Is there a decent web browser out there?
 

I'm stuck. I've tried all the major web browsers and they all kinda suck, i'm really unsure what to do.

We have IE, 99% of sites work with it but it's just hacked.. everything targets IE so i don't want to use it day after day.
Firefox is just buggy. Just visit www.bungie.net It lags like hell when you scroll. Even if the site isn't prefectly xhtml compliant, i'd prefer it to show the page properly rather than screw it up.
Opera manages bungie.net fine, but it's bloated, and you need to pay or see adverts all day long.

And that's it. I'm on the verge of making my own, sure it'll never work, but it's worth a try! Does anyone know of any other browsers out there?

firefox, buggy? try the new version.

best browser ever.

agreed, nothing better than i think of. Firefox all the way.

Hhehe. yeah. Firefox. I have the T-Shirt ;-)

And some stickers.

Try Mazthon http://www.maxthon.com I like it better than anyother
Best things, works with all pages, and has tabs

I used MYIE2 (previous version of Maxthon) for a long time until firefox RC1 came out...I have never looked back.

The thing to remember with Maxthon is that it is only a front-end utilising the IE shell...so you are still open to IE-based exploits...(and it is still IE ;))

also, remember that you have to download extensions for firefox from:

http://update.mozilla.org/?application=firefox

there are a ton of good ones

I just tried it, and yeah, that's pretty bad. I searched and this is discussed over at Anyone else get scrolling issues when visiting bungie.net? - MozillaZine Forums. Turns out that the page uses all sorts of IE-proprietary stuff; go figure, Microsoft wrote it.

Yeah Firefox is awful displaying Bungie.net. I have an extention on Firefox that allows me to view pages in IE quickly. So when I browse somewhere on firefox that doesn't work well/is buggy, I just hit view, and then view page in IE and it loads. I have always had two or three browsers on my desktop (Right now, Firefox and IE).

You might try "links". It's a command line, text-based browser for linux. Works like a champ.

If you haven't had any bugs in Firefox, your lucky. I've had the problems showing pages like mentioned, it often hogs loads of memory, the address bar list is fucked, the read mail thing thinks i have had 2 unread mails since i got the versions that have that feature..

Uninstalls don't work, it leaves too much crap behind. I messed up an install in the early versions (didn't uninstall before upgrading) and it's been broken ever since.

Sure, the bungie site is a bit biased towards crappy IE coding, but wouldn't it be better to support it anyway? It wouldn't do the browser any harm.

And i'll try out Maxathon and let you know.

Firefox is the best browser so far. Opera is way too big, consumes too much memory, and it has no activescript (you need that for gmail). If you are looking for a fast, convinient, easy to use browser that also looks good, you should use Firefox. I have not come across any bugs so far, and the support that they provide is excellent. The features within Firefox are way better than its competitors by leaps and bounds.. try Firefox before anything else

lynx.
homonyms are a bitch.
I do use this fairly often when testing sites though. If you can navigate the site with lynx, your site will be accessible to most people and search engine spiders.

Darkpho, they're computers most have everything you need to start programming. If you cant find what you like, write a better one. Hell, with Firefox you can even start by writing extensions. Though an extension to handle all of MS's proprietary tags may be a bit of a challenge.

As far as Bungie.net being compliant, HTMLTidy shows 54 errors, mostly related to proprietary tags. As long as IE dominates the browser market enough that those of us who use standards complaint browsers can be ignored, there will be problems with sites designed for the non compliant ones. The ieview firefox plugin is handy as is the launchy (my preference) plugin. Its not necessarily the browser that sucks i guess.

I was an IE guy for years, but I started using Firefox a month ago and haven't looked back since. There are some sites that are written poorly, so I have to pop it open in IE, but those are few and far between.

Yeah this is probably my biggest gripe with Firefox. I use Linux exclusively, so I don't have the option to "View in IE". I'd much rather Firefox simply display the pages without lagging.

This would be my second-biggest gripe. I don't even know *what* causes it to happen, but sometimes when you type in the address bar, the recent-address list appears *behind* the browser window and causes the address bar to lag as the window manager pages between the address bar and the browser window. Very annoying.

