[Who dat?]

I still like lynx. I know I'm alone in that. I love a quick, non-banner-add~ing, non-pop-up-menu~ing, non-java~cised, whatever... Oh well... `

[Cicero]

After four or five years of work, it's still not as fast as Internet Explorer and it's still full of bugs? Plus I hear it has a very large footprint. I think I'll hold off installing it.

[Grut]

Opera 6 is available for free (it plays ads at you up in one corner of the screen) and works pretty well. It has pop-up rejection and useful cookie controls built in and for some reason seems to yield many fewer modem 'device errors' than IE6 does, at least on my system.

I have pretty much stopped using IE6 in favor of Opera 6. IE users may be interested to know that Opera will import your IE 'favorites' directly.

[Nick Danger]

The Munchkins should be getting their talking point memos any minute now. Let's see if we can guess what lines of attack they will take.

I figure the "open source software is communism" canard will be one of the first ones floated. The "no one uses it" ploy is also an obvious candidate, and they'll probably send in at least two Munchkins to claim that they personally tried it, and it's full of bugs and besides that it makes your hard disk explode.

It will be interesting to see if any of them try to seize on the fact that it's free by saying "you get what you pay for." They have for months been arguing that Microsoft was only being helpful in giving away IE for free, but this time free will mean not 'helpful' but 'get whatcha pay for.' Consistent logical argument has never been the Mark Of The Munchkins.

Damn, I almost forgot about security holes. Yep, it's full of security holes. They'll have to try that one; that's essential to the cultivation of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Starting the Bush2000 timer....NOW. Tick.. tick.. tick..

[rdb3]

[Uncle Fud]

Opera 6 is worth paying for. The ability to turn graphics off with a single keystroke is the only thing that makes surfing on a dialup link even possible anymore.

[jigsaw]

Mac users should also consider iCab (www.icab.com).

Although it's still being developed, it's small, fast and very customizable (is that a word?)

[upchuck]

Hate AOL and Microsloth. Never used 'em, never will. AOL is a bloat. And MS is so full of security holes. I was a fan of Netscape. Ran V4.7. Did real good for me. But more and more web pages wouldn't load properly. So I upgraded to V6.2. Even paid $20 for the book and CD. Oh, what a disappointment! No way to import a .csv file into the email address book. Says you can in the documentation, but the facility just isn't there. So I went back to email from V4.7 (which has always worked fine; 'twas the browser I was having trouble with). Then I discoverd some weird stuff in the V6.2 browser. Ya know what "focus" is? It's the area of the current window that's "live." If you type, it shows up in the area of the window that has the focus. Son in the V6.2 browser, the fine folks at Netscape decided the URL dialogue box should get the focus. So if I choose a web page from a bookmark, when the page loads, the focus is in the URL dialogue box. What a stupid thing. If I hit the spacebar to page down, I don't page down; I just typed a space character after the URL displayed in the URL dialogue box. I have to click in the browser window to change focus to that window and THEN I can use the spaceabr to page down. Why'd they change this? They had it right in V4.7 and blew it in V6.2.

Bookmarks: in V4.7 you could have close to 100 bookmarks displayed on the screen at a time. In 3 or columns. In V6.2, they went the "XP" route and you get one column that ya gotta scroll up and down in to find what you need. If you ahve 100 bookmarks and want the next to last one, you'll be scrolling for awhile.

So I downloaded Opera. WHAT A JOY! Fast, easy to use, bookmark handling that makes sense. A terrific product! And I don't find the ads all that bothersome. On my 14" notebook screen, the ads are in a box about .75" tall and 5.25" wide in the upper right of the screen. And it doesn't take away from browser space because the navigation buttons (bach, fwd, reload, etc.) are to the left of the window.

I've been very impressed with Opera. Give it a try if you're fed up w/ Netscape and IE.

[Neologic]

What about Galeon (http://galeon.sourceforge.net/)? While it is based on the rendering engine of Mozilla (and requires Gnome), its the best web browser I have ever used- handles all the web sites that I visit and is very stable. Of course its free and probably best thing to install if you know your way around Linux.

And for those KDE fans, how is the new version of Konquerer? I have heard good things about it, but have yet to try it.

The browser wars are not over- They would have to pry my keyboard away from my cold dead hands...err wrong topic, sorry.

[Southack]

The intriguing tidbit of news is that Mozilla is running on Linux/Unix, Mac, and Windows.

No, portable software alone doesn't make it intriguing, of course, but what DOES make it intriguing is the fact that one day Browsers will replace operating systems, or put another way, Browsers will become full-fledged operating systems.

Add some additional OS functionality to Mozilla and you've got an environment that can run applets on Linux/Unix, Mac, and Windows systems from the same codebase with no recompiling. Add a little more functionality and Mozilla (or something like it from someone a little more clever) obviates the need for Linux/Unix, Mac, or Windows in the first place.

Even today, if my guys are writing VBscript or Javascript, they don't care about the client OS so much as they care that the Browser supports their scripting. This trend of Browsers becoming more important than OS's shows no sign of slowing down, either.

[Mr. K]

GREAT!! I can get a NEW BROWSER that works ALMOST as good as the one I have (except for "a few flies in the ointment...")

I Can't WAIT~!! And it is OPEN SOURCE TOO!!! (For all those times my gramma wants to tweak the source code...)

< sarcasm off >