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Software The Internet Technology

Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers 291

Posted by timothy from the hit-the-internet-button dept.
bsk_cw writes "With the exception of Google's Chrome (which got attention because it was, after all, Google), most of the alternative browsers out there tend to get lost in the shuffle. Computerworld asked three of their writers to take some lesser-known browsers out for a spin and see how they do. They looked at six candidates: Camino (for the Mac), Maxthon (for the PC), OmniWeb (for the Mac), Opera (both the Mac and the PC versions) and Shiira (for the Mac)." It would have been more interesting if they included some popular open source, Linux-friendly browsers like Konqueror or Epiphany, as well.
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Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers More

Too Good To Ignore — 6 Alternative Browsers

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  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by netsavior ( 627338 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:32AM (#25959937)
    Finally I can browse the internets on the Mac, it was the one thing missing from that experience...

  • Mac over represented? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JustNilt ( 984644 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:33AM (#25959953) Homepage

    I find it interesting that they checked out 4 for the Mac and only 2 for the PC. Isn't there at least one other PC browser they could have looked at? Maybe not, I'm unsure. Interesting read either way.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:43AM (#25960139)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Mac over represented? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:26PM (#25960867)

        No offense, but if you are going to talk about the top three, and only three, browsers, it would have to be Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Explorer is bundled with Windows, Safari with Mac and iPhone, Firefox with many Linux distros. Who was bundling Opera with anything? Embedded devices, some mobile phones... all of which were overshadowed by Mobile Safari.

        You might be disappointed, but you shouldn't be surprised.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by phillips321 ( 955784 )
          FYI - Lots of new windows mobile phones made by HTC come with opera mobile (as well as the inbuilt IE). I've just got a HTC Touch Pro and opera on it works like a dream. (sadly, not sure if it would ever compete with the misleading apple ads we've all seen lately)

        • Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:41PM (#25961121) Homepage Journal

          Opera is available as a download for the Wii (and was free for quite a long time), as a cart for the Nintendo DS (discontinued, but still) and as a built-in app/download (not sure which) for the new Nintendo DSi.

          If anything, Opera is the fourth on what should be the "top four".

          • Not by stats (Score:5, Informative)

            by ThrowAwaySociety ( 1351793 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @01:46PM (#25962255)

            It depends somewhat on your geographic location, but these days the breakdown is something like

            IE - 70-80 %
            Firefox 15-20 %
            Safari - 3-7 %

            Opera - 1% or less
            With some others thrown in.

            Opera is a fine and often innovative browser, but its share of the market is negligible. Luckily, it's standards support is good, so it works with the same pages that Firefox and Safari work on.

            Being the premier browser on a gaming platform doesn't do much for market penetration.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

              Well, the Nintendo DSi just launched a few weeks ago and for now it's only available in Japan.

              I don't know if it will be enough to change global stats (even by 1%) once the DSi is released world-wide, but the fact is, Opera is available on a lot more platforms than anything else at the moment.

              So you're right that, on paper at least, Opera doesn't have a huge marketshare. But then again I wonder how many of those Safari users are on Windows/OS X vs iPhone/iPod touch.

              All I'm saying is, it's not that much trou

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by zenslug ( 542549 )
            According to the stats from the website I work for, Chrome is #4 (just over 2% of traffic) and Opera is #5 (0.7%).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Fri13 ( 963421 )

          Internet Explorer is bundled with windows and integrated to NT operating system.

          Safari is bundled with Mac OS X but not integrated to Darwin operating system

          Firefox is preinstalled on most of Linux distributions but not integrated to Linux operating system.

          Opera is preinstalled and bundled on many software platoforms on telephones and handheld machines (or even game consoles). Question is, is it integrated any of the devices?

          Konqueror is integrated to KDE desktop environment but not integrated to Linux oper

          • Safari (well, WebKit) is just as integrated into Aqua as IE (Trident) is into the Windows GDI.

            Both OS X and Windows use their respective rendering engines for a LOT of stuff in the OS.

            And, any distro with GNOME has Gecko integrated with the desktop environment.

            Opera isn't integrated with much of anything, other than set top boxes, IIRC.

        • ...all of which were overshadowed by Mobile Safari.

