It has been brought to my attention, though indirectly, that I have completely ignored Opera for some time. This is due impart to a bad experience I had some time ago when I was first experimenting with alternative browsers for my Windows Mobile phone. That story can be summed up in by my confusion as to why their mobile browser costs money when their desktop browser is free (the inverse of what I would postulate).
That nonsense aside (and perhaps requiring a post of it's own) I recently downloaded and installed Opera. I was rather impressed.
I will not give it a full review until I have time to properly utilize it and it's various features and compare them with the alternatives (perhaps a full critique of the four major browsers is in order). However having played with it a bit, I will now list my personal, highly opinionated ranking of the four major browsers:
(drum roll)
As I said, this is completely subjective, hopefully I will one day have the time to be objective. If you feel there is another browser out there I should consider/try let me know. I have briefly used various other linux offerings but really don't consider them to be in the same class as these guys. I have installed SeaMonkey in the past, but really have no use for a 'suite' and really didn't find it all that attractive so unless you can convince me otherwise, I shall not try it again.
1 comment:
IE is the worst browser, without question. IE6 interprets CSS the way it wants to, not according to the spec. The antialiasing on text is embarrassingly bad, and standards-support is low. Not to mention no support for PNGs. While IE7 fixed some of these bugs, it's far from perfect. The only reason I still support it in development is because I have to for work, and Firefox has yet to catch up in marketshare (which i suspect will happen this year).
I use firefox quite a bit for development, but I still use safari on a day to day basis. It understands many css3 declarations, it's fast, and stable, albeit a bit of a memory hog. I'd put it right on par with Firefox overall. My only experience with Opera is on the Wii, and some testing work. I find it to be capable in many situations, but not my favorite browser. Ultimately, here's my list for major browsers.
1. Firefox 2/ Safari 3 (tie)
2. Opera
3. IE7
4 IE 6
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