Thread: Browser Wars
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Old 02-01-2005, 06:48 AM   #18
feminista
Abandonia nerd

 
Join Date: Dec 2004
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Posts: 50
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I've got an answer for another reason not to use Opera: a totally screwed up rendering engine. Now, I'm not saying that it's not standards compliant, it probably is (though the fact that it is affected by the IE bug with CSS is pretty weird), but the fact remains that a great many sites render incorrectly with Opera, and correctly with Firefox. Firefox, on the other hand, remains the most standards-compliant and speedy rendering engine I've ever seen. I've gotten all my friends to use an alternative browser, and they thank me constantly and share my despair whenever we're forced to use IE.

One other thing I dislike about Opera, that seems a very minor complaint, but which bothers me to no end is this: Ctrl-~ doesn't cycle through your windows! You have to use Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3, etc, and hope to remember which is which! What could be more ridiculous? When I switched initially from Safari (mac user here), I found I could not get over this missing feature which I had taken for granted in IE and Safari. Luckily, I found it present in Firefox when I switched browsers again, and I'm now perfectly happy with my browsing experience. Thi probably matters to very few other people, especially since so many people use tabs anyway, but I'm EXTREMELY keyboard-oriented (can't stand tabs), and I MUST have a way to cycle between windows (on Windows you can Alt-Tab, but in hierarchical operating systems, we differentiate between programs and windows, optimizing processor speed (and dock space) by running only one instance of a program at a time, and using multiple instances of window objects instead). Rawr.

And as for our text-based friends, Links is far superior to lynx, because it supports tables, meaning poorly-designed pages will degrade better (doesn't matter with modern stylesheet-based design, but that's only about 3% of the internet). And furthermore, it has a stylish interface. And w3m looks good from what I've read, though I haven't tried it yet. Anyway, lynx is antiquated, and if you're into alternative browsers enough to use it, you should be using something else.

</rant>
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