reply to xEik, but with a bunch of other stuff

[Lance]

''copyrights are held by their respective owners'' ;)
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xEik said:
''[Lance] I finally downloaded Opera and I'm trying it. However I still use IE6 50%. Will see how this develops, but having big bandwith from the University network doesn't make speed differences really noticeable. ''

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xeik: if you're referring to page rendering speed, that isn't the kind of speed people are referring to when they praise Opera. [at least 2 or 3 of the browsers i've used render the page pretty quickly]
_Opera's speed comes in the features that promote power surfing. the multiple documents in one window interface, the keyboard shortcuts, standardised panel creation, total control of page appearance, quickchange for commonly used preferences alterations, optional mass opening of every site in a folder, drag and drop site opening in new windows, page zoom. all those things, and more besides, work together to allow me to do several times as much work as i would be able to do with any other browser in the same amount of time. that's where the real speed is.
_i have several versions of Opera, and usually have at least 2 of them open at once, each of them set up with a different appearance and set of internet access preferences [proxy or no proxy, pop-ups or no, javascript allowed or not, etc. i find it handy even though i could use Quick Preferences to change them, i sometimes forget, so i just set up separate versions] and each of these versions allows multiple sites within its primary window. more speed, more convenience, less time spent on tedious waiting. even on broadband, it's better, and on narrowband, the advantage is almost vital. [and no, i don't have any financial interest in Opera]

_i've tried pretty much all the windows browsers, other than variations of shell programs based on IE [although i have tried Neoplanet {and a couple of others} and liked the improvements, though its IE base still remains too weak] ; Opera radically outperforms all of the others, even the latest Mozilla, which i consider to be the second best of all the browsers.
_some people may be a bit put off by Opera because it allows so much user control over everything that they may feel they hAve to change everything, or that it has too many things they're unfamiliar with. might as well get used to them, though because Mozilla, and therefore Netscape, and IE are just now beginning to copy features that Opera has had for years.
_if a page doesn't look the way it was designed to in Opera, it's because the page wasn't designed to WorldWideWebConsortium standards, THE internet standards. Mozilla/Netscape is also now standards compliant. the troublemakers in netsurfing are those sites designed to conform to the archaic and still not thoroughly standards compliant Internet Explorer.

in my much-thought-about opinion, Opera is just the best.

___lance
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[infoxicated]

Erm, you know how I feel about Micro$oft, but I'm willing to stick my neck out on this one and say that IE has done more to push standards over the last few years than Netscape/Mozilla have- and maybe even Opera.

True, they are all levelling out now, but IE 5.5 was the first browser I could really trust with a table-less page layout in any shape or form.

By the same token, IE 5 is the Netscape 4.7 of this generation! it just has to go!

I agree that Opera is a very decent browser, but I would disagree that it's anything like light years ahead of the others in terms of standards compliance. For my money, and for all the headaches I've had and still have over cross browser consistancy, none of them are pulling their weight as far as standards compliance goes.

Saying Opera is more standards compliant than IE is like saying Schwarzenegger is a better actor than Stallone - they are both overly bloated applications with a ham-fisted approach to the craft. :)

The sad thing is, Mozilla was meant to be a streamlined web browser that was standards compliant. That was the deal, yet for some crazy reason it's now a huge download and doesn't really offer any great advantages.

The battle for me is really between Opera and IE, and although the tabbed browsing is pretty cool, when I have to design sites that will look good in the most popular browser I have to be looking at them through IE.

Maybe time will even things up again, but until every one of them offer full and proper CSS level 2 support in a consistant way, there's not really any point in using the standards compliance of an individual browser as a point of contention. :)

[Lance]

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for argument's sake, i didn't say Opera is lightyears ahead on standards, merely that it is compliant. IE6 is at least more compliant than the older 5.x versions. too many sites are designed to take into account the proprietary vagaries of IE5.x and Netscape 4.x. both MS and NS were so eager to destroy each other that they forgot to worry about the benefits/deficits to the netuser. one of the problem areas in surfing is the considerable number of sites made to use active-x which as i understand it is proprietary to Microsoft. even so, standards compliance, desirable as it is, is not my main reason for using Opera. Opera is just better for me in every way. the slick integration and powersurfing are what do it.

bloated? Opera is currently about 3.4 megabytes. Mozilla about 8.9, minimum Netscape 6.x similar to Mozilla. how big is IE? i suspect it's bigger than any of the others. :D
i admit that i do have a browser that is less than one megabyte, but even though i like it, it's functionality is too limited for wide-scope use.

i am very happy the IE 'market' share is beginning to decline at the same time that Opera's is increasing and that there is renewed interest in Mozilla/Netscape. Microsoft is already moving closer to the others because of the pressure from various quarters.

Mozilla's pace of development seems to be increasing; this can only be good.

IE5? i find it to be unusable, due to the sluggishness of its own internal mechanics. surprisingly to me, Netscape 4.08, though behind the times a bunch, still works surprisingly well on many sites, though simply because so many sites are still designed to allow for older browsers. the oldest browser i've found to work reasonably well with modern sites is Opera 4.0, it dates back to perhaps mid to late 1999, only 3 years old or less. [current version is 6.05, unless they've already introduced another one! they're very active]

if it were up to me, internet standards would be simplified to the point where a 2 megabyte browser would do everything required with snappy response even on a slow computer.
_my current not-very-well-informed opinion of dynamic html is that i don't like it much. what do you think of it? i'd like to know more about it.