          About time Mobile Safari [blogspot.com] started getting the respect it deserves...
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Big Hairy Ian ( 1155547 )
        Actually Opera Mini is quite hand for getting around content filters :)

    • Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:51AM (#25960285) Homepage Journal

      I think part of it is that building browsers on Trident has fallen out of favor. There used to be quite a few such browsers out there, but most of them have disappeared. Probably because they are unable to compete against the IE == The Internet mentality. Mac users seem to have less of that Safari == The Internet association, so they're more open to alternative browsers.

      Personally, I'm not really sure this article adds much. You still have four major browser engines: Trident (IE/Microsoft), Gecko (Mozilla), Webkit (Apple), and Presto (Opera). Nearly all web browsers are based on one of those four engines. Which limits the choice based of better web experience to primarily the user interface. Since the major browser makers are already tussling over the best interface to wrap around their engine, there's not much to differentiate the third party browsers.

      • Re:Mac over represented? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:23PM (#25960801) Journal
        Trident based third-party stuff really caught a triple blow: Over time, Trident has become less of an asset, since its performance has been mediocre for quite some time and the number of IE only websites has fallen fairly sharply. At the same time, though, the relative quality of IE has improved somewhat. Things like tabs and something resembling a popup blocker are no longer exotic features. Third, of course, is the existence of good and fairly well known non-trident browsers on Windows.

        I don't expect non-IE uses of Trident to disappear, since MS makes it fairly easy to embed in programs that could use some basic HTML-fu(though I was interested to see that Adobe's help program is now based on bits of Opera, presumably so they can reuse more of it on the mac side); but the case for the longterm survival of non-IE trident browsers is pitiful. IE is the default, and has a bunch of useful features for corporate type environments, so it gets all the corporate and clueless users; and how many of the people who actually comparison shop for browsers like Trident?(particularly with the existence of IEtab for FF)

        • I was interested to see that Adobe's help program is now based on bits of Opera

          Are you sure? Since Adobe did the original port of WebKit to Windows, I'm amazed that they'd use Opera instead of it.

      • Also, for some reason that I don't fully understand, OSX seems to be a good platform right now for small applications. I remember in the 90s there were tons and tons of little Windows shareware apps all over the place, and all of those dwindled down to a handful of actually good/useful applications. Right now, OSX seems to be in a shareware/freeware/FOSS boom.

        I myself have a handful of $50 applications on my Mac that I've bought and that are pretty good. I never buy those sorts of little applications fo

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by telchine ( 719345 )

      I find it interesting that they checked out 4 for the Mac and only 2 for the PC.

      Does anyone else find it annoying that Mac users have a tendancy to use the term 'PC' as if it were a synonym for 'Windows'?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by 427_ci_505 ( 1009677 )

        Many mac users think I'm being a bit of a troll when I say they have a nice p(ersonal) c(omputer) in meatspace.

      • I think this is more due to what non-techy people think/say. A PC is just a personal computer, regardless of what OS it has. But I've heard my inlaws say they have a Dell or an HP as opposed to them saying they have a PC. About the same as saying you have a Mac.

        I think it's also just assumed that people have a Windows computer at home, so to differentiate without getting into full-on discussions, people just say Mac instead of PC.

        Note: I have both OS X and Windows running at home, and I don't really

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Yvan256 ( 722131 )

          Yes, PC used to mean "Personal Computer", but with all the marketing from Microsoft and Apple, PC might as well be as generic as "computer running Windows". Regular people are now using computers, so a lot of the "technical details" are lost on the masses.

          If you ask someone what they use to drive around, I guess most of them will not say "a car/a truck", but the brand/model of their car/truck. I suppose the same is now true of computers. You either have a Mac, a Dell, an HP (or "something you built yourself

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Golias ( 176380 )

            Bingo. There was a deliberate marketing campaign by Microsoft, right about when Windows 3.0 was about to emerge, to push the personal-computer press to stop saying "IBM-Compatable" or "Clone" and start saying "PC" when speaking of the computers that would soon be running Windows.

            It was thought at the time that IBM would soon be running a different OS than the so-called clone market, so the old labels didn't apply.

            Most Apple & Commodore users (among others) thought it was the stupidest thing ever, but M

      • Very true. Macs are PCs. PCs are real PCs. I know you didn't even insinuate this in your post, but somewhere in your subconscience, you wanted to. ;-) The Macs and PCs thing are a carry over from previous times. Apple is just running with it like a bitch nowadays.

