What web browser do you use/favorite?

What web browser do you use?


  • Total voters
    82
You guys keep saying internet explorer has changed. But its still not as good as chrome. But ie is my second favorite browser. But the margin in between the two is huge. Firefox is fast but it always takes like an hour just to open. Once it is open its fast.

I think a lot of people take "not as good as ____" and turn it into "sucks". For regular users, IE is just fine. The newer versions support web standards to a degree that most normal sites work just fine (if you go by the W3C definition of standards, IE has been fully compliant for quite some time now). It is also reasonably secure with good security habits (especially with the feature in IE9 to disable ActiveX, though the UI for this could use work).

Personally, I rarely use sites that have lots of javascript (though performance is supposed to be fast now in IE9, I have not tested it) or html5.

Note: I use Chrome for about 99% of my browsing these days. I only have used IE in the past few months if I need to log in to a second google account or if I need to view a word/excel/powerpoint file online. I do miss accelerators, though.
 
I run Mozilla Firefox on my machines, I think this is the faster one, I've been using it for quick long and I have not complains. I also have installed Chrome.
 
This is the attitude that needs to end. A lot has changed with IE6. Seriously: products change over time. Microsoft could rebrand IE9 under a new name and people would probably love it (in fact, they did this with Vista - ever hear of the Mojave experiment?). 90% of the FUD against IE are complaints that haven't been valid for years or tech people who have a grudge against IE and are deliberately trying to make it look bad.

The Mojave experiment was where MS experts installed clean and tuned OSs on way-overspec workstations and let people play with them for five minutes to see how wonderful they were, right? Probably best not to compare IE9 to Vista, I'm thinking...
 
Vista trounced XP as an operating system, people who didn't prefer it to XP, in the same way IE9 is clearly superior to previous IE8, are simply ignorant of the facts.

Seriously? :dubious:

If you're not trying to be sarcastic here, let me know and I'll respond in detail, but I don't want to waste my time otherwise.
 
Seriously? :dubious:

If you're not trying to be sarcastic here, let me know and I'll respond in detail, but I don't want to waste my time otherwise.

Well, I'm not being sarcastic, but it's probably not worth your time to respond in detail in any case, particularly since there's really no point in going with any version of Windows pre-7 at this point.
 
Well, I'm not being sarcastic, but it's probably not worth your time to respond in detail in any case, particularly since there's really no point in going with any version of Windows pre-7 at this point.

That's probably true, but I've been running Windows networks for over ten years now and am not frequently accused of being 'ignorant of the facts' in such matters. I won't bother going into details, but I was involved in testing Vista in preparation for a 200-workstation upgrade from XP and Win2k for my company, and also ran it on my own PC for a while. I'm not just spouting anti-M$ rhetoric or mooing with the herd when I say that (IMHO) XP Pro was superior to Vista.

And yeah, 7 is an improvement over either of them.
 
Your posts simply illustrate a fact that should be obvious to anyone that works with PCs: one should NEVER get a new copy of windows without getting a brand new computer except in special cases.

Additionally, one should NEVER, EVER do an upgrade install of any version of windows. It's simply way too buggy and results in problems. If you must upgrade your copy of windows, do a clean install. Seriously, if Microsoft had not allowed upgrades from XP to Vista, 90% of the complaints against Vista would have never happened (for this reason Microsoft requires a clean install to move from XP to 7).

And running a new version of windows on old (read: obsolete) hardware or with old software (especially old software that didn't follow the windows API) is just asking for trouble.

Unfortunately, similar advice seems to apply to IE as well. Upgrading from IE7 to IE8 resulted in numerous slowdowns on my older system, but my newer one which was upgraded on the first day I owned it didn't have them. It appears that the same junk that causes windows issues also causes IE issues, especially after an upgrade.
 
The Mojave experiment was where MS experts installed clean and tuned OSs on way-overspec workstations and let people play with them for five minutes to see how wonderful they were, right? Probably best not to compare IE9 to Vista, I'm thinking...
I don't really agree with that blog.

Whilst the placebo effect may mean that the experiment doesn't show Vista to be better, I don't think that's the point. The point was to counter the idea that people thought Vista to be awful compared with XP.

It's unclear how one would create a placebo in that kind of experiment?

"Unfortunately, that’s NOT why people choose Windows. They hack together their own machines, and they want their software to still run."

I imagine that most people buy complete PCs these days, rather than building them.

His argument seems to focus that Vista is bad because it's not compatible with old games, but that's always an issue with newer OSs.

Windows Genuine Advantage issues apply to XP too (Windows 2000 is the one that didn't have all that crap).

That's not to say I like Vista - I'm just not convinced by the "bad science" argument. Vista's main problem is that it runs crap on 1GB of RAM, and when it came out, that was still the standard for laptops (and still is for netbooks).

Windows 7 fixes this issue though.

I remember when XP came out, and people were preferring 2000 for years, and hating XP. Seems funny that XP is suddenly the liked OS.
 
XP is suddenly the liked OS (and Vista the hated) because Vista is the first (and only) version of Windows to come out after people had time to stop hating the last one. It's hardware requirements are nothing new, but in the past hardware advances were matched by new versions of Windows that use the hardware and keep the performance status quo. Simply put, people were ignorant of what happens when you run and old OS on new hardware (and with XP lasting so long, it was actually supported on the new hardware, which never happened before). Simply put, Vista is a victim of XP's longevity (IE7/8/9 are victims of IE6's longevity, but for different reasons). Thankfully MS appears to be learning that long release cycles = bad.
 
Your posts simply illustrate a fact that should be obvious to anyone that works with PCs: one should NEVER get a new copy of windows without getting a brand new computer except in special cases.

In fact it is so obvious that I didn't expressly state it: one of the options the company was looking at was rolling out new workstations with Vista preloaded. It still sucked. And while the home PC I clean-installed Vista on wasn't "brand new", it was of adequate horsepower.
 
That's not to say I like Vista - I'm just not convinced by the "bad science" argument. Vista's main problem is that it runs crap on 1GB of RAM, and when it came out, that was still the standard for laptops (and still is for netbooks).

Windows 7 fixes this issue though.

Windows 7 fixes this issue?!? :eek: I hope you are not referring to your "runs bad on 1GB of RAM" phrase! I've been using Windows 7 for a while now and it uses 2 GB of ram even when it isn't doing anything!
 
Slightly more topical: my Chrome browser is now 20% cooler.
 
Windows 7 fixes this issue?!? :eek: I hope you are not referring to your "runs bad on 1GB of RAM" phrase! I've been using Windows 7 for a while now and it uses 2 GB of ram even when it isn't doing anything!

You can't reliably measure the Windows memory footprint like that. With Vista and 7, Microsoft decided there was no reason for unused RAM to go to waste, so these versions of Windows will take everything they can get for idle processes.

Also, a lot of the system performance issues were from Intel's stupidity in labeling them Vista ready when they weren't.
 
Not sure when it happened, but Chrome finally got the handy-dandy YouTube downloader. One more reason to choose it over Firefox. :)
 
How big do people here set their browser to? Full screen? Windowed (resolution/size)?
 
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