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Browser To Replace Ie?


Alan

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Hi everyone,

 

 

I am looking for a new browser to replace Internet Explorer, IE 6.1 keeps making the webpages I visit have Tiny text, I mean, it is too small to read.

 

 

Any Ideas for a better browser?

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Mozilla Firebird: http://texturizer.net/firebird/ or http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/

 

If you don't feel comfortable with using "beta" software, you can always get Firebird's older brother, Mozilla: http://mozilla.org/

 

There's also another option, wich used to be pretty darn good but both Mozillas have surpassed it some time ago: Opera -> http://www.opera.com/

 

And since you're in a changing mood, I'd advise you to change your e-mail client as well - assuming you're using Outlook Express.

Both Opera and Mozilla have an integrated e-mail client. Mozilla Firebird doesn't but you can get it's e-mail companion, Mozilla Thunderbird: http://mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

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Yes, I downloaded Mozilla Firebird 7.0, It is gonna take some time to get used to but hehe, it is alot nicer than IE.

 

 

I found out about it through your site Raul lol,

 

So you do have some good info on it, Ima have to finish looking through it later. :)

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Yes I found the text size in IE, I got IE 6.1 and Mozilla Firebird 7.0 now.

 

I can start doing better checks, I found out that my color scrollbar wont work in Mozilla, but it will in IE lol :)

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Alan, the colored scrollbars only work in IE. There's nothing you can do about it - unless you can convince Gecko's developers (Gecko is Mozilla and Firebird's HTML rendering engine) to include IE-specific CSS extensions into it - which I don't think they are willing to do... :)

 

The scrollbar-face-color and all it's companions are not part of the official CSS standard. They are extensions Microsoft invented and only work with their browser.

 

Take a look in here:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validat...&usermedium=all

 

That's W3's CSS validation service. If you need to check if your web pages use valid CSS or HTML you can use their online services.

The CSS validator is here:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-uri.html

And the HTML validator is here:

http://validator.w3.org/

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  • 6 months later...

Why does everyone seem to prefer Firefox to Mozilla?

 

I've been using Mozilla for about a year now, I tried Firefox at one point but didn't like it, it didn't have as many features at Mozilla and lacked some useful things I always use.

 

So whats wi Firefox over Mozilla?

 

James

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I prefer Firefox because of how much you can extend it .There are many more themes and extensions available for Firefox than for Mozilla. Plus in the near future Firefox will replace the suite.

 

Another reason I don't use the suite is because i don't use half the things in it, I much prefer Firefox + Thunderbird than the Suite !

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Plus in the near future Firefox will replace the suite.

I have heard that one for a long long time now. Does anyone know when it will be replaced?

 

As far as I have heard there was netscape first. Some guys didnt like it so they built mozilla when netscape stopped developing it. Then other guys didnt like mozilla so they started to build firefox. All 3 are in the market with developements still going on. Will netscape & mozilla actually be replaced with firefox?

Edited by Jikrantz
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I know only one person running Netscape. I've tried to get him to switch but he won't. He hates AOL and anything to do with it almost as much as he hates MS. However since AOL purchased Netscape he still insists on using it.

 

As for when Firefox will replace Mozilla, unknown but Firefox is also still in beta. And I have to say, I haven't seen much better beta software anywhere.

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Netscape Navigator used to be the dominant browser (before MS took over the world by including their Internet "lame" Explorer in Windows :P) but at a point, Netscape (the company, the browser is actually called "Navigator" ;)) stopped updating their browser. When they saw that MS was taking over the browser world, Netscape realized they had to do something. But they didn't simply want to make another browser, they wanted to make THE browser, they wanted to make a browser that was extensible, respected the standards, something that would last a long time. And so they started the Mozilla project, which was a remake from the ground up of their Navigator browser. And instead of making it closed, they decided to make it Open Source / Free Software, so that anyone could contribute with their ideas to the project and if anyone thought they could do something even better, they could get the source code and work from there in a different direction.

 

That's what happened with Firefox. Firefox used to be "Phoenix", one of the many projects derived from the original Mozilla code. But this one standed out from the crowd and the Mozilla team liked it so much, they decided to make it the next step in the Mozilla family.

 

By the way, in case you're wondering, the Mozilla team didn't simply throw away all their work and started over with Firefox. The Mozilla project actually had two parts: the Gecko HTML engine and the Mozilla user interface. What the derived projects did was use the Gecko HTML engine and create a user interface on top of it. What the Mozilla team decided was that they'd use Phoenix's user interface, which was much lighter and extensible than their own.

