Mon16Jan20061243AM
Browser wars!
tagged tech
One of the hottest topics these days is the fight amongst browsers. People have started to look beyond Internet Explorer and its limitations and moved to various other browsers.
A couple of very popular alternatives for Internet Explorer are Mozilla Firefox and Opera and there are several movements on the web, especially in blogs and forums, to get people to switch from IE to other browsers. Day-by-day the popularity and usage of IE is reducing and Microsoft better do a lot of hardwork if they want the next version of IE to slow down or stop this loss of users.
Browse Happy is an interesting site, which lists some of the alternative browsers to IE and also goes on to tell what is wrong with IE. It also has stories and experiences of people who switched from IE to an alternate browser.
Ever since I decided to make the jump from IE a few months I’ve been using Opera and I absolutely love it.
A few features that I liked about Opera are
- Mouse gestures - I got so used to them that when I use explorer sometimes I do a gesture and then wonder why nothing happened!
- Saved sessions - If while surfing the power goes off or something crashes and Opera gets closed or I simply close Opera, I don’t need to break my head remembering which sites I was browsing before Opera closed. Opera remembers the sites I was browsing and next time I open Opera, I am back to all the sites I was surfing.
- Lighter on memory and faster to load - Opera loads up very quickly and even with about 20 tabs open consumes less memory than say Firefox does.
It feels and works so good. But it has issues with certain sites and controls. Opera has a very dedicated and exclusive fan club and from what I’ve seen - people either love Opera instantly (something like love at first sight) or they never like it.
I recently started using Firefox also. Mainly to see how my site shows up in this most popular browser after IE. Firefox has increasingly gained popularity and support for its features and extensibility. One of the best things about it is that we can add functionalities and features to the browser through plugins. I’ve got myself some cool plugins like the mouse gestures, currency convertor, etc.
I will now be using both Opera and Firefox interchangably, although Opera is still my default browser. Henceforth if some page does not load correct in Opera I will check at Firefox before opening IE. But there is one time wherein I know I have to rely on IE - to check my Windows Live Mail, which currently does not support Opera or Firefox!
