From Opera to Firefox

A few days ago I found out that Opera 10.0 Beta 2 came out and as I still love Opera ( though I don't use it anymore) I decided to give it a try for old time's sake.

The interface is a little changed, nothing major but better overall. They seem to have resolved the stability issues, the program didn't crash, and they also seem to have resolved the rendering issues. I actually couldn't find any rendering faults this time , which is a big plus. And of course Opera passes the Acid 3 test with 100%. There's a new feature called Turbo, which is designed for the one person in the world that still uses dial-up. When turned on, your pages appear much faster because of a lossy algorithm that makes your pictures look like shit, but hey you see pages a lot faster. It's actually a useful feature for that ONE person out there.

Unfortunately no plug-ins work. I mean nothing besides Flash Player. Quicktime didn't work, Reader didn't work, and Windows Movie Crap didn't work. Plus the program now uses more memory that IE and Firefox. What's up with that? I would have added screenshots but I deleted it immediately and went back to Firefox and crying. Hopefully by the time they have the finished product ( which if I'm not mistaking should be Q1 of of 2010 as if it's a major release) they'll have worked out all of these problems. Cheers.

PS: It kinda seems we're going in circles here with the same subjects coming up over and over Browsers->windows-Apple-browsers-windows-etc and I'm getting sick of it. My next post will be about ..hmm ..muppets. Yeap that's right MUPPETS.

Opera Unite

While waiting for the OS3 for the iPhone, V recommended I do a little research on a new project from Opera, Unite. If you've been reading this blog you know I'm quite a fan of Opera though lately they have been disappointing me.

What is Opera Unite?

Unite is a new concept. Actually, it's a question for an older concept.. " aren't we missing something? shouldn't this be different? " where this refers to the internet.
The internet may be viewed as " a series of tubes" but that's somewhat misleading. Fortunately the way the internet works is quite easy to understand and if you're reading this blog you already know how it works. The whole idea behind Unite is that why should we depend on servers who somebody else manages? why should we depend on 3rd parties when it comes to file sharing and other such interactions?

This idea in itself is worth pondering. And the people at opera say they have a solution, but I believe it to be flawed from the beginning. Their ideea is that each computer on the web should be it's own web-server, and interactions should be ..well .. directly peer-to-peer. And somehow Unite is said to deliver that. But my honest opinion is that Unite is an upgraded tunelling , VPN app. Something like next-gen Hamachi, over which you can now send files and stream media. But that's crap. The whole ideea with posting on the web is "it's there even if you're not". Social services are meant to be hosted by 3rd parties. Instant messaging is already well established with it's own apps. Same goes for browsing, games and everything else. Why would you want to downgrade all of the great apps and services out there and stick them all up in another new app? it just doesn't really make sense.

And let's say you do that, let's say it works out fine, but in the end ..YOU ARE STILL DEPENDANT ON 3RD PARTY SERVERS, opera's in this case.

SO let's try and forget for a second about utopic web-spaces and let's focus on rolling out the useful software..YOU HEAR ME APPLE??? useless people....

Browsers

I'm really pissed right now, for half an hour I've been trying to get to different sites and I have to use all possible browsers that exist each for a particular thing.  And i'm sick of it .

A good simple, good design and ergonomic browser is just something that doesn't exist and never will !!!!! Firefox looks like shit, I personally hate it + I can't even download it right now cause it doesn't f-ing work! Opera works like shit! Internet Explorer IS shit! And Chrome still needs some work put into it for my liking. Safari doesn't even count. I prefer text browsers rather than Safari. I prefer trying to get to a site via Command Prompt rather than Safari. I prefer physically going to the server and printing out a carbon copy of the page's source code rather than using Safari.

So I guess I'll just have to revisit THE LIST of less popular browsers and one out of there..

God damn it!

Asus TV 7135 Tuner Card

I had another PC a couple of years ago, runnning Win XP. The PC came with a tv tuner card. Now i'm not the type to watch tv ..basically everything i watch is on my pc and usually not related to this country. So I didn't use at all because of that, and also because for some unexplained reason the sound didn't work. When I gave that machine away I took out the tuner card and yesterday i came across it. Having nothing better to do and no life of my own I decided to try it out and see if i could get it working.

