Browser Wars
I'm extremely picky when it comes to browsers. I'm a minimalist, so I've never seen the need to install any addons for Firefox. I like applications that work (more or less) how I like out of box, mainly because it's rare for me to keep an installation of an operating system for more than six months, and I'd drive myself crazy with all the reconfiguration and/or backup. The only extensions I use for Firefox are for development and debugging, namely Firebug and Tamper Data.
Last spring, I purchased my first Mac. I soon found Firefox far too unstable to be usable on Mac OS X. Ever since then, I've switched to Opera and have been satisfied with it so far.
The candidates for browsers are Opera 9.5 Beta, Firefox 2, and Flock 1.0. Flock is a "social" web browser based on Firefox. I chose Flock mainly because it's recent release has struck interest in me, but I plan to write a more comprehensive post on Flock in the future. Today, I'll be covering three aspects of each browser: RSS Feeds, Speed, and Keyboard Accessibility.
Last spring, I purchased my first Mac. I soon found Firefox far too unstable to be usable on Mac OS X. Ever since then, I've switched to Opera and have been satisfied with it so far.
The candidates for browsers are Opera 9.5 Beta, Firefox 2, and Flock 1.0. Flock is a "social" web browser based on Firefox. I chose Flock mainly because it's recent release has struck interest in me, but I plan to write a more comprehensive post on Flock in the future. Today, I'll be covering three aspects of each browser: RSS Feeds, Speed, and Keyboard Accessibility.
RSS Feeds
The main reason I chose to cover RSS feeds was to nitpick about Firefox's "support" (or lack thereof) for RSS feeds.
Speed
You can find benchmarks here.
Keyboard Accessibility
Update: And an hour later, Flock has crashed.
Update 2: Fifteen minutes later, it crashed again.
The main reason I chose to cover RSS feeds was to nitpick about Firefox's "support" (or lack thereof) for RSS feeds.
- Opera -- The feed reader which comes with Opera works very much like email. Like Firefox, a feed icon is displayed in the address bar on pages with feeds, and subscribing just requires clicking that icon. Notifications are displayed on the bottom right corner of your screen when a feed is updated, much like notifications from Outlook, which is a big plus for me as I like being able to see my feeds updated in real time (which is why I don't use any service like Bloglines or Google Reader). The feed reader is definitely plain looking (read: ugly), but the functionality is all there and is the best of all the browsers.
- Firefox -- What can I say? Firefox has "Live Bookmarks", which I wouldn't classify as a feed reader. Each "feed" becomes a folder, and all the items in the folder are the latest items in the feed, thus you only see titles and nothing else. Completely worthless.
- Flock -- It reminds me of Bloglines, but prettier. No notifications and no options to configure how frequent to refresh feeds. Definitely a step up from Firefox, but still short of being functional.
Speed
You can find benchmarks here.
- Opera -- Damn fast. Uses more memory than I'd like, but doesn't leak memory.
- Firefox -- Leaks memory. I don't know what it is, but Mozilla-based applications pain me.
- Flock -- I haven't played with Flock enough to talk about it's speed, but considering it's based on Firefox, I would imagine it to be similar.
Keyboard Accessibility
- Opera -- The Speed Dial feature is such a simple concept that it's amazing. I get to choose nine of my favorite websites to place on a speed dial which can be accessed by pressing CTRL + [1-9]. I often catch myself trying to access these shortcuts on Firefox and being disappointed when my browser switches tabs.
- Firefox -- They're fine. IMO not as powerful as Opera, but still decent.
- Flock -- Same as Firefox, except some of Flock's shortcuts clobber the shortcuts for Firebug which is annoying.
Update: And an hour later, Flock has crashed.
Update 2: Fifteen minutes later, it crashed again.
