I have had my ups and downs with Firefox. It's not IE and the interface is all it needs to be. It's worth repeating it's not IE. IE does work well on MS though but the GUI is rediculous. Mandriva 08 came with Firefox 2. It's great besides sometimes LQ and Yahoo mail open up child windows and if you close them it crashes Firefox. Then I may have to have maybe four child windows open for the only reason as to not crash Firefox. If I have alot of windows open a condition arises that the window border will only be visable and not anything in it. They start off reloading slowly until they won't load at all. Firefox three works good on XP but it has a tendency to state that you have a broken address and when you load it again it works fine.It seems to have a built in downloader manager that works like Retriever but with out the overhead. Firefox three on Mandriva works great until it crashes so I don't use it at all on that distro. I had been thinking of trying Opera but every thing is such a pain to run on linux. Surprize! The RPM file for the latest Mandriva distro worked fine on 08. Opera seems to be the flagship browser that it resembles on XP but on XP it has a bug of behaving like it is loading a hot fix. I know it is strange but I have had a lot of bad behavior from browsers. I generaly prefer a basic browser but maybe it is time to jump on the Opera bandwagon. On XP opera saves your pages to disk so if it does crash the pages are open in a few seconds. I'll repost if it lets me down.

Serendipity to all

I've been an Opera fan for 5 years or something.

The Opera 10.50+ Linux versions are much faster, especially switching tabs. Too bad they're not out of beta yet.

*Kb*;
I would encourage you to make shorter posts with more paragraphs breaks, etc. It is hard to follow what you are saying.
The last time I installed Opera, it was pretty easy---what problem did you have?

Have you tried Google Chromium?

I don't use Opera because it's proprietary, and that just doesn't feel right when you're using Linux and have a bunch of great open-source browsers available:

Firefox (of course)
Chromium (my current favorite)
Midori (very clean and fast, but still glitchy and in early development)
Epiphany
Arora
uzbl-browser
Konqueror

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I have tried different browsers and stick to Firefox so far. Some of the websites I use test the browser and refuse to load if you are not using IE or Firefox, or Netscape (see?). I guess the rest of the world is not moving as fast as the Linux community

At least, Firefox should be a backup.

I have not had more than five or so pages open at a time but so far Opera is working very well. The download manager is pretty nice. I don't think the Browser teams have it together as much as they should. I think the Firefox interface is the best as it is much like Linux in general.You should be able to choose which sites it won't run Java on and not the other way around. LQs site and Yahoo mail is too aggravating for Firefox 2.Child windows sprout like weeds.


I have read where Firefox is not completely OpenSource and hence the advent of IceWeezle. The Chome interface resembles IE which for the life of me I can't understand what the reasoning of that is. Windows 95 is gone and was not that good. Let it die! My best guess is that someone thinks the interface should be "entertaining". I compare it to something that a childs stroller would have on it. Lots of different colored buttons that you don't need. Its like having a board game on the dash of your car or something. It does not serve for the functionality of the application and the mental association of how to use it is insane.IE does work well and I assume so does chrome if you could change its apperance I am not sure.



Myspace won't allow old versions of Firefox but you can use Dillo on it.Myspace can kiss our outdated butts with the use of Dillo.If they can't load trash they won't let you play. I suppose the ulimate test for a browser is to see if TomDrudgeReport.com crashes it or not. I'm confused as to what the web developer intensions are with that. The web page does not know whether it is left or right I guess.

Epiphany is a rock solid browser. If I /when I write my own browser I would pattern it after Epiphany. It is too bare bones though. Just add a search bar and a better download manager and "that" is what Linux Distros should come with by default.Oh ya, It has a little difficulty with Java so that would have to be ironed out. I should find out if there is an update for it.

Mandriva has applications that mimic Windows. You just click on a file, it checks to see if it is machine code, then it asks you if you want to install it. You put in your password and your ready to go.Other than Ubuntu, I have only used Mandriva 08. I just know that Mandriva is more refined then that particular Distro. Whether or not that abitity is native to most Distros I don't know but it installed easier than windows apps. I would have to say that installation was damn easy.

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You misunderstood what you read. Firefox is completely open source. That's not the issue. Completely separate is the issue of trademarks. Mozilla has the right to enforce its trademarks (including on the Firefox name). This includes the right to put limitations on the use of the trademarks by third parties. Debian, a third party, did not like some of the limitations specified by Mozilla. Debian has the right to fork Firefox and release it themselves.. so they did, branding it Iceweasel and sidestepping the trademark issues.

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I use Opera: I like the way you can use it without a mouse, and the pull-down quick-preferences menu. But the problem with closed source is that if the owners won't or can't fix a bug, no-one else can. Somehow (I can't see how it does it) Opera hijacks the keyboard so that the Compose key doesn't work. This means I can't use it to access an online dictionary in any language that uses diacritics

I have used opera since they ported it to BeOS.

I like Opera too.

I really have no interest in anything from Google. They are nothing but a data mining company to me. If MS went open source with their software, would your opinion of MS change?

Firefox is excellent as well.

I use Opera since 10 years or so. In Linux both Flash and Java installation always has been problematic. Java simply didn't work and Flash would work on one version and then again not in the next.

Somehow Java problems have been overcome in Opera version 10, and usually the problem in Flash is missing libraries.

That can be found out using:
This will list the problems while loading libraries. Those can simply be installed using Debian's apt.

Opera is terrific for saving the exact state it is in, without any annoying popups. When I restart Opera, I get all my pages back just like they were. If I restore a page from history it is restored, including the previously visited links.

jlinkels

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Debian did not do anything here really. If you ever have built firefox from source you will see a message about the branding and if you have issues with it you just change part of the config file before you tell it to compile. It then will remove all branding from the built binaries. You are welcome at that point to name it whatever you want :P. So in reality the Mozilla team actually put in an option to remove there own branding for the folks who did not like the policy.

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Arch Linux rebrands Firefox, too. All they do is give it a globe icon (like the Firefox logo without the fox) and change all instances of "Firefox" to the codename of the current version of Firefox (right now it's Namoroka).

But you still use the command "firefox" to launch it from a terminal.

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Slightly off-topic, but: I completely fail to see any issue with using proprietary SW. Computers are intended to help people do work. Today, the SW we use comes from two different business models---traditional (proprietary) and OpenSource. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but the typical end user will not (and should not) care what is being used as long as it gets the job done.

As an example, I thank Nvidia for their proprietary video driver for Linux---I do not bash them for not making it OpenSource.

If you have a organic garden out back (good thing), that does not mean you can't buy food from the supermarket also.

But if you had the choice of your own home-grown vegetables or to buy pesticide-soaked genetically modified vegetables from the store, and you knew both tasted just as good...