Browsersphere

Since my last installment of Around the Browsersphere was posted back toward the beginning of May, there’s simply way too much going on to get all caught up without breaking things up a bit.  Therefore, this eleventh edition will focus solely on the “minor players,” or the web browsers not named Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.

Avant

• There’ve been about four builds (builds 17-20) of Avant Browser 11.6 released in the past month.
• The Download Blog recommends Avant Browser for “XP users who want a Microsoft-based engine but think that Internet Explorer 7 is a pain.”
• A commenter at Lifehacker points out that Firefox 3’s new fullscreen mode is old news to Avant users.

Flock

• A Mac OS X user moving away from Firefox was pleasantly surprised by and subsequently switched to Flock.
• The Flock blog has announced support for a “deeply localized” version of Flock for German users.

Konqueror

• Linux Hater’s Blog, which I was referred to via Ben Goodger’s blog, rips into some of the usability shortcomings in Konqueror.
• Ruben Schade wonders why the evolt browser archive doesn’t include past versions of Konqueror.
• An Ubuntu user is trying to figure out how to clear Konqueror’s find file history.
• Tork allows you to browse anonymously in Konqueror (and other browsers?).
• Someone thinks that the folks who are triaging Konqueror bugs are contributing to more bugs being fixed than opened in KDE recently.
• Karpion is a Konqueror add-on that “utili[z]es the Open Phishing Database to provide the user with information and tools that help protect against phishing.”
• Someone thinks IE gets something right that Konqueror doesn’t…but that’s about all said person has to say.
• A site called Echoes explains how to add new web shortcuts in Konqueror.
• In a review of Konqueror 3.5.9, the same site calls Konqueror “the great Swiss knife.”
• Over a month ago, Konqueror got support for crash session recovery and session management.

Maxthon

• A sometimes-on-the-verge-of-incomprehensible blog (case in point) suggests that Maxthon is the mathmatical equivalent of IE added to Firefox.
• Maxthon’s CEO, Jeff Chen, has been quoted as saying that they are working on porting Maxthon to Linux (via Maxthon Blog).
• One user thinks Maxthon may be a good browser for translators.
• Another user thinks Maxthon and Firefox have different core goals.
• Someone created a Maxthon logo in “cool” colors.
• There’s a list of requested features from Maxthon 1.x that aren’t in Maxthon 2 in the Maxthon forum.
• Here’s some information on where you can go to chat with fellow Maxthon fans/users.
• Here are some interesting opinions stated as facts, if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Rod Trent was counting down the days ’til he could stop using Firefox 3, but he has enjoyed using Maxthon.
• This blog suggests that Maxthon is the best alternative to Internet Explorer.
• Here’s a friendly discussion on the differences between Maxthon Classic and Firefox 3 and Maxthon 2 and Firefox 2.

SeaMonkey

• The SeaMonkey team has started having semi-weekly status meetings.
• SeaMonkey 1.1.10 was released last week.

Others

• In a request for feedback on Avant, someone mentioned Deepnet Explorer, which claims to be “the world’s first browser with RSS news reader, P2P client integration and phishing alarm.”
• Orca Browser, which has been covered here previously, appears to have resurfaced a week ago as a form of Avant utilizing Gecko 1.9 - the same rendering engine used in Firefox 3 - as opposed to Avant’s use of the Trident rendering engine from Internet Explorer.
• Web Worker Daily points to the Off By One Browser, which has “a footprint of about a megabyte.”  I think I may have mentioned it here before because I recognize the website, but it doesn’t hurt to drop its name here again.

I’m hoping to catch up on the major players soon, so stay tuned.

Tags: Add-ons, Avant, Ben Goodger, Deepnet Explorer, Extensions, Features, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Flock, Gecko, Gecko 1.9, IE7, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Linux, Localization, Mac, Maxthon, Maxthon 2, Minor Players, Off By One, Opinion, OS X, Phishing, Releases, SeaMonkey, Trident, Ubuntu

A couple weeks ago I posted to Twitter about how my wife’s first impression of Firefox 3’s Awesomebar was that she hated it.  Tonight, I got a reply from the @awesomebarhate Twitter account letting me know that Awesomebar “hate feedback [is] welcome” over at Get Satisfaction.

I’m pretty sure my wife has adjusted at this point, but if you haven’t, now you know where you can go to vent some frustration or, better yet, take care of the problem.

Tags: Add-ons, Awesomebar, Extensions, Features, Firefox, Firefox 3, Get Satisfaction, Opinion, Twitter

In a few blog posts I’ve read recently, I’ve witnessed at least two backers of separate web browsers claiming that their respective browsers have an edge over Firefox because they don’t require all the add-ons Firefox does in order to behave the way a user expects them to.

First off, over at the Maxthon Blog last week, a Maxthon user was quoted as having said the following about Firefox 3:

I’m sure Firefox has add-ons that can compensate for its apparent lack of features but…my hard drive says it was nice knowing you but you have to go.

Given that the Maxthon Blog reminds me of a certain other source of information, I took the opinions there with a grain of salt.  However, I soon spotted a similar refrain at a much more trustworthy source.

