Internet Browsers - Safety, Compatibility etc.

[Frank N. O.]

I didn't want to ruin the other car thread anymore than I did already so I'm starting this thread instead.

I've tried 2 other browsers now, Opera and Firefox and neither one of them has been as easy to use for me as IE, and even worse, they don't/can't show several of my normal sites as intended and trying to edit the settings to possibly correct this problem has only caused bigger problems. Now is this possibly due to lack of add-ons I need to download or what?

An example, starting some pages then Firefox shows the text first one place then moves it to a completely different place on the screen, which is where the text was originally intended, and then it tries to download java-scripts or whatever they are called and run it from my computer instead of running it in the browser as needed to view the site properly.

And that brings me to the other point, downloads. Isn't it possibly to just have a download window for each download like IE instead of having it pop up in a list in a single window with statistics and everything which I have to manually delete instead of just clicking Open or Close on IE's download window? I've tried looking at the menus, especially in Opera but after trying switch off the unwanted functions and try to change the display options to make the sites display correctly I ended up destroying the look of the forum here no colour borders, frames, coloumns or anything and no correct menu-display, just the option-text in a row over each other with the forum way underneath it and after looking again I couldn't recognize any menu option-name that would even remotely be the cause of this.

What about Netscape? Before sites were programmed specifically for IE I used Netscape as my main browser, does it still exist? I know my email is at netscape and it's still there.

Frank

[Chaul]

Opera has rendered pages ok for me but I did have some problems with Firefox earlier. Both work well enough for me for the usual websites I visit but still prefer Firefox becaus it happens to start up faster on my system than Opera. At least for Opera you can change which browser it identifies as to the sites you visit. Maybe that affects something. In the past I've seen pages that refused to render at all if you had the wrong setting..

IMHO it's better and simpler to have just one download popup instead of several but I'm used to Firefox. At least you know which downloads are going at a given time instead of trying to find all the popups under all the windows to see the progress. And you can limit it to say 2 downloads at a time if it matters. I can't see many other differences in finding all the separate download popups and clicking close as opposed to a single window and clicking cancel/remove for each download inside it.

At least in Firefox 1.5 which I use, you can even force new links to open up in a new tab or window.

One problem is that Macromedia Flash/shockwave keeps updating often so every few months you start getting warnings that some new software has to be downloaded, if you have not updated it already..

I try to avoid IE if possible because I just can't trust it. But the windowsupdate site seems to require that so I can't help it. If some other site requires a specific browser, well.. that's their loss. Not all browsers follow the standards and some even make their own extensions. From a html developers point of view there is a standard that would work on all browsers, and there are even html validators for the same purpose but not all developers make use of those either. :p

Netscape browser (which is based on Mozilla Firefox these days) is still around but is being developed by AOL. Netscape 8.0.4 was released late last year. From what I understand from their website, the browser supports /utilizes/features two different renderers - IE's Trident and Mozilla's Gecko.

Tuukka

[chris]

I didn't want to ruin the other car thread anymore than I did already so I'm starting this thread instead.

I've tried 2 other browsers now, Opera and Firefox and neither one of them has been as easy to use for me as IE, and even worse, they don't/can't show several of my normal sites as intended and trying to edit the settings to possibly correct this problem has only caused bigger problems. Now is this possibly due to lack of add-ons I need to download or what?

An example, starting some pages then Firefox shows the text first one place then moves it to a completely different place on the screen, which is where the text was originally intended, and then it tries to download java-scripts or whatever they are called and run it from my computer instead of running it in the browser as needed to view the site properly.

And that brings me to the other point, downloads. Isn't it possibly to just have a download window for each download like IE instead of having it pop up in a list in a single window with statistics and everything which I have to manually delete instead of just clicking Open or Close on IE's download window? I've tried looking at the menus, especially in Opera but after trying switch off the unwanted functions and try to change the display options to make the sites display correctly I ended up destroying the look of the forum here no colour borders, frames, coloumns or anything and no correct menu-display, just the option-text in a row over each other with the forum way underneath it and after looking again I couldn't recognize any menu option-name that would even remotely be the cause of this.

What about Netscape? Before sites were programmed specifically for IE I used Netscape as my main browser, does it still exist? I know my email is at netscape and it's still there.

Frank

NS is not so popular anymore, it's all IE and Firefox.

To be honest, if the site doesn't display properly in both, it's the fault of the designer for not checking compatibility in both browsers, not yours. :)

Me, I use IE6 as my main web-browser, and Thunderbird for e-mail client.

[VQ]

the download box is a lot more usefull, you just need to learn to adapt to things like that you know? you can't expect Firefox to be identical, but then again whe IE7 comes out (I've used the Beta version) you will hate that as well, things are messed up in that IMO, but it just copies Firefox anyway.