop pop-up advertisements from loading while you use the Internet, not to stop you from accessing the browser's features.

[Timeout]

I finally used the direct link in post #64 and it worked.

[snopercod]

I experienced spurious IE windows opening when clicking on a hyper-link in my E-mail program, Eudora. Upgrading from Firefox 0.9 to 1.0 fixed the problem.

[unspun]

Yes, you can. I just did it to verify. Keep in mind, I have Tabbrowser Extensions installed, so I can't say if this is enabled by default, or if TB enabled it. But it's there, one way or the other.

Thanks. This thread may yet pull me away from Opera, to an 'mericun browser. Opera 7.50 is very handy, though. An improvement I would look, is a more robust use of java (sometimes in Opera, it just doesn't work quite as well as Mozilla or IE).

What makes the vanilla Mozilla suite very handy for me is the ability to cut presented HTML and paste into Composer. Very nice for clipping items into FR, for one thing!

[Eagle9]

Missed another comment... wow, I'm terrible at this. Okay. Firefox speed tweaking. This is written for version 0.9.x, so I don't know if you can still do this in 1.0PR. Definitely worth a shot, though.

1. Type "about:config" in the address field.
2. Set the value of network.http.pipelining to "true".
3. Set the value of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to "100".
4. Set the value of network.http.proxy.pipelining to "true"
5. Set the value of nglayout.initialpaint.delay to "0"

Thanks for the speed tweaks.
I'm using 1.0PR and was able to set all of those you listed except for nglayout.initialpaint.delay to "0". I wasn't able to find that one, but just the first three tweaks increased the speed.

[crushelits]

I've always used Netscape.

Netscape is NOT subject to attacks like IE and its also faster than IE.

New version is best so far. Netscape 7.2

http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp