Sound Off: I love my browser (and hate yours)

Oh for heaven's sake. I just

Oh for heaven's sake. I just LOVE K-Meleon! I have been using Firefox for over a year. (I have heard that Firefox is part of a sort of Google conspiracy.) In the last four months, as Firefox has continued to insist that I upgrade, the new 'upgrades' seem to be buggier and buggier! The initial '1.9' upgrade had no uninstaller. I had to use a bunch of fancy tools to pick the thing out of my 'puter piece-by-piece.

SourceForge's K-Meleon is now twice as fast, many times as stable, and presumably can be compiled and thus retained when my personal glacial inertia gives way, and I move from win 98SE to Freespire Linux. See:

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
http://freespire.org/

It's quite amusing to read

It's quite amusing to read these comments. For every message that states that "people are too ignorant to begin using an alternate web browser", there is a companion posting that states that businesses and/or new computers don't allow anything but IE (6 or 7). These statements are reflections of each other. Why don't businesses install alternate web browsers? Testing, certainly, especially in companies that use ASP.NET or native Microsoft products. But I cannot help but think after reading the comments here that another reason is because those same administrators and tech-savvy individuals who so vociferously push for Firefox on the Internet online and in forums have already written off the average user as not having any smarts at all and don't want to be bothered to train those end-users or adjust the programs to run as natively well on FF as on IE. (Yes, I expect angry responses. But please stop behaving as if knowing about FF is some kind of indication of a high IQ.)

Having posted the above flameworthy material, I can say that I use Windows and Linux at home, and currently have a total of 10 browsers installed on both machines. What do I use the most? Opera. The only browser that even comes close to the speed, simplicity, style, and full functionality - OUT OF THE BOX, without extra work or configuration - is K-Meleon, which is my second favorite browser - and it's also free. I use FF/IE rarely. I even use Lynx more than I use FF/IE. FF requires too much tweaking to approach Opera in basic functionality, and IE (6 or 7) is just not as good. Do I hate FF or IE? No, I just have perfer other browsers, that's all.

Thanks for reading!

Question from typical IT

Question from typical IT Bob: "What operating system are you using". Answer from typical Microshaft user: "Microsoft Internet Explorer". And thus starts the problem.

The real problem, however, is that although IE might have 80% of *installs*, and those people might surf a little, that still does not track the kind of people who actually do stuff online, such as shop. Some sort of index of the percentage of people who use something other than IE to actually do real money stuff online (banking, shopping, etc) would be nice. Unfortunately, the major mags are in Microsofts pocket (if they want to see more advertising revenue), and the little guys are too strung up and evangelical to look outside their crib.

Oh well.

It isn't likely that firefox

It isn't likely that firefox cannot "find the server" ..
more likely you have a bad "Extension",
try firefox in it's "safe mode" to eliminate and then isolate your bad extension/addon.

IE7 vs Firefox ? --- Small

IE7 vs Firefox ?
---
Small minds: Bicker and disagree
Mediocre minds: Criticize and fault,
Bright minds: Create and solve.
---
Thanks Mozilla for Firefox!
A Great creative solution.

From a bright mind.

all the fuss over IE7?! IE7

all the fuss over IE7?!
IE7 is NOTHING more than a cheap imitation of firefox! for me, the only thing that has changed from IE6 is that using my google toolbar reduces my usable screen an extra 1/2inch!

unfortunately for me, i am forced to use a dialup connection and firefox can never "find the server"!

until rural america becomes high-speed internet enabled IE7 is the only usable browser!

If Windows wasn't shipped

If Windows wasn't shipped with every single PC most users wouldn't even know what to do with their boxes. Take my experience as an example: I can assure you that I know at least 10 persons who have a PC or laptop and they didn't change a thing on their machines since they bought them: their desktop wallpaper is the same that the vendor defined, the office suite they bought it from a close friend, they don't have image manipulation software, they don't know what is Firefox, Opera, Songbird, RSS, Webcasts, blogs, etc, etc... Believe me: it's impressive how people don't know or are not willing at learning that stuff. If they use IE it's because that stupid blue «e» icon sitting on their desktop has «Internet» below it! And in Portugal, where I live and from where I'm writting this, it's IMPOSSIBLE to buy a pc or laptop which doesn't have Windows pre-installed on it! Those 80% or more where the easiest numbers that IE could had achieved - the "browser's war" it's all poisoned...
(sorry for the mistakes that this comment may have - english it's not my native language!)

The reasons for IE's

The reasons for IE's dominance in the field have been clearly stated, and will probably continue as long as Windows and Office do--which may not be as long as people used to think. The question that exercises me has more to do with what the real opposition is, such as might have success in turning large numbers of regular people away from IE.

I've used Opera by preference since v.3, with a special love for its comparative simplicity, which oddly enough has increased even as the features have been added to. It's one of the main things that can get 'non-savvy' people to switch from their default (IE or AOL) browser--it is so much easier to work with, and in many ways is designed with the average viewer in mind, from browser to company web site.

