Poll: What's your favourite Browser

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=132231

by german • 18 years ago

9 26 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

german• 18 years ago

I'm going to start with Firefox 2, because of all the great plugins.

rms• 18 years ago

Firefox 3 for me... almost all of the FF2 plugins work if you force them to and it's so fast. The nightly builds are better than the point releases.

makecheck• 18 years ago

OmniWeb (Mac only). :)

It uses the WebKit (Safari) engine, so it is great at rendering.

Its preferences are very smart...one of my favorites is "block images matching known ad sizes". Preferences can be saved per-site, nice for cookie management. OmniWeb also lets you create a list of regexes for things to always load and things to never load, e.g. files from known ad servers.

It has some unique features too. For example, you can "yank" any text field from a web page into its own window, at which point you can make it as big as you want. Also, its tabs show miniature web pages.

The "downside" (if you can call it that) is that the browser isn't free. But it is cheap at $15, and for something I use 100 times a day I figure I can afford it.

tbx• 18 years ago

vote 1 for konqueror... it's plain shit, but at least uses little ram and cpu. in my old pc, I can't stand to use firefox 2. Haven't tried firefox 3 however

manny• 18 years ago

Opera. Though once I get some free time and get a little better at C, my secret wish is to resurrect Dillo (http://www.dillo.org/).

antiform• 18 years ago

I used to be a Camino guy, but Firefox 2 with the Vimperator plugin won me over.

technoguyrob• 18 years ago

When I'm on Windows and have 40 tabs in Firefox (with Firefox closed), I often open IE6 if I only need to look at a quick piece of information (like check my e-mail). Opening Firefox would take two minutes or more (just to load the tabs). Same goes for Opera and all the other browsers. IE is built right into Windows so it already has all the necessary components loaded.

hschenker• 18 years ago

IE 6 gets my vote because of the three browsers (IE6, IE7, FF2) that are most popular on the site I work on and therefore have to have installed, it allows for the smallest amount of browser chrome.

ROFISH• 18 years ago

Put me down for Safari. I use WebKit nightlies which are very fast, and passes the most Acid3 tests right now. ;) The latest additions for :nth-child are a godsend and I can't wait for it to be implemented elsewhere. (No more odd/even classes!) Since I'm on an old iBook, the speed difference between Safari and Firefox is amazing. I don't know if Apple's cheating or Gecko is just unoptimized for the PowerPC.

Note that both like to eat RAM like no tomorrow. I haven't found a decent one that doesn't like 256MB+ after an hour's browsing.

mdemare• 18 years ago

I'm on a Powerbook, and Firefox is almost unusably slow. Safari 3 is nice and snappy, and I'm not even using the Webkit nightlies which are rumored to be 3 times faster. Still using Firefox for Firebug, which is a life-saver.

tehmoth• 18 years ago

No SeaMonkey?

curi• 18 years ago

safari ftw

(I'd just vote but I can't.)

watmough• 18 years ago

Firefox 3 with Proto, FireBug Beta.

Still has some problems with focus, but otherwise, really really great, and they seem to have fixed the TextArea bugs.

webwright• 18 years ago

I am despising Firefox lately.

bootload• 18 years ago

Fox3 for a simple reason. Fox2 is a memory hog on ubuntu. I checked the mem each was using w/o add-ons & F2 was almost double the RAM.

jamiequint• 18 years ago

I use Safari because it doesn't crash as much as Firefox 2, Ffox only when I need Firebug or Live Headers

simanyay• 18 years ago

Opera for web browsing and Firefox 2 (with FireBug and Venkman, of course) for development tasks. Also, I have three virtual machines with FF3, IE6 and IE7 installed for testing.

But I am thinking about switching from second version of Firefox to the third for dev tasks. I just did not test FireBug there and have no idea about its reliability on that version.

And for sure, I will switch one of my virtual OSes from IE7 to IE8 after its next beta because it's IE7/IE8 rendering modes support will make possible to test webapps for both versions.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

I voted for FireFox 2, but only because 1.5 wasn't there. Firefox 2, as well as 3, represent deterioration of the breed.

All of the operas after version 5 have gotten worse as well.

IE7 and IE8b are really bad--almost suprisingly bad.

+1 for Lynx (aka "other"), which hasn't gotten worse over the years, at least.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

Firefox 3 on my desktop and big lappy. Opera on my XO (memory consumption of the foxes is a problem...Firefox 3 is usable, but Opera uses about 20-30MB less on startup, and a wee bit less per open tab). I have the IEs4Linux installed for testing.

choward93• 18 years ago

Am I the only one running on Flock?

ropiku• 18 years ago

No, +1 for Flock. I'm also using FireFox for developing (FireBug).

philh• 18 years ago

I use opera for some things (reddit, news.yc, webcomics, games), elinks for others (mostly forums), and vary between the two for research and other things.

I like how easy it is to navigate with the keyboard in elinks (though the default setup is awful, IIRC). I've set up opera to have many of the same bindings, but navigation in particular just doesn't work as well. Partly that's because there's no grid, but I think it's also just not as well designed.

I also like how elinks knows what the 'page down' function means. It either scrolls a page down (if I'm not at/below the bottom) or it doesn't (if I am). All other browsers in my experience think the bottom of the page is more important than my knowing where to start reading from.

A plus for opera is that I've actually worked out how to script it.

sarvesh• 18 years ago

Opera. It is fast even when I have 20 tabs open and i do have around 20 tabs open quite often.

trenchfever• 18 years ago

Firefox3 nightlies now support true fullscreen. But now it needs a tab switcher pop-up dialogue. Hope they implement one before final release. More features less girth. Awesome!

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

Opera for general browsing (js, plugins, etc all disabled by default).

Safari for selective personal transactions (plugins, etc enabled).

Firefox for all work related stuff: Trac, RT, etc.

Camino for playing games and reading xkcd.

exiquio• 18 years ago

IE 5 (MAC)

Poll: What's your favourite Browser

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