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1. Which browser is the best?
2. Discuss your answer.
Pros and Cons of the different Browsers.
I've always liked pushing products
You'd make a great military test-pilot! ;)
I've still never been impressed with Opera, just something about it seems bulky.
This is the same aesthetic sensation that made me not switch to Opera, I just don't like how it feels, and I never have, even though I can't pinpoint the exact cause of that feeling, I know what you're talking about. Oddly, when trying out different browsers on my non-tech friends, they have had the same reaction, and stopped using it almost immediately. I have to believe that, aside from Opera charging too much for their product by a factor of 2 (I would happily have paid for 6 and 7 if it had cost $19), this might be one of the main reasons they've had difficulties breaking through 1% market share.
I've never been able to put my finger exactly on the source of this impression. My suspicion is that it comes from the programming decisions they make to achieve their goal of having the browser be able to work on handheld devices without modification.
I've always coded to support it as far as possible. Also of course, it's hard to get around the fact of its consistenly miniscule market share, for me supporting it has been more ideological than logical, wanting to support the top 3 browsers no matter how trivial their market share is, although some of the annoyingly hard to resolve bugs I've found in 7.1 to 7.23 to 7.5 have markedly decreased my willingness to do that any more.
I would have much preferred the quirks MS box model to the W3C box model, it makes far more intuitive sense from a design perspective than having to add up all your elements to create the box.
I suspect that like the float model, it's because they were thinking beyond people who design web pages that are seen in browsers.
When I prepare the camera-ready copy for a book, the publisher gives me a width and that width is the text box, not counting the margins or borders or whatever. It is from the start of the line to the end of the line of text (assuming full justification). He doesn't care, in fact, how big the margins are, so long as my stuff fits in the box dimensions he gives me.
I suspect that, unlike most web designers, the W3C knew that this is standard in publishing which has been developed over a very long time. It may be a stupid standard, but the W3C is all about standards and, for people coming from other media (and remember, in the early days, anyone with any expertise at all was coming from another media), that's a familiar approach.
If there were no Mozilla, I would use Opera. I don't use it now because it screws up some of my CSS and its simply too heavy--puts a real strain on my system, especially if I have Photoshop open as well. I don't have this problem with Firefox.
I still run Opera for the speed, standards support, and a list of features other browsers can't touch.
If I'm doing site admin, Netscape wins hands down. Why, because I usually do a lot of copy n paste, setting up customer records and stuff, and for some reason about half the time Opera either doesn't copy, or the pop up box gets in the way of the rest of a long string that I'm trying to copy... really annoying either way.
If I'm just surfing, reading news, whatever, I really like Opera. It seems to load everything much faster, and I can navigate without doing much more than touching the mouse. I'm still in the 30 Days to Become an Opera Lover phase, but so far the love is still strong.
Sometimes I'll take a hour or 2 to play my favorite online game at my favorite online gaming site, and the only browser that works for that is IE. Just another reason it's falling out of favor for me, because it's being pushed on me without an alternative choice.
. . . and a list of features other browsers can't touch.
Care to elaborate? I contend that FireFox has far more features than Opera, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Would like to see some support for such a sweeping statement, though.
Care to elaborate? I contend that FireFox has far more features than Opera, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Would like to see some support for such a sweeping statement, though.
Let me interrupt your dialogue, I also find that Opera has far more features. Speaking of "more", I don't take a mere quantitative sense, see navigation: I get really used to the feeling that I can equally handle things through the keyboard shortcuts and the mouse gestures.
I agree that Opera is really bulky for a first-time user but as soon as s/he realizes that the interface is customizable, s/he doesn't have to accept the default interface (s/he can easily switch things off/on etc.), then the "bulky look" is all over. In other words, you can change the embarassing feeling. That's what I cannot change in NS clones, the retro feeling of "back to '97" when I first started using the net through the good ol' NS4.
I agree that Moz or FF is needed from the developer's side, but from the user's side, it is just not up-to-date for me.
Opera doesn't suffer from that problem because it gives you plenty to start with. And in less than 4Mb! Whereas all the Firefox extensions have to be downloaded.
Now as far as CSS support goes, Opera has always led the way. It was the first browser to support media queries, along with loads of advanced CSS2 and even CSS3. Of course there are some things that don't work in it but work in Mozilla - styling drop down menus for instance - and vice versa.
Firefox is simple and easy to use, but Opera has so many radical and brilliant features that many users who have tried it just don't know about. Even long-term users find new things over time.
Sadly a lot of JavaScript code in use today was programmed for IE, Netscape and Opera 6. The result is that some sites can fail in Opera 7 but are OK in Firefox. This leads a lot of people to believe Opera is broken, where it is the sites that need to update their scripts. Luckily Opera users can get round this by setting their browser user agent to show as "MSIE 6", which it does by default.
I find the Opera layout a bit strange and have to customise it a fair bit before I'm happy with it, but others disagree and get on well with it. Whereas Firefox is similar to IE and Mozilla, so you can't go wrong. But it doesn't offer as much customisation - Opera allows you to change almost everything.
I'd say IE6 is for people who don't know about other browsers - if you do and are still using it, well enjoy those nasty popups, viruses, lack of PNG transparency and so on. Firefox and Mozilla are for keen users who want to display more code, never see a popup again, and know they have a browser constantly being upgraded. Opera users just want that bit more, an advanced program that offers killer features. Once you learn what they are, you'll not want to use any other browser ever again.
So my personal vote is for Opera.
Got Opera / IE / Mozilla on my W2K / XP boxes, and Mozilla / Opera on my Linux box. Since i moved from NN to Opera 3 years ago, i have never looked back.
Mention Firefox to an Opera user and they tell you about the problems caused by Firefox extensions.
