Browser of the Year
 

What browser do you prefer when browsing LQ?

--jeremy

Midori

I don't see Luakit.

Dillo

Luakit and Dillo have been added.

--jeremy

Although it's almost the same as Firefox, it's not quite. Iceweasel is the Debian browser, one of the more heavily used distros.

Still my choice is same as last year. Because I am pretty happy with my browser. It is Firefox

No IE?

My choice is Firefox, despite them killing off my addons with each rapid release.
Though once I have no addons left then who knows! :(

Chrome, I like the themes and extensions (and the fact I only have to type L and press enter and I am at LQ) and overall way it works. I also use Midori,Firefox, or Opera depending on needs. But as far as one I find the most appealing and would call 'favorite' it goes to google.

Firefox gets my vote. I also think IceWeasel ought to be there.
batfastad: Add-on Compatibility Reporter is your friend.

Mosiac >> WebExplorer >> Navigator >> Phoenix >> Firebird >> Firefox!

At work (windows) I didn't want to use IE so I installed Chrome. Having used it for 6 months, I started using it at home. It's fast and I like it. Having said that, my vote goes to Firefox.

My vote goes to Firefox. I can use it with the three big OSes, Linux, MacOS & Windows...I do have a liking for Epiphany too!

What about Chrome? It also supports Linux and Windows. Not sure if it is avaliable for mac but preety sure that the *nixes have it.

+1 for firefox.
BTW where is Netscape?

I would think that only browsers that are still being updated and supported as of this year are eligible.

+1 for Firefox.. Even if its a resource hog and crash once in a while..

My choice/vote is Firefox but i use and Chrome.

Why is rekonq not on the list?

Hi,

Have been a Chrome user for a long time.

Kind regards,

Eric

rekonq has been added.

--jeremy

I swear by chromium/chrome because it supports html5 and all of web 2.0!

firefox.

Dillo, iceape and elinks-lite

Still using Firefox - do others have/needs things like NoScript and Adblock Plus?

Firefox gets my vote. Lately, I have been testing out Chrome and I'm pleased with the results as well.

Firefox is still the best browser.

Firefox mostly.

I'm suprised at all the Chrome votes, I didnt think that closed source broswer from a multinational datamining company with an aggressive acquisition policy and rumoured ties to intelligence agencies would be so popular on a linux forum.

...

Hmmmm, that's a tuff one, Firefox because I use it most of the time, but Lynx...o yea' :), Lynx is your swiss army knife if you're (like me sometimes) in a text-only setting...

Too bad I should only vote once...

Opera and Midori, but voted Opera.

Firefox on all platforms.

Opera

First, it is open source. See http://www.chromium.org/Home and http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wi...VsGoogleChrome

Second, from what I've read on the subject, they were requesting help from the NSA to secure their systems after the accounts of some human rights activists were breached. I haven't seen anything indicating any privacy violation, other than people speculating.

As far as browsers, I find Chromium lets me block all cookies except necessary ones far more easily than in any other browser I've used. Chromium also seems to be faster and better with resources than Firefox, especially for long sessions and large numbers of tabs. I haven't done any serious benchmarking though.

I'd call them a marketing company rather than a data mining company, but maybe that's because I've never seen evidence that they are selling my search information. Maybe I'm too comfortable with a machine seeing what I type in a search engine so that it can rank pages and show ads. Also, I don't think a search engine would work very well without heavily data mining web pages to determine things like page rank.

How is their acquisition policy relevant to a browser?

Firefox, used it since 0.7. Have Iron installed out of curiosity, Still prefer Firefox.
Arora shows promise as well.

First, no, Chrome is not open source. Sure, its based on Chromium, which is open source, and we can debate about how much closed code google has shoved into Chrome. But since the source is closed, we wont find out.

Second, Googles 'rumoured ties to intelligence agencies' goes back a long, long time, pretty much to the beginnings of google.

Thrid, you dont have to sell data to be a data miner. If you take a simple defintion of 'data mining' google is a data mining company without doubt.

Forth, IMO a companies polices always matter.

As for how its important, think about how google is operating. They do some work on Chrome, then release it as Chromium and open source, using a licence that allows then to make a closed source versio). That allows google to not only get code for 'free' (LOL), and have a 'development' version they dont have to do anything with, they also get lots of people who dont understand the situation (or are prepared to 'misstate' the situation because 'google isnt evil') running aroung saying that 'chrome is open source' and 'google supports open source' and similar bulldust.

