I recently had some problems with internet access on my new computer. I originally thought the problem was in Internet Explorer so I installed Mozilla. Alas, I still had the same problem, but this made me think which is the best browser. Your input is appreciated.
I have also tried a browser called Crazy Browser (http://www.crazybrowser.com). It is not actually an independent browser but an add-on to Internet Explorer. The great thing about it is that it kills pop-ups and is freeware.
I think by far the safest option is not to have a browser at all, but rather to email your buddies a list of great URLs you’ve heard about. Then when you’re out having a beer with the lads next, you can ask them how good the web sites were. Incidentally, this saves on online costs too.
If you write your web page with Office, you can ask it to display the Chinese phonetics as superscript over your Chinese characters. In Netscape it displays the same page with the chinese phonetics in parenthesis.
I also like Office’s feature that allows you to take any Chinese character and get it’s B, P, M equivalent so you can look it up on your palm or instant dictionary.
My current fav. is Chimera with some changes made by Chimerachanga. Though still in beta the difference in speed between Chimera and IE was absolutely amazing. The interface is absolutely lovely as well.
"Chimera is a browser for Mac OS X that has a Cocoa user interface, and embeds the Gecko layout engine. It is intended to be a simple, small and fast browser for Mac OS X. "
I use MyIE. Sort of like that crazy browser. IE must be installed. MyIE ends up using less RAM than IE and a lot more features that you can’t find in IE.
I’m using IE (ie there’s so much non-standard, M$-specific shit out there) and OmniWeb (Mac-only). The latter is fast and pretty stable, though it has trouble displaying some “newer” code like that used on Wired, etc.
I’ve found Opera (really, really fast) to be buggy and Chimera (mostly elegant design) lacking features. These two browsers are probably the fastest available and sport some good features (ie cookie control, pop-up killing, etc).
My favorite browser is Opera. Unfortunately, however, it – and all of the other browsers I’ve tested, other than IE – do not handle Unicode diacritics well (e.g. tone marks for pinyin). This is a major problem, and I was very disappointed to discover that even Netscape 7 is the same.
I would very much appreciate hearing from those of you who use Macs and/or obscure browsers how the tone marks render (or don’t). Fonts are also a problem, what with Microsoft ending its free downloads of Arial Unicode and other important fonts.
Though I had to tweak the software settings a little to get it to work, I got pages downloading and displaying on my OLD 266Mhz Pentium in about 5 secs on DSL.
Think I’ve tried just about all of them at some point and have to conclude that IE is the best for all round functionality and support. I didn’t much care for IE with Win 98, but I’ve just moved up to XP pro which is very fast and stable with IE.
I really like the new Netscape 7, however it seems they have a problem with there Chinese encoding… The addition of the tab taken from Opera makes it nice. I like Opera also. IE crashes too much.
With the exception of one site that visit daily, v0.6 Chimera – the version of Mozilla with a Quartz (OS X) interface – simply rocks. It’s fast and lacks virtually nothing. Downloaded it last night and have since dumped OmniWeb.
If you’re using X, you really should check out this latest public build of Chimera.
Apple has recently released its own browser called Safari to compete with Microsoft and Netscape. I think the Windows version is not available yet. i.e. there is only a version for the Mac operating system
I was wondering if anybody had any experience with Safari. I think there are a few Apple users on forumosa.
I really like how it presents and handles bookmarks. In this regard it’s greatly superior to any other browser on any platform. Quite elegant.
With beta 67, Safari now offers tabbed browsing, which many people seem to think highly off. I’ve always been a two-handed user (ie one hand on the mouse and the other the keyboard for key commands), so this “new” way of browsing hasn’t won me over.
There are, of course, a number areas where Safari needs work. Specially, CSS needs work, though recent browsers have shown improvement. Also, the pop-up menus one gets by right clicking (ie control + click) on a page, picture, etc need more option, ie reload page, etc.
As far as speed goes, Safari and Camino (the Cocao version of Mozilla specifically for the Mac) are in a dead heat. IE for the Mac is dead issue, though it’s still loaded on my machine because their are so many pages on the net that aren’t standards compliant.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with Safari and look forward to first version, which the grapevine says with be released soon. Perhaps by the end of this month.
BTW, if anyone has a copy of v67, please drop me a line.
I love Safari but absolutely hate how it handles network problems. Damn annoying seeing those error messages sliding down repeatedly when IE just deals with it. Of course its primarily a problem with our Hinet node having so much line noise or some other bull but it could handle problems better.
It will never be available for Windows. Releasing Safari is part of Apple’s strategy to stay independent of MS applications. As you will see more and more, Apple will continue to release more apps that are Mac-only to showcase Macs usability and robustness (debatable… don’t flame me, I am an OSX user too).
YES! Someone finally said it…
Anyway, I have a copy of v67. Do you want it?
I have v.71, do you want it? (No, seriously, I do have v.71)…
Other than the fact that Safaris sucks in handling some of the financial banking sites (i.e. Citibank site in U.S. for checking your balance), it’s my favorite browser! Clean, fast, and the Google built-in is just too easy.