I hooked it up to the motherboard and turned on the PC. I was a little worried about drivers cause the original driver cd would only install on : " windows 95, 98, 98se, 2000 or later". Don't actually get how that's possible but anyway I really thought that it wouldn't run on my Windows 1.1 ( Vista Ultimate SP1 ). After loading Vista had a little surprise for me. It actually auto installed the driver from microsoft's server. So I said great ..let's try it out. Launched Win Media Center and tried to watch tv. OPS sorry no tv tuner card found. You need one! BUY ONE! FROM WINDOWS MARKETPLACE NOOOW! I thought to myself ..well the pc doesn't recognise the card..too bad. And i took a look in Device Manager under Sound, Video and Game controllers but the card DID show up there. Tried to update but it said the drivers were the latest there was. After 10 minutes of looking around i realised that Vista had only installed the driver for the FM receiver on the card, not for the video part. So after another 20 minutes of looking around the Asus website i came across the corect driver and installed it. Then I started Media Center one more time.. WOW SORRY NO TUNER CARD FOUND BUY ONE YOU CHEAP BASTARD. I was sick with media center so i got the latest version ( trial) of Power Cinema and the card works perfectly with it.

PS: Opera has reached version 9.62 but it sucks more and more. I have problems with it rendering many pages ( including this "new post" page) and there's no support for silverlight and other such add-ons.

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 ( .1)

    So the new Firefox 3.0 has been out now for a few days and I just updated to 3.0.1. It fixes a few bugs encountered in the original 3.0 version.

( WHY the hell does Opera have to open the Help page on the same tab you are on!! It's the 3rd time i lose this article and i start rewriting it!)

   As you know Mozilla Firefox is one of the leading browsers out there coming close with Internet Explorer and as usually they have delivered a great product. The new release fixes tons of bugs, improves compatibility with 3rd party add-ons, has what I believe to be a very nice improved user interface, and greater performance than ever. The only thing I still don't really like about Firefox is how tabs seem to be somewhat of a secondary feature, but that's maybe because I'm so used to Opera.

   And speaking of other browsers, a few months ago I had anounced that the first batch of betas had been released almost simultaneously. I was refeering to the Firefox 3.0 , Opera 9.0 and IE 8 betas. Well after being released so close to one another, Opera took the lead and had their final release version some time ago. Since then they have reached version 9.51 fixing bugs along the way. Unfortunately the 9.x versions don't seem to be as good as promised. Mozilla came round and got out their 3.0 version which is great, and 3.0.1 latest that will probably be browser of the year. And while all of this is going on ..guess what the people at Microsoft are doing? Brandon LeBlanc from MS said that Beta 2 of IE 8 will be coming out shortly. And you simply know it's not going to be anywhere nearly as good as the other browsers. 

Browsers

    First of all I want to say sorry for the long absence but the holidays were quite busy for me, I was away most of the time and quite focused on trying not to use the PC because I really needed a break. Secondly, I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope you all had great holidays.
    Now, as you've seen in the title I've actually commited to the impossible and started to write this article on browsers. Why am I writing this ? Well mainly because there are 5 major internet browsers out there, and I myself was really curios which was the best and why, and just maybe this will also point out to which browser works best for you. Ok so the major 5 browsers which I will refer to are : Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Safari. All of them created for browsing the net, but which is the best?

    Internet Explorer

    This browser first appeared in 1995 with the Plus! release of MS Windows 95. It is probably the most known browser out there even though it's usually not the best one. In the beginning IE struggled for a long time to try and catch up with Netscape Navigator , the first public browser . In 1996 both browsers were at the same level offering brand new and exciting support for Java Script and CSS. But due to the fact that IE was free ( unlike Netscape) and that it continued to evolve backed up by Microsoft, it won the battle. By 1998 IE had majority of the market shares, and Netscape's future was unclear. With the passing of time Microsoft kept developing the program increasing security and support for third party features, but also adding their own new features that kept this browser at a very competitive level.
    In 2001 MS released Internet Explorer 6 alongside Windows XP, which was now very focused on security and reliability. And now in 2007 the latest release came out with Vista and that is Internet Explorer 7. IE 7 is the best version of IE of course, and it brings new features such as tabbed browsing ( IE was the last browser to adopt tabbed browsing), better support and a friendlier relationship with the user regarding RSS feeds, advanced printing and other such features. Now the dowside of the browser, while it is true that it now supports almost all third party add-ons for any kind of media, and it is true that it is one of the most secure out there, it has come to lack in speed and to consume a lot of resources. IE7 is probably the second slowest browser ( the first being Safari ) that there is and the fact that it's free is not a good excuse anymore as all the above mentioned browsers have become freeware. There are no other special features that I find worth mentioning. It has all the common features that every browser now has.

