[Software] Dubb Reviews Browsers
Posted on February 3rd, 2005 by A-Dubb in Reviews
Internet Browsers
There’s about millionbilliontrillion Internet browsers out there in this day and age and you need somebody to make sense of it all, it’s ok, you can stop crying I’m here now. What browser should we start with though? How about we start with the one that’s making the most noise on the net…
Firefox
I’m going to get little personal and watch my email fill up with hate mail, I don’t like Firefox, I don’t. Before you lynch me and beat me with dead Firefoxes (Or live, it’s up to you) hear me out. I’ve experienced many problems with Firefox that would make me go back to IE if I had no choice, such as it’s incredible RAM usgage (Yes, even in 2.0 I have that problem still), it’s a bug they can’t seem to fix. I’ve also had random crashes that puzzled me, there was no reason for the crash yet, it just disappears, much like women do when I pull my pants down. Other than what I’ve already mentioned, the browser is damn good and worth a look with all the features such as nifty plug-ins (Extensions as the Firefox community so lovingly calls them) and a pretty uber popup blocker, I just wish it had more out of the box. 3.5/5 because it owns IE, but doesn’t own all browsers like it’s being marketed by the web community.
Internet Explorer
Well, good ole IE has reached version 7. What does this mean? A seriously comptetitive step up. We now have tabbed browsing, a pretty decent popup blocker, and a nice shiney new UI, that’s really it. One thing it still suffers from is code standards, but come on, this is big daddy Microsoft we’re talking about here, they think they make the standards. Instead, however, they end up making people like Fizzle cry and break things and run around public pools naked with a shotgun because he went insane trying to make a site work properly in it. That’s a huge downer as far as coding goes. On top of it, this new version comes with every copy of Windows in the world that’s legally released and it still has the security issues, but those aren’t so bad now, still the least secure browser out of all I review, but not like it was. 2.5/5 just because it’s actually become a good training wheels browser for those just now joining us on the interwebs, the security and coding aspects suck worse than than the mexican hooker I picked up with my last $3 in Cancun last year… I don’t want to talk about it.
The browser of my of destiny, the Excalibur to my web adventures. It keeps safe me while eliminating 3 extra programs by building them in, oh Opera, how I love thee. Let’s do an old school 40’s dance-style gang feature throw down, shall we? Tabbed browsing, IRC chat, email (POP3 and IMAPI as well as a few others), super customiazable UI, pro looking skins within the browser itself (no need to go to a website to get skins, Tools > Appearence is all you need), Widgets (works the same as the skins browsing and applying), torrent downloading, and many many more, but those are the ones you’ll notice the most. Let’s get to some good old fashioned nit-picking now. Widgets, I’m gonna get technical here and then break it down for you laymens (ie: stupid people). Widgets don’t intergrate with Opera and work with it like you’d think, instead they’re seperate Java-style ‘programs’ that simpley use Opera’s Java processing engine to run properly. In stupid people terms, widgets are useless, just don’t bother unless you like to have a cool looking simulated globe or aquarium for no reason. Torrenting with Opera is just as useless, with programs like uTorrent and such you can see all the torrent stats and have a control over your download that Opera doesn’t even come close to getting. It treats the torrent download as a regular web (HTTP/FTP ect) download. You can’t see how active the torrent is, you can’t go through and deselect files you don’t want and/or need, you don’t get anything but Stop, Restart and Retransfer, it’s useless. This is still my fav browser and the most standards complient browser out there, it’s fast and secure as well and since all I nit-picked were optional features that nobody uses anyway it still gets 5/5. Yes I’m biased, but when I see something like Opera, I can appreciate the expertise that went into it. In case you didn’t know, Opera is free now thanks to Google. Free as in beer, digitized beer, but still, beer.
This is for you *nix guys and gals (yeah right…) out there, I felt I needed to address you as well. The way I feel about Konqueer is this, it’s IE for *nix running KDE (And sometimes not). Konqueer really isn’t my cup of tea, in fact, I don’t drink tea, I hate tea, this is tea. It’s got next to no features and froze on me twice in a 3 minute period. I’m going to call this KonqueerIE, because that all it is. 1.5/5 simply because it does display pages and that’s good enough for most people. As soon as the next major release of KDE comes out I might give this a shot again, but man is this horrible, just… so… bad… As a file manager it’s awesome though.
When I used this the first time, I expected IE for Macs, I was wrong, very wrong. When I opened this up and used it for about 3 minutes I realized this thing slapped my butthole and made me smell it’s hand afterwards and as odd as that sounds, it’s a good thing. This is Opera for the Mac in my eyes. Extremely fast and capable popup blocker, Java enabled but also doesn’t suck the life from your system like your ex sucked the life from you. This thing is optimized for fast everything. Loading Safari takes only seconds, Loading pages in Safari makes even 56K look faster (Not by much, but it does) and it’s capable of maintaining these speeds without taking over your computer. If you’re a Mac user and don’t use this, get your butthole slapped like mine was and get this. Sure it doesn’t have the features of Opera and Firefox, but it’s built for only one thing and it does it so well it makes most browsers almost look bad, it’s the Cadilac of Mexican hookers. 5/5 for the Mac browser-fantastico. However, I feel as though I must also review the Windows port. Basically take all the speed, replace it with clunk and add memory hogging bloat for no reason and you have another Apple program on Windows, it’s hideously bad as with all Apple ports. 0/5, don’t get Safari for Windows, it’s not worth the EXE it’s packaged in.
There you have it, browsers, reviewed, by me. Click the names to get more info on any browser you’ve seen in here. I should have linked the new IE version for all you XP people who rock it still (For shaaaaaaaame!), but I’m too lazy to go find you a good working link, so pretend I linked it to Goatse instead.
Tags: browser breakdown, browsers, firefox, internet explorer, konquerer, opera, safari, software