___lance
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[xEik]

I don't know if the forum is fully standards compliant or not but the other day when Xenepp posted about a 3D mode,l the 'author' column was far too narrow making the text concerning his data be cluttered. This was with Opera. It seemed strange to me. I switched to IE6 and it looked OK. That's why I'm still a bit reluctant to make a deffinitive change from IE6 to Opera. If most of the sites are still designed to match IE then I'll stick to it for a little while until the situation changes.
I'm no M$ fan and I'm not defending them but as a user I take what fits best my preferences.
I hardly ever pay a fee for the time I'm connected (University network or the kind) so I got used to browse the internet in a quite a calm way. Maybe one day not being able to do fast configuration changes or this kind of things will seem lame to me but for now I don't give it such importance.

Do you know what is, in my opinion, the biggest problem of good software? Good as they are they let you configure so many things that the stupid/novice/"I_hate_computers" user easily gets tired of it. They should provide a "I_dont_want_to_know_anything_about_software" configuration ready to be changed as soon as you are a more experienced user.

I can now use linux as a user with not many problems but at the beginning it pissed me off that storing something in a floppy was so complicated. Also 'vi' may be a fantastic code editor that uses almost no resources but who would recomend it to a beginner?

What I really hate is those 'market share wars' that usually end up with the user getting the worst part. The longer it goes the more convinced I am that standarization in communications and free software is the way. To hell with propietary formats.

Smeg all those smeggin' smeggers.I hope they smeg the smeg as the smeggin' smegg they are. (This line was brought to you by Infoxicated's forum wordcensor ;) )

PRACTICE LEADS TO PERFECTION !

[AmishRobot]

The problem with IE isn't so much it's lack of standards complience (no browser is fully complient yet), but the fact that Microsoft is creating their own standards. Of course, many of these standards are specific to IE or at least Windows. As Microsoft blanketed the world with free browsers, more sites used these 'features' that have the added bonus of causing grief to those of us that hate Windows. That's not a good thing. The new EULA for Windows Media ought to give people an idea of what's to come: Microsoft maintains a database of what you do, maintains ownership of your software, and is allowed to do whatever they want to your system. This is what the whole anti-trust suit started over; too bad everyone forgot that.

If I can go off on a tangent (which never happens here, of course! :wink: ), since when have these interactive features they keep piling on added to the usability of a site? Flash is neat and all, but I have never come across a site that was actually improved by it. Animated gifs, flash ads covering content, pop-up windows, auto updating, that damn comet cursor! Argh!! None of this helps me in any way. It's useless.

As for Opera, I would think the pop-up blocking alone would sell it, but there are so many usability features built in that it's a joy to use. Lance mentioned a lot of them, but I'll say that everytime I'm in IE (what I have at work), I keep trying to use mouse gestures to move around or open links, and I get irritated when I remember it won't work. Personally, I think that Opera's a beautiful example of of what you're talking about in software design, Xeik. The more I use Opera, the more I use it's power use features, the more I accomplish, and the more I enjoy myself.

I'm really starting to like Linux. It's hardly user friendly and there's a lot of little things that bug me, but the more I use it and learn about it, the more I realize how poor a piece of software Windows is. And I've learned more about computers in general within the past month than I have in years just from working with it. I'd recommend it to anyone comfortable with computers... and with a lot of spare time. :wink:

Infox, I came close to starting a thread about this but it didn't seem worthwhile, but I was wondering if you'd be willing to divulge some statistics about the browsers being used to visit Wipeoutzone?

[Lance]

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xeik: although i do pay for internet service, i do get unlimited time for a fixed fee. i have often browsed in leisurely fashion, but when i want to really track something down and find out about it as fast as possible, i powersurf. my time is often important to me. besides, i'm old; who knows how much time i have left?

''They should provide a "I_dont_want_to_know_anything_about_software" configuration ready to be changed as soon as you are a more experienced user.''

'they' do. :D default mode. but that's in the Windows and Mac universes of course. no doubt that Linux is what i'd want to use if i were running my own server. even so, there's no reason for it to be so much work on a low level. have you ever used the GIMP? the hardest thing in it is just getting a file into the smeggin program so you can alter it. unbelievable. unix-based systems users seem to have a different thought process.

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james: the virtue of simplicity was demonstrated to me yet again when i browsed a few of our members homepages. one of them was absolutely barebones and a pleasure to use. no flash, no animated gifs, no embedded soundfiles. just bam bam bam! relevant data! i love that.

the cometcursor is an adware/spyware program infesting your own computer, you can get rid of it with AdAware.

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btw, i have actually heard good things about the Mac version of IE [5 point ... um... something]. primarily that it is more standards compliant than the latest windows version.
_and it looks really good with its OSX Aqua theme. it even looks better than MacOpera [ though naturally it doesn't have the Opera features]
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[xEik]

Yesterday I had to fill in some documents online in one of the public PC rooms at the University. After entering all the data a PDF file had to be generated and I had to print it. At first, I tried IE5.5 (over NT) and it kept not wanting to load some of the pages with the fill-in boxes. After a while I switched to Netscape (don't remember which version) and everything went smooth.
I guess that every browser has his own flaws (ones more than others :wink: ) and I don't know if the problem was caused by a proxy configuration, a firewall, the browser, the OS, the site server's security system, or the University network but in that situation Netscape worked better so whenever I'm going to that PC room I'm using Netscape. Although I will still give some margin to IE6 over XP in my room.

I don't stick to something because of its name but because of its its facts. The day IE6 fits me no more I'm uninstalling it. That is if Windows lets me. :wink:

PRACTICE LEADS TO PERFECTION !

[Lance]

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''That is if Windows lets me.''

just imagine Microsoft in personal form as some sort of megalomaniac professional dogwalker, holding the leashes of 20 or 30 dogs all at once. all the dogs have to do is turn and bite. he'll have to let go.
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