According to NetApplications, Microsoft’s forced-use browser Internet Explorer lost 11.4% of the browser market between the three versions currently in the wild (the recent IE8, the first-IE-with-tabs-finally-half-baked-standards-support-they-could-have-gone-all-the-way-but-noooo IE7, and the it-just-won’t-die-no-matter-how-many-times-I-whack-it-with-a-sledgehammer-AHHH-AHHHH-AHHHHH IE6). While IE7’s loss in popularity is explainable – people upgrading/being forced to upgrade to IE8 – and IE6’s persistence is starting to wane because it lacks certain features like tabs and any notion of security, the nice thing is that it’s losing to the renewed competition in the Second Browser Wars. Where it was once mainly between Netscape and Internet Explorer, there’s now Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox (Netscape’s next of kin), Opera,Apple’s Safari, and the new and very impressive Google Chrome. As the Internet Explorer line has done very little in the way of innovation (A small browser called NetCaptor invented them in 1998 and after losing market share to the tabbed Opera, Firefox, and Safari, IE integrated them in 2006) this isn’t surprising.
What is surprising (though not at all unwelcome) is that people are taking enough interest in quality to look past the default, to revolt from the dictatorship of Good Enough. All the new entrants to the browser wars bring new innovations – Firefox with extensions, Opera with Unite and many others, Chrome with Tab Sequestration – and people are realizing that what comes installed on their computer really isn’t that good.
Aaaand Firefox 3.5 drops today. This post is a Three-In-One. Part One is a Firefox Overview, Part Two is how to give Firefox some (more) serious speed, and Part Three is how to stop wasting your time on the web.
Here’s your overview. I was going to write one all by myself but the Mozilla team’s great quick tour really defeats the purpose:
It’s interesting how “buying gifts” has become a universal euphamism when it comes to Private Browsing…
There are also all the usability features which are great but don’t really *innovate* as much as they follow Google’s (amazing) Chrome browser.
As someone who designs and builds websites, however, what I’m really excited about is Open Video. Open Video uses the OpenSource OGG-Theora video codec (which is included by default in Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems and available for Windows and OS X) to do some really neat stuff: Continue reading
Apparently I have become among the newest casualties in the Browser Wars II. Firefox was running sluggishly and so I decided to give Opera – the speedy, powerful Scandinavian browser popular in Europe – a try again. Before I switched to Ubuntu I was an avid Opera user before being a user of Google Chrome (which is still not available for Linux) but instead of building the browser’s interface with GTK like most other desktop apps, it uses the cross-platform QT toolkit. By default, it looks really, really ugly in Ubuntu, especially when you’re running a dark theme like Dust.
However, with a little googling I found that using either a snapshot of Opera 9.6 or the alpha for Opera 10 you can bind QT4 (the version of QT used in the two builds) to GTK so that everything looks the same.
This was tested in Ubuntu 9.04. It should work for other Debian-based distros or previous versions of Ubuntu, but no promises.
svn co svn://labs.trolltech.com/svn/styles/gtkstyle
cd gtkstyle
qmake && make && sudo make install
There you have it! To make all your QT apps – including Opera – using GTK, open up System -> Preferences -> QT 4 Settings and under the Appearance tab set the GUI (first thing in the tab) to GTK+. Then open Opera.
Credits for discovering this go to king.pest at the Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=956329
Recent Comments