Its a win/win/win as far as google is concerned. Lower production and development costs, a ready made cheer bench, while keeping the code that matters to google closed.

As far as I'm concerned, its lose/lose. Not only is Chrome giving google more power in the internet ecosystem (which they already have too much off) it also erodes the whole concept of 'open source', and is playing a silly licence game.

Opera suits all my browsing needs.

May be Firefox/IceWeasel and Chrome/Chromium in the poll options, or have any differences? besides the logo and the name?

Like sgosnell, I use Firefox with Debian, so it is technically Iceweasle. I make it even better by using DuckDuckGo as my preferred search engine. A pretty good combination!

EDIT
I see no option to vote for Arora. That might make Arch users unhappy.

:p Had to lol at this one. I voted Firefox, as I've been using it so long that anything else feels alien.

LOL

Oddly enough, I never liked IE. As soon as local internet became available, I installed AOL's version of Netscape (Navigator?) on Windows 98, and when AOL announced they were discontinuing Netscape, I switched to Firefox. I've used it on every platform since, and have never found reason to try anything else.

Firefox is the browser for me. I use it in Linux and Windows XP.

I use mostly Epiphany and elinks.
So I voted Epiphany, 'cause it's quick and light and I need to browse a lot of image-heavy sites. (fashion, costumes and photo-related sites)

Chrome. It sucks slightly less than the others. Firefox has lost it's way and drifted off into the land of crazy.

I chose Firefox. And I use Chrome and Chromium alot too, as well as IceCat and Konqueror - sometimes I'm running most all of the above at the same time too!

I suppose that with consideration to my debiantard side, I might should be choosing Firefox although it's really IceWeasel LOL!

Oh and let's not leave out lynx ;) Hey is Emacs in the list? LOL!

I hope that helps :)

Kindest regards,

.

I don't see it hahah nice! but what about conkeror.org it's nice web browser on emacs I use from time to time but on firefox I uses a lot of add ons not to easy to switch though...

Best regards,
John

Now a days firefox is rapidly releasing its versions .... facing some compatibility issue ...

voting for chrome ...

All the active browsers available for linux:

Amaya
Arora
Chromium
Dillo
Dooble
Elinks
Epiphany
Google Chrome
Konqueror
Links
Lynx
Midori
Mozilla Firefox
NetSurf
Opera
SeaMonkey
w3m

Ok, mostly open source. It's open source with some closed source components. A couple of closed-source plugins and a usage statistic collection feature (that's off by default IIRC) are all they added in. Matter of fact, I believe the crash reporter and user metrics system are open source.

How much of your software did you compile on your own machine? If you didn't download the source, then compile and install all of your software yourself, how do you know whether or not extra code was shoved in?

Rumors are just rumors. I'd be interested in something concrete, but I don't really care about rumor.

They are definitely a company that does data mining. You seem to think they are doing nefarious things. What's the issue? What are they doing that's evil and where's the evidence?

So, you think all software should be strict GPLv3 or similar? How is it a bad thing if they release almost all of the source code, with the exceptions being replaceable plugins?

They do release very large amounts of code with projects like Chromium, Go, Android and Google Mock/Test. They employ developers like Guido van Rossum and pay them to spend time working on projects like Python. Other developers work on the Linux kernel. There's also their Summer of Code. I'm not "cheering" for them blindly. I'm saying that it's a good thing they can sink a large amount of resources into open source, especially paying students to work on open source projects instead of closed source internships. I'd be interested in knowing about companies that do a better job of supporting open source.

I'm not asking whether or not a business policy matters, I'm asking how is it relevant? Business acquisitions sometimes happen. Debating whether Google's policy is good or bad could take at least one long thread.

The economics of a company developing a program, then giving away both the compiled program and source code for free could be another large debate, but paid developers spending large amounts of time on open source projects costs a company a lot of money. Have you ever looked at what percentage of code in Chromium is done by Google developers and what percentage is done by non-paid developers?

How does releasing the code for a good, multi-platform browser under licenses approved by the FSF and OSI erode any part of the concept of open source? What is this "silly" license game? Chrome might go against Stallman's idea of "free" software, but it does not go against open source.

Opera, always Opera.