Despite what I said earlier, I don't think it's strictly correct to "make" Firefox display all pages correctly. This encourages crappy site design. If (when) Firefox begins dominating the browser market, web designers will start testing their pages in Firefox. If Firefox supports crappy IE code, designers will continue using crappy IE web design, and Firefox simply gets more bloated as it has to support more and more exceptions to the rules.

I think a clever Firefox-ey solution to the problem would be to leave Firefox lean and mean, and fully W3C compliant (and no more), and offer an extension that adds support for crappy sites. That way users can choose to either stick with a fast, lean browser, or add some optional bloat to make it more generally compatible. This also helps preserve the motivation for web designers to stick with standard coding practices, so that their site works on all browsers (not just the ones with the "crappy-site extension" installed).

TheFez: Homynyms aren't a bitch. There are two programs, lynx and links. Links is by far more advanced.

See Lynx at http://lynx.isc.org/

See Links at http://links.sourceforge.net/#what

I'm trying Maxthon out (using it to write this post) and it performs well for normal webpages. But it can't seem to handle many applets at all. On Miniclip, the hamsterball game gives instructions on how to allow the activex thing in IE, but I can't find an option anywhere in Maxthon to allow it. All the control lists are empty, i get no info bars telling what is going on.. seems a bit useless. Guess i'll still need IE for that type of thing.

I downloaded Lynx a few days ago.. seems i need to compile my own version. That usually goes wrong for me, so i'll give it a miss.

Mozilla stlil works...
 

Maybe I'm a bit of a dinosaur, but I've been using Mozilla for a long time, and have not found the time to port over to firefox. I run Mozilla on both WinXPpro (just for self-abuse) and Linux and have very few problems. Ocassionally sites don't work because they're coded spoecifically for some screwed-up IE funcionality that installs DSO expolits, ad-ware, spy-ware and many other chinks of malware code that I can happily live without.

I don't mean to rant, but Mozilla for browsing and mail has always worked, although I have tried, and really like, the evolution mail program, so maybe firefox/evolution is my next step. Until then, I dig Mozilla.

Just my $.02 worth.

Its that kind of thinking that made HTML go down the drain. As already said, firefox is greatness... go get it :)

I love links2...
anyway the reason firefox doesn't support crappy ie proprietary stuff is that...we don't know how to implement alot of it. They don't share the specs openly. Therefore it's damn hard to use them. Second, firefox is a cross platform browser that hopefully one day can compile on your toaster. (the processor being your toast) putting in proprietary IE crap would jam things up. Blame microsoft for not sharing their documentation or blame bungie or other sites for making IE only sites.

Sorry...had to rant..
support w3c!!

Speed Tests
 

Just downloaded Firefox and decided to do some comparison testing between IE and Firefox (latest version).
After all I've read about Firefox I was suprised AND confused by what I saw.
Here is the web site I went to for the speed test... if there are any better ones out there please post a link.
http://www.numion.com/
Now for the numbers I got:
First I ran IE and got a throughput of 69368 Bps / 555 kbps
Next I ran Firefox for a throughput of 46327 Bps / 371 kbps
I must say that I think Firefox "feels" like it's faster then IE and I like the interface... it is simplistic perfection... definetly smooth.

Any thoughts on the above data??

I shouldnt think the browser would have any baring on the download speed.. that would be your connection and networking software etc. As a browser, firefox renders the code it downloads faster than IE.

Maxthon also seems to use IE's history and cookies and such, which is a pain. I guess i'll have to stick to firefox, but i'm kinda getting used to Maxthon now. It has a cool utilities bar at the top with things like notepad in.. could be useful but other factors let it down.

If only i could completely wipe firefox from my PC.. let it start from scratch. I'm pretty sure there are remenants of the beta versions screwing things up but they refuse to give uninstall options!

It should be simple. FFx only installs to two locations; program and userdata. There's nothing in \windows, or \system, or stuff like that.

Make sure to set IE as your default browser before deleting Firefox.

