Firefox Use is on the Rise
According to zdnet Firefox has passed a 20% marketshare in Europe.
Personally I’ve used Firefox for the last year or so and I really like it. I’ve recently tried Opera. It seems to run much lighter. However, I’ve been told by some css “gurus” that Opera isn’t that good.
I’m unsure why or what the exact complaints are against the Opera browser, and I’m unsure of my source’s credentials. I would really like to get feedback from anyone on their preferred browser and why. Please feel free to leave a comment.
I’ve also been using IE7. I’m quite frankly not pleased with it. In general the options really don’t offer anything more exciting than the firefox or the opera. Not only does it have the M$ signature giant footprint, but as usual it does NOT render css very well.
I’d say: try them both. If you ask the fans, they will of course say their favorite is much better. Both Firefox and Opera can have problems with sites that are only tested on MSIE. For the record: I’m also utterly biased :)
As far as CSS in concerned, both Opera and Firefox are far ahead of most other browsers (though Safari comes close in some areas). There are some differences between them. See for an interesting comparison:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html
Opera is now at version 8.51, and Opera 9 is in the oven. Opera 9 will offer support for a number of non-standard-but-popular techniques like Rich Editing, and will also offer an improved rendering engine to be compatible with even more sites.
Firefox is at version 1.5 now, next will be Firefox 2 but that wil use basically the same rendering engine. The really serious improvements (for example to render the Acid2 test correctly) will have to wait for what is now expected to be Firefox 3:
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
Thanks for the response. One thing I’m learning about is those “quirks”. As I’m learning css, I’ve resorted to creating a different style sheet for IE using a conditional comment. Of course, I’ll save that for another entry as I learn about it ;)
The more I read, the more I’m disgusted with IE. Not only does it not render css in standards(or strict) mode, but its entirely integral to the OS.
Yesterday I removed IE7 from my machine, and couldn’t reinstall IE6. I got the “a newer version is detected” warning. The only way to reinstall it was to do an in-place install, which of course after rerunning all the updates etc took me over an hour. Why should it be so difficult?! I can install and uninstall Opera, or firefox all day long without any problems!
The more I use firefox and it’s extensions, I really like it. For those readers who don’t know what an extension is, it’s like a mini program that integrates with your browser. Some examples are a program that shows the weather in your status bar or more robust ones that aid in editing web pages, or even reading rss feeds.
I will be switching to Firefox due to all the trouble I went through with removing IE7 Beta.
Lawk Salih
http://www.lawksalih.com
Problems removing a beta, interesting….