 

They're still developing both the Gecko rendering engine and the user interface (you still see regular releases of the Mozilla Suite) but they're focusing more on Firefox and Thunderbird as their next generation products.

 

I don't know when Firefox 1.0 will be released but I think they will only drop the Mozilla Suite when they have both Firefox and Thunderbird complete, so they can replace the older Mozilla Suite without losing functionalities.

 

As for why Firefox is better than Mozilla, someone who doesn't want to use Mozilla's Mail, Composer or Chat modules doesn't have to install them and so it's lighter (demands less from your computer) and faster than Mozilla. It's user interface is also better than Mozilla's - I know that when Firefox was at version 0.6 (at the time it was still called Firebird) it wasn't that better but I've been using it since then and believe me, it has improved a lot. Also, as Arvind said, there are much more extensions and themes (skins) for Firefox than for Mozilla.

 

I'm sure there are a lot more reasons but these are the ones that come to my mind now. :)

 

Give Firefox another try. If you use Mozilla for e-mail, download Thunderbird too. Then go to update.mozilla.org and extensionroom.mozdev.org and look at the extensions you have there. I bet you will not be able to "build" a browser so powerfull and feature rich as Firefox after you install some extensions you find usefull ;)

Edited by TCH-Raul
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  • 2 months later...

I prefer the Opera browser. It's UI is extremely customizable. Far superior to any browser on that front. The down side? There are a few sites that Opera doesn't work with. Most of them it probably would work, but they just refuse to allow any browser that isn't IE or Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.

 

Opera's free version has an ad bar, but with broadband it doesn't affect browsing speed, and with a good resolution, it's not that obtrusive.

 

Sites that I know it doesn't work (or they just won't let you use it) are:

  • Gmail
  • Expedia (Microsoft owned - known for and sued for not allowing Opera to render properly)

There are more, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

 

If a site renders in Opera, I use Opera. Otherwise Firefox is my tool of choice.

 

Opera's highlights are:

  • The best browser UI (User Interface) since it's the most customizable
  • Loads and renders faster than IE, Mozilla, and Firefox
  • Not only does it have tabbed browsing it has the best tabbed browser implementation
  • You can put a "Find in page" text box on the UI making the search of large pages extremely easy.
  • You can render any page any size by using a drop down box on the UI and it will not effect other tabs
  • You can tell Opera to tell websites that it is IE or even Mozilla to make them happy
  • F12 bring up a Quick Preferences menu for quick changes if a website is giving you problems
  • More popup blocking options than any other browser including opening only requested popups
  • Many more! Try Opera for yourself!

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I do agree that Opera's tabbed interface is far better than the one in Firefox. The MDI (Multiple Document Interface) is really nice.

 

I don't think it's faster than Firefox, though. I have them both installed on this machine and they seem to load pages equally fast. Table-heavy pages even look faster in Firefox, not Opera.

 

As for the rest, you should explore some of the Firefox extensions. I have most of the ones you mentioned working in FF via an installed extension :)

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Are these various browsers cross-platform?

 

On my Mac I use either Internet Explorer 5.2 (MS announced that this is last upgrade of IE for Mac) or Safari.

 

Neither one is especially great or especially buggy, but I am looking for an upgrade path since IE is no longer being updated.

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As you can see from the links Thomas posted, yes, these browsers are available on various platforms :)

 

I never used it personally but it seems that Safari is a very good browser. You could get Firefox for those few sites that won't work on Safari. I don't recommend Opera for that because it also has a few problems. On the other hand, I did stumble upon a couple of sites that didn't work correctly on Firefox but did work perfectly on Opera, so you may still want to have all three, just in case... :P

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When I first installed Opera out of the box for my parents, I wanted a simple, uncluttered layout with perhaps the minimum buttons (ie Firefox 1.0 out of the box) I went for Opera rather than Firefox because at this time FF was on 0.8 or 0.9.

 

Anyways, I installed Opera and boom I loaded up the screen and it was a complete mess. Completely cluttered with multiple toolbars everywhere, two sets of back/forward. It took me a while to really customize it and make it simple.

 

I am of course all of Firefox, heck you can see that from my avatar. In fact Asa recently reviewed the newest preview of Opera and says that the UI has greatly imrpoved (he had similar complaints to mine)

 

Firefox 1.0 I feel is much better out of the box and overall much more customizable. I have spent a few years with Opera but just prefered the flexibility of Firefox.

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