      • 100% IBM-PC Compatible (Score:5, Informative)

        by cromar ( 1103585 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @01:07PM (#25961561)
        Oh bother. Look at you all. There's a good reason for calling them PCs. Of course Macs are personal computers, but for many years up until around the Windows 95 days, a lot Windows and DOS software was marketed as running on "IBM-PC and 100% compatible computers" and then just as "IBM-PC Compatible [wikipedia.org]. That's where it comes from. It's simply an evolution of a marketing slogan.
      • I didn't realize that was just Mac users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hugonz ( 20064 )
      kmeleon

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No love for k-meleon?! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    At my work, I'm forced to use a SLOT-A Athlon running XP with 32mb RAM. K-Meleon [sourceforge.net] allows the machine to function. All other graphical browsers bring it down to its knees.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hell0W0rld ( 1315765 )
      And no love for the nice Seamonkey...

    • At my work, I'm forced to use a SLOT-A Athlon running XP with 32mb RAM. K-Meleon allows the machine to function. All other graphical browsers bring it down to its knees.

      How does that work? I couldn't even get Win2K to boot within the same day with 64 megs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BrentH ( 1154987 )
        You can't get it to install with that amount of memory (actually, you can remove the check with nLite), but you can fun it 'fine'. I ran a 2003Server with 40MB and a 90mhz cpu for a while, once it was booted up (which, admittedly, took 5-10minutes) it worked fine over the network.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by rodrigoandrade ( 713371 )
      Hey, I was using a Slot A Athlon until last week, you insensitive clod!!

      Now it's Core 2 Quad bliss!!!

  • opera
    ie
    mozilla (firefox/ netscape)
    webkit (safarit/ chrome)

    am i missing any (competitive, comprehensive) engines?

    aren't all of the browsers here variations on these engines?

    maxthon, for example, is ie based i believe

  • Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hassman ( 320786 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:37AM (#25960037) Journal

    6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Golias ( 176380 )

      Yep. An "alternative" browser is a classic case of a solution in search of a problem.

      Last time I checked, I was pretty darn happy with Safari on my Mac and Firefox on everything else.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Andr T. ( 1006215 )
        So, what makes Firefox not an alternative to IE in Windows? IE is still the main browser.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Golias ( 176380 )

          Says you. I say IE is the alternative, and a poor one at that.

          (Also, IE is Windows-only. I said I use it on "everything else", which include Linux boxen.)

          • Says you. I say IE is the alternative, and a poor one at that.

            I see people switching from Firefox to IE nowadays and with a bit more polish on the UI I could see myself switching to IE8 from Firefox.

            Opera, Chrome, etc, aren't vastly superior to IE7 for the common fool anyway,

        • IE is still the main browser.

          Only to the Luddites dear. IE is for people that say things like "The other day I sent an internet and it never showed up".

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by FlameWise ( 84536 )

        How about: "Find a browser that's not ever going to be mainstream enough to be a viable target for trojan writers, but still allows doing home banking?"

        I'm all for Opera never making it into the top three.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slapout ( 93640 )

      Yes, but features usually appear first in "alternative" browsers and then get implemented in the mainstream ones. (Tabs, mouse gestures, etc.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        Who do you think first implemented tabs?

        (Hint: It was on a browser that ran on Windows 3.1 and was written by a company later bought by AOL.)

        Mozilla and Opera were VERY late to the game with tabbed browsing.

    • No they don't (Score:5, Informative)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:20PM (#25960735) Journal

      6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.

      Unless I've missed it there is one thing that none of them do as well as Firefox and that is block ads. The browser extensions like this are the one thing that, at least for me, puts Firefox head and shoulders above the rest.

      • Re:No they don't (Score:4, Informative)

        by larkost ( 79011 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:40PM (#25961099)

        OmniWeb (my browser of choice) has been blocking adds very well for a long time (much longer than other browsers). It even allows you to set per-website preferences for that (and most other preferences). It started out just blocking certain image sizes, then expanded to off-site images, then got regular expressions. And it has held those for a while. The only issues I have are that you can't selectivly block flash images, and that it does not offer the ability to reflow the document as if there was never an image there.

        And there are a number of features that OmniWeb has ad for a while that FireFox is just getting around ot copying now: saving the windows that were open when you quit, per-site prefereences, replicating bookmaks/history/etc to a WebDAV server, etc...

      • Opera has built-in image/plug-in blocking, so it's a good number two in that respect.

