Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Firefox 3.x is my primary browser, with Konqueror a close second.
I try every new browser that comes out, and I've yet to find better for my needs than Firefox or Konqueror.
NJBest,
I am like you in that I never bookmark anything. Ever. Never have, actually. I visit the same sites routinely and never have use for knowing where they are. Any new sites I find are usually by dint of chasing rabbits when I'm looking for the stuff I was supposed to be looking for in the first place.
Wow @ Epiphany. I haven't seen anyone but you mention that in a long time. I like Epiphany, too. It's nice and simple and fast. I saw that they moved the rendering engine from Gecko to WebKit. How is it working for you? I need to try it out again as it's been a long time. Were you ever a Galeon user?
1) Netscape 3.04 when I have a choice, with images and javascript OFF (for sites that will render usably in what amounts to textmode). NOTHING beats it for speed and ease of use.
2) SeaMonkey 1.1.9 (Mozilla family) when I need a full-featured browser, with PrefBar installed so I can stand to use the nasty thing. (PrefBar lets me turn JS on/off with one click, quickly change windowsize and user-agent, and a few other useful things.)
And I have about 20 others installed from Mosaic 0.9 to IE5.0 to oddities like OffByOne, to be used only as needed on nasty-tempered or ill-mannered websites.
I am like you in that I never bookmark anything. Ever. Never have, actually. I visit the same sites routinely and never have use for knowing where they are. Any new sites I find are usually by dint of chasing rabbits when I'm looking for the stuff I was supposed to be looking for in the first place.
And I'm the other way around. I hate typing URLs. So I have a clump of everyday bookmarks I use all the time, plus several thousand that are in no order but I know what to search for when I want to find something among 'em. So that part is more like a collection of notes on places I've been or might need in the future, than of places I want to go regularly.
And since bookmarks in the NS/Moz family are just glorified web pages, I make them share by having a local web page for "Home" which references the various bookmark files as links. The oldest one (collectively used by various Netscapes) has been with me so long that it still lives in the Netscape 2 directory!
I don't like purely textmode browsers (tho I used to use one for FTP in DOS!), but I like to have the web page itself render in as little time and as legibly as possible, which if it's set up right, means you can discard all the fancy stuff and still have a working page. Slashdot in classic mode, as seen in NS3 (no JS or CSS), is a good example. C-D works after a fashion this way too, tho you need more experience at figuring out where stuff landed without the CSS, whereas /. just winds up as one long vertical stack.
Why not just run Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript. You would get better rendering and speed most likely.
Seamonkey is faster than Firefox (which isn't saying much; the whole Moz family has horrible coding Zen) and VASTLY more configurable without having to delve into the guts. I hate how FF is dumbed down. On the rare occasions when I'm forced to use FF, I wind up wanting to put my fist through the monitor (which SM does to me often enough, but FF does it 100% of the time... and so does IE, tho it's a lot faster than Moz/FF). Also, I use SM for email (I need multiple accounts, secure protocol, the ability to delete attachments, and email must be stored as plaintext not databased; SM-mail has issues but at least it does all that), and I do NOT want to run TBird (insert same reasons I hate FF, plus some).
I almost never see ads, just from basic image and popup blocking (and having only an ancient version of Flash as a plugin). The scripts that are the worst performance robbers are presently mostly links to Google functions or run "shovel everything onto one page" databases (like realtor.com); I've blocked a bunch of Googlecrap in HOSTS but the Moz family has a bug there that sometimes ignores HOSTS til it times out (report bugs all you like, they only fix the ones THEY care about).
If you're using a fast machine, you won't notice what utter pigs the whole Moz group are, but this reliable old bugger, which has outlived half a dozen faster systems, is a P3-550 (1GB RAM, fast HD, Win98; benchmarks equivalent to a P3-800). I'm reminded of the maxim that the programmer should always have the slowest machine in the entire company, so he's forced to recognise what he's doing unto others.
Netscape 3 has by far the fastest rendering engine of ANY browser (around 20x the speed of Moz/FF), but the source code was not available -- JWZ tried and tried to get the source but it just wasn't available or was already lost. The nearest equivalent I've ever seen elsewhere was the old version of Konqueror that came with MDK7 -- it's basically a NS3 clone from top to bottom. At any rate, it ruined me, and now I expect every browser to perform like that.
The fact that even relatively "simple" pages (like this C-D page! tripled in size since I started here) are now running around 300k, all of which has to be parsed and rendered, does not help matters.
Hopefully looking at other browsers is why I've got about 20 different ones installed.
I use different browsers for different things. Sometimes nothing will do but IE (like Sharepoint). If Chrome will do the job, it has the advantage of loading fast. However, it doesn't perform as well as FireFox for CD. Safari and Opera get used sometimes. I haven't installed Sea Monkey. Generally, I like FireFox best.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The nearest equivalent I've ever seen elsewhere was the old version of Konqueror that came with MDK7 -- it's basically a NS3 clone from top to bottom. At any rate, it ruined me, and now I expect every browser to perform like that. 
