I’m a Firebird user here, both at home and at work. I actually learned about Firebird at work, as I was poking around for a browser with a small footprint. (The computer was, at the time, a POS that was struggling to run Win98 much less Win2K. Don’t ask me why my workplace felt it neccessary to put Win2K on a system that barely met the minimum requirements.) Firebird helped the computer limp along until my work managed to ‘liberate’ me a better computer.
I still have IE and Netscape 4.7X on my home system, for the sites that just refuse to display well in Firebird (for whatever reason) and to test out layouts for webpages.
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I like Opera, but for some reason I can’t use it for a couple of sites I use, namely my online banking (bank of america) and my American Express card, because both sites don’t reconize my opera and seem to require IE in order to work. Anybody else have problems with that?
That’s a common problem with browsers not produced by Microsoft. It’s not really Microsoft’s fault; it’s a product of their ubiquity.
The software used to run the sites is tailored to Internet Explorer and takes advantage of Microsoft features that, if you are Microsoft, enhance a standard or, if you are not Microsoft, break with the standard.
Mostly, it is shopping cart or e-commerce applications that do this.
Or more commonly, if you are not Microsoft, you adhere to the universally agreed upon standard, but if you are Microsoft, you adhere to the Industry Standard.™
A second Camino devotee here. It is faster than Safari, has a nice popup blocker, allows you to save sets of tabs, is free, and seems to work with all Mac-friendly sites. Can’t beat that.
Sort of - Konqueror’s rendering engine, called KHTML, is used as the basis of Safari’s rendering engine. The Safari engine is not quite the same, but unless you’re a developer, you can pretend that it is.
I use Opera, because of tabs and mouse gestures, but I’m starting to hate it…
The mail client can’t print. All I get is the headers. It also takes way too long to delete the heaps of spam I get every day.
Sometimes when I go ‘back’ to a page, none of the links or buttons will work.
Typing in a Flash text box makes the browser do crazy things.
Opera crashes a lot. It saves the tabs I have open, which is nice, but sometimes a certain page will make it crash, so when I restart, I have to quickly figure out which tab it was and close it before Opera crashes again.
I’m trying to switch to Firebird and Thunderbird, but I can’t figure out how to make the All-In-One Gestures extension work like I’m used to. In Opera, I open a link in a background window by gesturing DU on it, but the only way I’ve found to do it in Firebird is to ctrl+click the link.
I use Opera, because of the tabs (switching between windows is somewhat annoying for me, although I can understand how someone could see it the opposite way), the fact that I can save a set of tabs, my google bar, the amazon bar, mouse gestures, the whole thing overall is rather pretty, it almost never crashes, and I don’t really notice the ad banner unless I’m thinking about it.
I do have a couple of problems with it. One is that I can’t access my school’s Outlook Web Access for the email account there, and the other is that M3 (the Opera email client) is just generally broken (often doesn’t communicate with my SMTP server, doesn’t print well, takes too long to delete spam, etc.). I still love it, though.
When using the Macs in my school’s multimedia lab (the rest of my high school has plenty of computers, nearly all of them PCs, but my senior project is a filmmaking thing so I end up in the multimedia lab for 2 hours every day) I end up using IE. This is actually mostly because it’s a nuisance to keep my OWA account secure in Safari–I have to log out of OWA, empty the cache and delete something else too (forgot what, but it’s something in the file menu), whereas in IE all I have to do is log out and restart the browser program if I don’t want the next guy at my computer to read my email.
Safari, because it’s small, quick, and has nice 'n easy tabs. Though before that I was using Navigator (a Cocoa-based front-end to Mozilla), but it would crash on me from time-to-time.
And yes, Safari’s rendering engine is largely based on Konquerer’s. Amusing trivia: When Apple first introduced Safari to the world, the Safari development team followed the terms of the open-source license and presented all the bug fixes and optimizations they made back into Konquerer’s version control tree – giving it a major boost in functionality.