Opera Watch has an article titled Guardian: Forget Firefox - I’m going back to Opera for browsing and email which quotes The Guardian columnist Andrew Brown as having said the following of Firefox 3:

With the release of Firefox 3, I mounted a private celebration: I went back to using Opera 9.5 as my main browser. This wasn’t just perversity. Firefox without its add-ons is clearly inferior to Opera. Firefox with enough add-ons to make it really useful is very much slower.

Although the reasoning behind Firefox’s add-on architecture has been well-publicized by Firefox spokesmen like Asa Dotzler and there are obviously those out there who appreciate that architecture, it appears that the latest approach by those supporting other web browsers is to suggest that the add-ons approach to feature support contributes to both a lackluster default set of features and excessive bloat once the desired features have been added.

So what’s your take?  Is Firefox’s add-on approach the right approach, or is it better to try and target a larger set of features out-of-the-box?

Tags: Add-ons, Asa Dotzler, Comparisons, Extensions, Firefox, Firefox 3, Maxthon, Maxthon Blog, Opera, Opera 9.5, Opinion, The Guardian, Twitter

Nearly two months after the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, several people have had a chance to test the browser out and formulate their first, second and even third impressions.  I’ve listed some of those impressions below, in no particular order:

• Ian Tearle was frustrated by a seemingly unremovable home page.
• Gary James decided after three minutes that IE8 doesn’t suck any less than IE7.
• Rob Hensing reveals that IE8 will likely opt-in to DEP in Vista thanks to Vista SP1 (more on that here as well).
• Matt Hester has put up two screencasts, one of which touches on CSS development and HTML 5 features, and the other of which takes a look at Activities and Webslices.
• IETester is “a free WebBrowser [sic] that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process” (via milosradovic).
• Here’s an IE8 review from Redmond magazine (consider the source) that says IE8 “shows promise.”
• Edward Mendelson gives a look at “the next browser war,” including an overview of some of the features unique to IE8.
• PctipsBox explains how to speed up Internet Explorer 8 by increasing the connections limit.
• Check out a presentation on some of the garbage collection improvements made in IE8’s handling of JScript (via dzone).
• Tim Kadlec comments on the availability of the W3C Selectors API in IE8.
• A Web User Interface Designer and Architect on LinkedIn asked how important supporting IE6 is in a world in which IE7 and IE8 also exist (and received some pretty good answers).
• Here’s a look at The Future AJAX Wrapper, given IE8’s non-standard XDomainRequest feature.
• Apparently ordered lists aren’t quite ordered in IE8 (via Digg).
• The slightest hint of some sort of Facebook integration in IE8 sent one user running for the hills.
• Marlon Ribunal gives a decent overview of his impressions of IE8, including some screenshots of its developer tools in action.
• IE8 Beta 1 doesn’t quite seem to stack up against Firefox 3 Beta 5 in terms of JavaScript performance (at least according to one particular speed test).
• A post at Softpedia explains why some JavaScript issues in IE8 Beta1 have caused certain fixes to look as if they’ve failed, and also mentions that IE8 Beta 2 is scheduled to drop this summer.

If you’ve had a chance to play around with IE8 Beta 1, what are your impressions?

Tags: Beta, Internet Explorer, Opinion, Reviews, Web Standards

This just in from the IEBlog:

We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously.

If you’ll recall, there was a bit of an uproar about a month ago when it was announced that web developers would need to opt-in in order to take advantage of IE8’s improved web standards support (I got to the news late and a combination of that and pure laziness kept me from posting anything specific here, especially since you literally had to be living under a rock to have missed the debate as it burned across the web).  As a result of the uproar, the IE team seems to have changed its stance on the matter.

Here are some more details from today’s IEBlog post:

Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers to ask for IE8’s actual “Standards” mode separately. We made this decision, informed by discussions with some leading web experts, with compatibility at the top of mind.

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

In the end, I think the IE team has made the right decision.  As a web developer myself, I really feel that it is in the best interests of the web to encourage the migration to the latest and greatest web standards, and hey, if a bunch of legacy code suddenly needs a retooling to catch up with the times, that can only mean more work for web developers, right?

What do you think of the decision?

Tags: Internet Explorer, Opinion, Web Standards

Matt Asay over at C|Net wrote an article earlier this year titled The Web’s unfortunate fetish with the browser, in which he essentially states that he is tired of being forced to use various applications from within the confines of his web browser.

To me, it sounds like he is too easily distracted (claiming that the browser toolbars steal his concentration away from the application he originally set out to use, for example) and the argument seems kind of weak.  But maybe I’m just not thinking “outside the box” enough.

Anyway, what’s your take?  Is it beneficial to have a common playground in which to use all of your favorite web-based applications, or would there be more freedom in applications that use browser features but don’t always require the chrome and all it entails?

Tags: Elsewhere, Opinion

sKatterBrainZ is convinced that “all browsers suck” and has given evidence to back his or her claim.  I’m used to seeing posts that go something like “[my favorite browser] is better than [not my favorite browser] because…” so this post stood out.  I figured I’d share the link, in case there are others out there who are a little frustrated with the current state of the browsersphere.

Tags: Elsewhere, Opinion