Tested: Five Web browsers you've never heard of

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49303237,00.htm

 

I'm trying Arora, and it opened pretty much when i clicked the icon.

 

Well i'd heard of 2 ! K-Meleon & Opera

Good to see them giving some copy to other browsers. But if they'd tested them for exploits/vulnerabilities against dodgy www's i'd have been more impressed.

 

Arora is not too bad... I tried it for a while since it was installed as one of the available browsers out of the box on KDE Four Live. Webkit based. Kinda cool.

 

Arora is awesome. It even works on Windows 98. Long live Webkit and QT4!

 

Well it seems it's only news to me heh. One more browser for the collection!

 

Let's not forget - Win binaries as of late July!

 

U have not heard of Opera

 

Opera 10 seems to get the best review which isn't a surprise really.

 

What? How can Opera be on that list? It might have a small marketshare but ffs it's well known! At least more than Safari

 

Yeah, you, the peeps here and I know, yet several casual web users I engage with couldn't possibly imagine others exist, let alone install!

 

Sure, but how can anyone who knows about Safari or Chrome not know about Opera?

 

They've never encountered a search engine? Trick question, right?

 

One is from Apple, the other from Google. You figure it out.

 

Here's a (free) hint on how to increase Opera market share:



Get rid of Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner.

 

Does it speed up Opera somehow, or make it do coffee?

 

Yes. Less time spent on useless ~snip~ like Unite and more on actual improvements. Also, it makes it less whiny

 

My browsers:

IE - online banking etc.
Firefox - general
Opera - in the form of OperaTor; stealth surfing
K-Meleon - certain sites with lots of err... graphics...

K-Meleon works very well and is faster than Firefox; highly recommended!

EDIT: I just read the K-Meleon review, and I would strongly disagree that it is only for coders and hackers.
I have been using it for over two years and have never felt the need to do any customizations.
Javascript speed, I do not know, as I turn off Javascript for these, err... graphical sites.
Overall I think it is lean and mean, and would suggest that one should give it a try and come up with their own conclusions.

 

"Graphical sites"...is that what the kids are calling them these days? On topic, with them heavily involved in the current EU debacle, I too wondered if it were true that very few heard of Opera. Here's my breakdown:

1. Opera. Good, extremely fast browser that just refuses to work on my system without freeze-ups and full blown crashes. Its configuration abilities are fantastic, rendering is wonderful and fast on the vast majority of websites. However, I would REALLY like to see a more functional ability to control javascript and block unwanted ads. I also would like to see this Unite "feature" vanish, I don't trust it. Opera also gets less points from me for this whole EU thing, but that's completely off-topic.


2. K-Meleon. I've used this browser a few times, and I've always come away either yawning or frustrated. It simply is an uninteresting browser to me and I agree with the test's statement that it can be very sluggish, though when it works well, it is very fast. This browser seemed to perform very differently depending on the website, so I agree with their statement regarding that too. It also loves to crash, at least during my trials with it it seemed to. I wish I could add a bit more of a positive view, but I just can't at this time.

3. Arora. I barely knew this was there on my system. It reminded me of my short time with Chrome, light, fast, and completely useless unless you only cared about basic browsing without any "extras". I too tested javascript websites and just browsed for an hour on random websites, and I honestly didn't have any troubles. It also stayed crash-free for me. Overall this browser bores me just as much as K-Meleon, but performance-wise I have nothing negative to report (your experience may vary of course).

The other two browsers I did not try as they were Mac. I find the author's reviews are just fine, however, a lack of at least talking about each browsers security or lack thereof concerns me. Far too much emphasis is placed on these speed tests (Come on, your eyes as a human can't even discern the speeds measured by these "benchmark tests"), and not enough on security. What good is a browser that loads in a nanosecond and gets hit by a drive-by download in the first 5 minutes?

 

I'd use Opera all the time, only it can't do 90% of what i need day to day so i've got no option but leave it on the shelf and just use it for testing.

Opera Mini and Opera on my Windows PDA rules though and i wouldn't use anything else on those platforms.

Arora looks nice, although same problem no functionality i need. Chrome, wouldn't use it if i was paid to. K-Melon i've never tried, although i will give it a spin when i get some time.

Firefox is it, there's no substitute for me.

 

I use Firefox on faster computers and Opera+maxthon on slower ones.

 

You can right-click and then click block content.

 

Not good enough in my opinion. For one thing, that means the ads are still allowed to load, slowing the rendering of the page AND if javascript isn't controlled, loading whatever drive-by it happened to contain. For another, correct me if I'm wrong as it's been a few weeks since I last used Opera, but do you not have to right-click each individual piece of content you want blocked? If so, that may count as ad-blocking to you, but to me that's a major annoyance. I want to look at my websites, not spend time getting rid of things on it.

Javascript is also a problem. The "either it's on or off" approach is dangerous when on, and really screws with the web when off.

 

ive heard of 2 browsers on that list. k melon and Opera.
Opera is my favourite browser.
its the fastest browser and stays fast no matter how many tabs you have open.
I have issues when some big updates are released but they are genreally fixed quite fast. 9.64 works great.

The only reason so many people have heard of firefox is because everyone seems to reccomend it to replace IE and then people like the extensions. the idea for most people was to replace an unsecure browser aka IE6 genrally. but firefox seems very unsecure recently. it seems to need more security updates than IE does.

I only know one person who has heard of safari and thats only because he has a mac. Of course people have heard of chrome because its on the home page of google and also has tons of links on youtube.

 

I have to disagree somewhat, Lodore. Firefox still lags behind IE with security issues, and they are also a lot faster to patch ones that do come up. It seems to me that with Firefox, patches show up without me hardly ever hearing there was a vulnerability in the first place. But, with IE, I read about a vulnerability, and, two weeks or more later on an ever-present "Patch Tuesday", a patch comes (just having a patch Tuesday should tell you who is on top of their security and who isn't).