They changed the places several times during the betas, so let's go...

c:\program files\:
c:\documents and settings\~\application data:

...and delete any folder with 'firefox', 'mozilla', 'firebird', or 'phoenix'. Then do a search for each of those strings, just in case you decided on a strange custom install location one of those times.

I'd ordinarly caution you to save certain files from your profile directories, especially your bookmarks.htm, but it sounds like you need to start fresh, and it also sounds like you still have all the Favorites in IE, so you can let FFx grab your IE favorites on a fresh startup.

I think this post is important enough that it's worth repeating. 99% of the time when Firefox is "buggy," it's because you should be writing e-mails to the webmasters of the page you're at complaining about them using shitty code.

In my personal experience I've had zero problems with Firefox.

Opera is my first and last choice on windows with Firefox 0.9.2 as the current backup - might upgrade that one of these months but I never touch it as it is bulky and akward by comparison in every respect.
Not sure what you mean by bloated - the installer for the non java version is only 3.4 MB or so and my copy of 7.5 only uses 9 MB installed. I have read cases of it using excessive memory at times if that is what you mean.

just DLed FF 1.0 after scrounging around for the non installing zip file and it is more impressive than ever on speed. Still a loooooong way to go on taking over as my primary browser even with all of the extensions that I have seen out there, but definitely a solid backup for those rare times I need one and a must have for testing sites along with Konqueror and Lynx.

If we're talking about speed, i've gotta bring up the MOOX optimized Firefox builds. Now THAT runs like a champ!

Same here. Been using it for a year and a half, and Mozilla before that, and have had *very* few bugs. Ive had far more bugs in IE than Ive ever experienced with Firefox. And like you said--when something wont render correctly, email the webmaster and tell them to quit writing such crappy code.

rats. i love being a smartass, but i hate being a smartass and wrong.

this does, however, only serve to prove that homonyms are a bitch though.

heh, yeah, Links rocks.

I have tryed them all and as long as they do what they are suppose to.And have the least amount of securety holes. works for me

After I had IE, and it got majorly hacked with spy-ware, I have been using Firefox, ever since. A whole lot better thats for sure. It does lag some times, but I'll take all of the other benifits over IE any day.

If you've got lag with Firefox 1.0 then you have computer issues. I've been pushing Firefox hard for over a week on three PCs and it's been great. Does it stumble on some pages? Yes, but so does IE. Some pages are just too damn big and full of crap.

So far, when you factor in stability, safety and add-ons, Firefox is probably the best out there right now.

The thing is, emailing them is unlikely to get anything changed, and i need a web browser that lets me browse the web, not just the bits of the web which are nicely coded!

I gotta say I come across very, very few websites that give me trouble with Firefox. It's pros outway its cons by a mile.

the thing i dont like about firefox is the way it puts sites into little drag down bar. It saves them by when u first type them in. Rather than how much u use them. So i type in my normal onces....then like once a year i use onces and ten they are at the top and the onces i use alot are at the bottom and its just a pain in the ass.....

Firefox is way better than anything else out there - I very rarely find sites that give it trouble, and the extentions are great!

I wasn't too big on firefox, after using their last beta, v0.9.2. I found several bugs without having to dig very deep at all into the browser functionality

I recently wiped my machines, and decided to try out v1.0, and I must say they've addressed many of the issues. It's much better than the betas, and I'm using it now as my primary browser. Sure, I get the occasional site that won't function correctly, but its a small price to pay for spyware free and cost free browsing. =)

well....it's not the bits that are nicely coded it's the bits that are coded as they should be coded...competently coded. Many two bit websites don't code for any other browser but IE in mind. This is changing rapidly however because of the rapid gains firefox(I liked it better with the name pheonix) has been making in the browser market. I believe that if you bug them enough, and everyone else that has firefox bugs them enough, that many will change. (do not file bug reports for those type of things...it just clogs crap up). You are welcome to file a bug report for any bug you find, and we will investigate it asap. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/



Also about that browser speed thing..Firefox gets alot of it's speed by first loading text, and then loading images. That way you can read while the images (on a slow server) take forever to load. This test only seems to load images, benifiting IE because IE loads everything at once.