      • There is also Safari (on OS X) and Opera (on everything) in case you don't want your browser to run like a drugged quadruple amputee and leak memory like a sieve.

    • 6 more browsers that all do the same things the mainstream ones do.

      Ah, but when you use these browsers, you can exercise a sense of superiority over your friends, for you have have chosen to walk a different path. A path that has fewer add-ons and support, but a different path, none the less.

  • Comparing related to engines (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:43AM (#25960137) Homepage Journal
    Maybe a better approach is to take the engines they use (ie/webkit/gecko/opera/khtml) and show what makes different from the best known browser using them.

    The interface gives bells and whistles mainly, but the engine in the end is what makes a site you need work or not.
  • The other day I saw this browser on a friend's machine. I think it was called Internet Explorer, but I'm not sure. I've never used it before. Is it any good?

  • Maxthon, Camino or Epiphany browsers in their own right.

    • Camino, however, was really the first modern, native OSX browser.

      Back in the 10.1/10.2 days, you only had a few unappealing choices: IE for Mac with its terminal brokenness, truly horrible non-native Mozilla/Netscape (which was an absolute performance dog on a 350Mhz G3 with 256MB), the then expensive (like $50, iirc) OmniWeb with its ancient rendering engine, etc. etc.

      Camino (Cameleon, I think it was called back then?) was a godsend.

      I switched to Safari once 10.3 came out, as it performed better on the ha

  • Props to Opera (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Bredero ( 1154131 )
    I love opera, its a fast light weight but feature rich and rock solid browser that doesnt require endless tweaking and fiddling with extensions like firefox does.

  • more reasons (Score:3, Informative)

    by icepick72 ( 834363 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @11:54AM (#25960327)
    "With the exception of Google's Chrome (which got attention because it was, after all, Google),

    True, but not the only reason: it's also a damn slick piece of technology and surprisingly intuitive in its initial phase.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ari_j ( 90255 )
      I use it for all my browsing at work with two exceptions: Windows Update and one particular web application I use that works fine in Firefox but believes Chrome to be a too-old version of Safari.

  • There's a reason they were 'lost in the shuffle' (Score:4, Informative)

    by twistah ( 194990 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @12:06PM (#25960517)

    First of all, Opera is not a forgotten browser and has quite a big following. Maxthon outlived its usefulness as "IE with tabs" when IE7 came out. Chrome was interesting because of its threaded design (ie individual tabs can't crash the whole thing, in theory), its specially-developed V8 JavaScript engine and its focus on making web apps part of the desktop. Slapping a different GUI on Gecko/WebKit, along with a general lack of support for add-ons and other crucial pieces of the browsing experience, does not persuade a lot of people to switch to something "new." Especially when that "new" thing is just a downgraded version of what they're currently using.

    • Slapping a different GUI on Gecko/WebKit, along with a general lack of support for add-ons and other crucial pieces of the browsing experience, does not persuade a lot of people to switch to something "new."

      Yes, who would ever use a browser like Firefox when it's just the Mozilla browser and Gecko engine with reduced functionality.

  • Avant is another good one, if you include one that borrows IE's renderer. I'm sure there's a ton of other ones that these Slashdot articles always miss. Lynx is always a good choice to avoid web bloat.

  • I'd rather talk about Chromium's nascent plans for extensions [chromium.org], which will hopefully bring AdBlock and NoScript (or at least similar functionality) to Chrome.

  • recently i was tasked with upgrading a bit of inhouse web 2.0 data entry software, and i had to add spellcheck, which of course is extremely easy: just use firefox. which floored longtime msie users

    but then, upon further research, i found out about dynamic textarea resizing, a useful little feature for lots of data entry, while using chrome. you just click and drag the corner of the textarea to make it bigger (or smaller). very nifty

    and upon even more research, i found out safari supports both dynamic resizing and spellchecking, AND a grammar checking feature (underlines green, as well as red for misspelt words like in firefox)

    all of the mac users in my office were all smiles when i proposed we switch to safari company wide

    so, for data entry with lots of textareas on the webpage, i summarize the following for you:

    firefox: spellchecking
    chrome: dynamic resize
    safari: spellchecking, dynamic resize AND grammar checking

  • Pfft. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by geminidomino ( 614729 ) *

    Useless.

    No linux coverage at all.

    I just wish there was a linux browser besides firefox that supported extensions. With the design decisions being made by the firefox team lately, I'd love to switch. :P

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