    Mozilla Firefox

    As I mentioned in 1998 the future of Netscape was unsure. So they decided their browser would be free from then on and also that it would be an open source project. 4 years later ( yes quite a long time) the first version of the Mozilla came out which was then named Pheonix. The first official Mozilla Firefox came in November 04 with their 1.0 release. It included advanced security , and new features such as RSS/Atom feed support.
    The second full official release came 2 years later in October 2006 when Firefox 2.0 was released, which added certain features such as session restoration after a browser crash, search using Google and Yahoo, an add-on manager and more importantly anti-phishing protection. It also included support for JavaScript 1.7. One year later version 2.0.11 was released that fixed a few problems that had arisen. This is the latest stable release of Firefox. Now you may say there is nothing special about this browser, but it's speed, stability, performance,high security ( still some debate if it is the safest ) and excellent compatibility with 3rd party add-ons make it one of the best browsers around and this shows as it's popularity is quite rapidly growing. It now owns about 17% of the market share.
    Work has already begun on version 3.0 but no public beta has been put out. While we wait , this is still one of the best browsers.
Note: Firefox 2.0.11 ( the latest stable release) does NOT pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test. But neither does IE7 nor Netscape. For more info on this, search on Wikipedia for Acid2 test.

     Netscape Navigator 

     I have to be sincere and say that this is probably the browser that surprised me the most. Why? Well because I actually hadn't heard/used Netscape ever since windows 95. I didn't even know this browser still existed, and yes that's ignorance on my part. Well I am very glad I found it once again. Popularity with it seems to be at an all time low ( that's the reason I didn't know it was still out there) but performance of the latest version which is Netscape Navigator 9 is above average. And I actually think it's even a little faster than Firefox.
    But unfortunately that's where the better part of it stops. While it does have compatibility for most common web technologies used now, it still lacks certain popular features ( right now it does not support e-mail and other such features). It is because of this and other reasons why it seems to be destined to always remain somewhere in the shadows, nothing more than " a backup browser". Plus on December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL will discontinue their web browser on February 1, 2008.Petitions have been made in an attempt to stop this, but I can't really say how successful they've been.

    Safari

    Safari is Apple's official internet browser and the first (1.0) version was released in 2003 alongside Mac OSX. Windows support didn't exist until June of last year. The latest version (3.0.4 ) works on both Xp and Vista.
    As with everything else Apple, Safari has a cool look and cute features, but it doesn't really take you all the way. It does have all the popular features such as tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, incremental finding, ad filtering, the oh so marketed page zooming that ie7 has. It does support almost anything you can think of that other browsers support, it actually passed the Acid2 test that most other browsers didn't. It even has complete text-to-speech support. Great security features. So why isn't it number one? Well mainly because it is slow. Certain people said that is quite fast and a great browser but comparing it to all the other browsers it seems to me that it's the slowest. Second I personally wasn't able to find any 3rd party add-ons to go along with it. On Mac Leopard it works great, being part of the OS and taking advantage of all the built in features of Leopard but on Windows it seems to be somehow out of place. I can't comment any further on it. As I said great browser but somehow it just stops dead in it's tracks.

    Opera

    Ok I have saved the best for last. Yes I do believe Opera is the best browser out there at this moment. Opera's first public realease was in 1996 and back then it only worked on Windows. Even though it's been around for such a long time it hasn't really caught on until now. The latest release stable release came on the 19th of December 07. The early versions had a lot of issues and that's why this browser was never very popular, not to mention the adds that were included in the browser some previous versions.
    Right now it is clear, fast, extremly economic on resources, and supports more features than any other browser. It does pass the Acid2 test and it has almost everything you can think of. I believe Opera is the browser that invented tabs ( but I am not sure of this so don't yell if it happens to be false). Anyway it does support tabs, mouse gestures, voice commands, email, adress book, bookmark management, almost any type of web standard imaginable, it even supports BitTorrent. It even supports Web Forms 2.0 that no other browser supports. It is a jewel. And if not the fastest it is definitely in top 3. What can I say ..I am more satisfied with this browser than any other and the only fault I have found for it is that most tracker sites will not allow you to use Opera's built in BitTorrent but that is a mild incovenience considering that using IE for just one link isn't that bad.

If you wish to look for a specific piece of information on support for any of the above browsers that I have not mentioned you can look here, a great source of info.

Well that's it. I've done it, I've written it though not in as much technical detail as I would have wanted. Disclaimer thingy : I have used both professional reviews and personal experiences in the descriptions above. Also all the support information or/and the technical specs were taken from OFFICIAL or trustworthy sites ( such as Wikipedia). If any of the provided information is false and you have proof of this please adress me in any form you want and let me know. The last thing I want is to post false info.

Anyway that's it. Hope this was worth it. I will definitely come back on this subject and the next article will also be on Browsers but the ones that aren't so popular such as Maxthon, Camino and everything else I can get my hands on.
Enjoy, Geeky.