Ramblings of an Internetaholic

Hello guys… Ok… This was sudden… I didn’t even intend to write a blog post today. But once more I have tried another browser and decided to write about it. (Yeah. I like browsers. It’s the most used application on my PC..)

Well. I had installed the Chromium developer build on Ubuntu a couple of weeks back. That wasn’t really usable. Specially without flash and still a lot of functionalities are marked as to-do. Yep. Instead of the options in the options panel it says TO DO .

Shortly after that experience Google released a pre-beta build of their Chrome browser for Linux (Which is based on Chromium). Tried installing that today. It’s currently supported for Ubuntu or Debian only. Get it here. There’s nothing much different there actually. It’s basically the same as Chromium with Google name on it and it sends everything we do to Google. (Typical).

Anyway the reason I started writing this post today isn’t Google Chrome. I tried another browser today. Yep. Another one. Opera 10 Beta for Linux. I’ve heard Opera was a nice browser. And although I haven’t really used Opera on my PC before I knew a little bit about it’s features. But today I actually tried the latest version and lets say my reaction is absolutely positive towards this browser. . . . Let’s see what it’s got.

Let’s see. Where do I start? Let’s start with the most prominent feature shall we? The speed dial screen. Now this is similar to the new tab page of Chrome. (AFAIK Opera had this screen before Chrome). But instead of showing the most visited sites like Chrome this page actually gives us the chance to decide what goes here and what doesn’t. Here’s my speed dial screen after I added the sites I want to it.

(Hmmm… most of this stuff seems to belong to Google…)

And Opera has Widgets too. Did you know that? It’s pretty cool. Obviously I’m still pretty new to this so I don’t really know which widgets i could recommend installing. But the video downloader is one widget I found that’s definitely useful. Here’s a screenshot of how widgets are installed.

Another very very cool feature I found in Opera 10 is the search box. While there is a normal search box as in Firefox, Opera also supports typing your search queries in the address bar as well. But that’s not the really cool thing about it. You can select which search engine you want to use just by typing a letter in front of your search terms. For example to google for flowers you would just have to type “g flowers” in the address bar. And these keys are customizable as well. See the search preferences screen in the screenshot below.

Ever used the Firefox plugin called “Reload Every” ? It’s a plugin that allows us to reload a page automatically in a given time period. Very useful in starting torrents at Imageshack. Well, Opera has that feature built in. Like I said, I don’t know whether this is new in Opera 10 because I haven’t really used this browser before.

Unfortunately like every other browser Opera has downsides as well. It’s not nearly as fast as Chrome or Safari. But Opera is widely known for following web standards precisely. Passed the ACID3 test with 100/100. Anyway, downsides. . . Opera does NOT render sinhala unicode properly at all. This is a very big minus in my book because I visit quite a few sinhala sites every day and I get emails in sinhalese too. See how Opera displays sinhala below.

Anyway. Other than the sinhala problem I’m very impressed with Opera 10. As I’ve mentioned it’s still a beta so there might be some bugs. And I’ve played with it only for a short while and might have missed another cool feature or another problem. Let me know in your comments. Until the next post then (Whenever that might be). See ya

As you all can see by the blog title itself I spend a lot of time on the web. And what’s the most important application to an internetaholic? Yep. You got it. The web browser. Usually my favourite and my default web browser is Mozilla Firefox (What else would it be? IE? I think not.)

Anyway, I choose Firefox because of a lot of reasons. The most important one being the huge library of add-ons for it. Ad block Plus, FlashGot, Firebug, X Marks (Previously Foxmarks), TwitterFox, Delicious Bookmarks and a whole lot more of other geeky stuff you wouldn’t really be interested in . I’m also writing this blog post on another Firefox add-on by the way. It’s ScribeFire. (Thanks to Shaakunthala for the tip). It’s more like a whole application platform than just a web browser. And it has the greatest download manager integration with FlashGot add-on and I’ve never wavered from Firefox for . . . well never.

But even with all this Firefox is not without its drawbacks. It’s one of the worst memory hogs in my PC.As I’m running the web browser all day long it sometimes takes around 700MB of memory. That’s a hell of a lot even for a browser. (Well all this add-ons I’ve installed must take their fair share, I admit. But still. . . ). And it’s slooooow. It takes its own time to start up (Which is another reason it rarely gets closed) and page rendering is somewhat slower than its competitors. (Once again, I don’t even count IE as a competitor. It’s popularity is purely based on Microsoft bundling it with Windows. Most people don’t even know they have alternatives.)

But this doesn’t leave me from trying out other browsers. Sometime back I tried Google Chrome. Several times from the beta stage to Chrome official releases and developer builds. It’s the fastest browser around these days and has some really cool features. But somehow it doesn’t seem to work for me at all. I’ve experienced a lot of crashes and other bugs with it and I’ve lost my taste for it since. It never should have left the beta stage in my opinion (Hey! It’s MY opinion in MY blog. You can belive whatever you wish ).

So, to the point now. The reason I started writing this post is I downloaded the new Safari 4.0 Beta from Apple today. (Yes yes, I know. It’s been a couple of months since its out. But its new for me). Safari is one of the fastest browsers out there, second only to Chrome. Apple has added some new features since Safari 3 and most of its eye candy (Yummy!) it seems. Anyways, check out the new home screen. Looks cooool. It’ll learn which pages you most visit and display them for quick access as soon as you open a new tab. (Hmm… Sounds familiar. Where have I seen that before? )

Another major change that’s immediately visible is the positioning of the tabs. It’s moved to the top of the window leaving more space for actual browsing. (I have the strangest feeling that all this sounds vaguely familiar again.) While this might be a change for the good for Mac OS X users, for Vista and Windows 7 users the transparent tabs can be kind of irritating. Take a look and decide for yourself.

And it seems like Apple’s cover flip has made its way into Safari too. The book marks and history view is now very cool. (Why anyone would actually want it there is a completely different matter). And I have to mention here. The lack of the Ctrl + H shortcut key to get into the history view is very very irritating. I keep pressing it and nothing happens. Here’s the cover flip view.

And it looks like the private browsing feature (AKA Incognito more in Chrome) has made its way into Safari too. I don’t really remember if this was available in Safari 3 so somebody correct me if I am wrong.

Well that’s it. I’ve tried the new Safari beta. Just now Kalinga posted a tweet about the new Chrome developer build. (Hmm. Should I try that and waste more time?). Leave your comments about your favourite browser and why you like it. Or why you like or don’t like this post . Cheers!!!