This simplicity includes, by the way, that the features all come in that same small package--they don't have to be added piecemeal, and with technical savvy, as with FF. (Except for the voice files, I believe.) And most of these features, such as FF promoters boast about, were in Opera long before FF existed.

As for Opera's 'market share', the very phrase is peculiar, given that all the browsers are free ... and that only Opera is a commercial browser company at all. In this latter sense, though, they are also the only one that is intrinsically in competition with Microsoft, which leads to a further wrinkle about Opera's 'share'.

That 'share' is in fact difficult to measure at all, given that most Opera users, myself included, have had to identify (or now 'mask') ourselves as either IE or Mozilla, to avoid either being fed deliberately distorted versions of web pages (as Microsoft did for some time, and NYBOT still does), or having sites blocked to them. (Hasn't eBay recently announced plans to do just this?) This is obviously due to no failing on Opera's part--the pages render perfectly when not deliberately blocked or perverted--but simply to what Opera is. And this, I feel, is due to the fact that it is the real-world main competitor to Microsoft, not something of a hobbyist alternative for those in the know. Nobody tries to block FF, so its usage shows. Something like diminished minority counts in an official census, with 'passing' here being a necessity just to operate.

As for the greater popularity of FF among the technical crowd, I think there are two reasons for it.

The first reason, I'm sorry to say, is a fairly distorted press, at least in some areas I've seen. Maximum PC magazine, for instance, aims at those looking for the latest in high-tech, largely for gaming, but also for self-image, as the magazine's language shows. Playing the bold role of anti-IE agitators in their own browser 'smackdowns' the past couple of years, they at first wrote as though Opera didn't exist, as though FF's features were brand new, tabs and all--and found FF a clear winner. When criticized for this egregious ploy by its readers, the editors made no comparison of FF and Opera, only stating that Opera was excluded because (at the time) it wasn't free -- this in an issue in which they had just created their own $12,000 Extreme Machine of the Year! (The cost of Opera at the time was about $19 with a student discount.) This policy, of making FF the default alternate browser in any discussion, with Opera simply not mentioned, continues in that magazine to this day, and I imagine this happens elsewhere, too. (I'm glad to see this is not the case here.)

The second reason follows this sort of perception in a peculiar way, having to do with the same divide readers have mentioned, between the technically savvy and the general public, most of whom truly don't know what the word 'browser' means, and don't know why they should. That is, a preference for FF has little to do with any superiority as a browser (anything is superior to IE), but to the implications of FF vs. Opera. FF sounds more savvy and advanced (though it isn't), requires a certain amount of technical knowledge to make the most of it (that is, personally downloading and adding features that are already in Opera), is the distinguishing brand of choice--all of which reinforces that very distinction in a way that Opera does not. Anybody can download and use Opera, and even modify it to taste, but not everybody can handle modules, plug-ins, and the superior feeling of using something made with 'open source' code! That Opera has been the leader in setting and following web standards (W3C and all), and helped force even IE to do the same, doesn't have that same ring, either. That is, rude as it may be to say, FF is more popular among the savvy because it shows them to be savvy.

Most neutral comparisons I've read find fairly little distinction between the operation of the two browsers, and what they find usually does have Opera ahead, if only (they might say) because Opera was there first. The little I've used FF, mainly to check web pages I've written, I found little to distinguish it from Navigator, as a 'user experience'. (One personal complaint I do have with FF. I use the "title" attribute to add 'tooltip'-type notes to my web pages, and find it odd that both IE and Opera show them in full, paragraphs if needed ... whereas FF truncates them after the first ten words or so.)

This is undoubtedly too long already, so I'll sign off here, with special thanks to anyone who made it this far!

Sincerely,

Paul N.

Preston Gralla, in response

Preston Gralla, in response to your response in the article "Readers say IE's market-share numbers depend on how, and what, you count," there is one huge problem with your comparison of the success of Google despite MSN search being the default search engine on a large number of computers sold. That is there is a large difference in the level of knowledge needed to switch to Google as your search engine and the level of knowledge required to locate, download, and install a web browser. All that is required for a user to switch to Google is for a friend to tell them to type www.google.com in the address bar before they want to search for something on the Internet.

In order for a user to switch to Firefox they first need to know about it and a large number of people believe that Internet Explorer is the Internet and have never heard about any alternatives. Then, once the user knows about Firefox they need to know how to download it an install it. Unfortunately installing Firefox is not as easy as typing www.mozilla.org in the address bar. If it was I believe that the market share of Firefox would be considerably higher. They need to download Firefox and install it. For many novice computer users this is too daunting a task.

For this reason your Google versus MSN argument is not a valid example to prove that the numbers do not lie. Internet Explorer has the advantage of being installed on Windows computers by default and many people, while they know enough about to Internet to type www.google.com in the address bar before searching for something on the Internet, do not know enough computers to download and install software.