Netscape, IE, FF and Opera

Webrowsers have come a long way. Back in the day of IRC, I used to use Netscape Communicator (version 3.8 - 4.5.) That was great. It looked pretty, and functioned quite well. Then I remember Evil Microsoft - the software giant that wasn't then, but is now - attempting to 'integrate' the 'offline' with the 'online'. How? Its solution was Microsoft Explorer; coupled with the release of (a neat function) ActiveX Desktop. I looked and played with ME for a while, but still stuck with what I knew, the pretty Netscape Communicator.

ActiveX however, was fun - it allowed you to "paste" 'stuff' on the desktop; so that your desktop was not static (as today's desktops are) but could have animated pictures such as "GIF" files. It undoubtedly slowed down your machine, but at that point ActiveX was still new, and there was great potential for dynamic desktops.

That is until the United States Department of Justice took on Microsoft and 'forced' them to make Microsoft Explorer a "non-integral" part of the Operating System. Microsoft complied (not that they had a choice) and essentially 'renamed' their new browser into what we all know today: Microsoft Internet Explorer. They also removed ActiveX (from their Operating System) which to date I still miss (although the protocol is still within their Internet Explorer browser.)

I used MIE for a good number of months, just because it was so easy and resourceful. It came with the OS and I did not need to download newer versions of NC. MIE also supported the 'newer' standards of HTML, which in effect made a lot of the webpages prettier. There was no ugly 2CM borders and scroll bars for the sites which still used Tables and there was the promise of a new type of code that allowed webpages to have Tables without the ugly boxes that seperated the different sections.

While MIE was good, it was flawed, and has seen more viruses than any programmer would in any two lifetimes. Trojans, Worms, Brute-Force, Standard, Mass Mail, MBR, you name it, MIE has seen it.

And that is when we all switched, to Open-Source Code, Mozilla's Firefox. I will say that Firefox is fun, you can customize it (skin it), you can download a multitude of applets and "plug-in" your FF and most of all, FF supported almost all standards of HTML. FF was taking the world by storm, and it even had a reliable download manager for your massive 10GB downloads. Most of all, it did not have security issues like MIE did. Alas, FF would crash in the most important of 'surfing' and when it did, you lost all 600 tabs which would be open simultaneously.

The browsing experience was almost perfect... if it weren't for the crashing...

...I read a review a good 2 months ago and stumbled across yet another webrowser. Opera. I took a quick look at their website and was throughly impressed.
The "wow" factor was adrenaline pumping, so I downloaded Opera. I used it for 5 minutes and was hooked.

Not only does Opera have a Tab feature like Firefox, but it also saves your "last session" and "reopens" it the next time you execute Opera. I think this feature alone is enough for one to switch browsers. You can have your Weather report, your Inbox and your other favourite sites open all the time. And even when you shut down the application to run your favourite game, and reopen it after, it simply restarts when it left off - it is what the Windows' "hibernate" feature should be. Now I can have my 600 tabs open and if it does crash, I won't lose all my precious (un-bookmarked) websites.

Moreover, the download manager appears better than Firefox's. It can actually resume files, rather than give an error about not being able to find the file, consequently restarting the download from the beginning (from the site where it mysteriously could not find the file.)

But all is not well, and a sad reminder that we do live in a Fallen world. Opera is not as widespread as MIE or FF (for those who don't know, NC is dead.) That means that certain pages will have problems in displaying correctly (GMail is one) and can cause some annoyances (sometimes even using MIE so that you can view the webpage.) Another is the "tag" feature of this blogger site - in Opera, the content within the tags do not display properly, which is sad, since this site has been so well generated.

Alas, one cannot have everything - if they did - what would be left for Heaven for all of eternity? Certainly only the best of the best should be reserved for all eternity; I sure would not want it any other way... but I digress...