This is correct, but not only Opera users are aware of this issue, apparently either 0.9 or 1.0 will have that issue resolved, it's on the roadmap as a top priority. Firefox is still not at 1.0, for these types of reasons. As to Opera always being far ahead of the competition and having DOM problems, the problems I've had developing for Opera are not browser specific javascript, but DOM javascript, as I noted above, only in 7.5 did Opera begin to support replace(), that's javascript 1.1. I've had to do Opera detection on complex scripts for quite a while, and my javascript is DOM with fixes for IE 6 and Opera.
Only in 7 did it begin to even marginally support overflow:auto. I suspect that by 8 most of these issues will be largely worked out, which will put Firefox 1 and Opera 8 as two excellent choices for both developers and end users.
I would also like to see a comparitive feature list, as mathewHSE requested, since I can't find a thing I can't do with firefox yet. Since my email client and the browser I use are not related, that's not an issue for me, or I suspect for most users, who will continue to use their outlook/outlook express no matter what browser they use.
Personally, I don't see any need to believe that one browser is better than all others, I can see excellent arguments for using each major browser out there, including IE 6. The current market puts Mozilla useage at roughly 5 times higher than Opera useage on average.
pros: very fast, light-weight (can run with below-sea level system hardware), customizable scripts (like CTRL + letter, to open something or a box to type anything to do anything), tab browsing, skinnable.
cons: runs on windows platform only. cannot use .xpi plugins for mozilla
tabs
developer toolbar
control+k = search bar plugins.
oh yeah
check this [csszengarden.com] out on firefox and opera.
Notice the complete failure in Opera, page scrolls, overflow div doesn't scroll with mousewheel until you click in it, no need to go on. This is why I use firefox, it has the best rendering engine, bar none. Not the best user interface, not the best stuff around the rendering engine though.
I could show you another major rendering failure like that, but that would violate the TOS, so you'll have to take my word on it.
I don't think anyone doubts that Firefox has a better renderng engine than Opera. Opera's advantages are elsewhere.
But then the original question is flawed. Which browser is best for what? As I said earlier, you don't get layout problems with Lynx. But of course if you want layout...
I think it has to be broken down even more, like to 'best standard full screen rendering of css', 'best small screen rendering', best implementation of feature x (like password managers etc).
I assume the design matter is an aesthetic judgement, not a display error.
Notice the complete failure in Opera, page scrolls, overflow div doesn't scroll with mousewheel until you click in it, no need to go on. This is why I use firefox, it has the best rendering engine, bar none. Not the best user interface, not the best stuff around the rendering engine though.
And I could show you a site full of pages that only work in Opera, Firefox being "not good enough" to handle the code.
It's built around IE, so everything works, but it also blocks ads, pops, scripts, sounds and anything else. I've installed every update and now I'm on my 10th update.
PS. I don't work for them.
Sometimes it has problems in shutting down cleanly and it can break if you have dozens of tabs open at the same time.
Oh, and IsItReal, that CSS Zen Garden page behaves the exact same on Opera 7.5 and FireFox 0.8 (clean install w/o any extensions), although in Opera it adds a scrollbar. Tested on Debian GNU/Linux. Actually, for some reason the scrollwheel function on mouseover doesn't work for me in FireFox, at all. No, there's nothing wrong with my scroll wheel. It just doesn't work.
And Google for LiteraryMoose for quite a few experiments that only Opera 7.2+ can handle (requires a browser that supports XHTML+XML MIME-type). Opera has it's bugs, but they're getting fewer and fewer, and with the UI and the features I get for the relative small cost, both download-wise and money-wise, Opera kicks ass for me.
That's my 2 cents.
I get a large gap in Opera between the bottom of the content and the bottom of the page. That was what I thought isitreal was talking about.
But I'm used to small things wrong with Opera's rendering. It doesn't have as many problems in that direction - not by a long way - as IE does, but it has a few. That's why I use Mozilla or Firefox to test out my site. I use Opera for browsing. I'll use Lynx to extract information from a site with an unreadable design.
As I said: best for what?
This "which browser is best" thread is so absurd. They all work, they all have quirks, they all have bugs.
Find one you like and be done with it.
I like IE
So There.
Speaking of Zen Garden, I can see every page in their "library" perfectly with my trusty IE 5.5.
This is rubbish. "Perfectly" means with every detail the author intended. I know for a fact that certain submissions are in a special category that only non-IE browsers are happy with displaying correctly - IE just can't handle the full code in them. To the IE user they cannot see what they're missing. (I recall one where the menu list goes down at an angle to fit the background, but IE can't do that, so it just lists it in a straight line. Others use fixed positioning which does not work in IE.) Do yourself a favour, install Firefox and try these designs again.
Speaking of Zen Garden, I can see every page in their "library" perfectly with my trusty IE 5.5
But have you noticed that the example isitreal pointed out is an entirely different (and much less impressive) design in IE?
They all work, they all have quirks, they all have bugs.
Agreed, I believe in trying out several browsers from time to time and choosing the one that meets my needs the best. It's been FireFox for awhile, was Netscape for a time, and before that IE. The question of which browser is best should always include qualifications as to "best for what?" Obviously interface is completely subjective. Rendering speed will vary. Best standards-compliant rendering engine is a point of fact, but I can't think of another aspect of a browser that is as cut-and-dried as that.
Find one you like and be done with it.
Good idea, only one should always keep up-to-date with what's available and try the new releases. Eventually everything currently available will be out of date.
I do believe that threads like this are a healthy stimulus and should be repeated every couple of months or so. It was a thread just like this one that caused me to begin trying other browsers, which started me on the journey to cross-browser compatibility, which then led to a study and implementation of CSS, standards, validation, and accessibility. The occasional "best browser" thread certainly does no harm, and I'm sure each and every similar thread gets several people to take their job more seriously.
