Originally Posted by dwlpl
We have Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Are there others?
Also, which one is the best with regard to performance, speed and general operation without 'freezing'.?
There are plenty of other browsers apart from the Big Three (or four, or five)
Off-by-One -
http://offbyone.com/offbyone/ - is an excellent and very fast mini-browser that's really small.
" The Off By One Web Browser may be the world's smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support. It is a completely self-contained, stand-alone 1.2 MB application with no dependencies on any other browser or browser component. For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP"
Arachne -
http://home.arachne.cz/ - is a fullscreen graphical browser that runs on DOS compatible OSes. An alpha version for POSIX-compliant systems like Linux is also available. Arachne is even smaller at under 1MB
"But I still don't fully understand why everyone hates IE so much."
Lots of reasons.
IE 6 is now ancient and lacks all sorts of abilities that more modern browsers have like tabs and so forth. MS just sort of assumed that because of their huge domination of the market that people would just have to like it or lump it, since after they had crushed Netscape no one would ever bother to compete anymore. Firefox has given them a nasty surprise.
Corruption of Web standards. The WWW consortium is the OS agnostic body that determines Web standards for writing pages in HTML. From it's outset, IE has ignored W3 standards and tried to replace them with proprietary MS standards - so that web pages written to display correctly in IE would not display correctly in any other browser (and
vice versa). MS wanted web page authors to use the MS dialect exclusively, so that no other browser would work properly. Web designers who wanted to reach other platforms had to produce two pages, one that would display correctly on IE and one that would display correctly on everything else, which was a great chore (which was what MS intended). IE is now "better", but still far from standards compliant (
AFAIK Opera is the only one that really is).
MS did something similar with Java. They licenced Java from Sun and then proceeded to produce their own, different Java run-time engine that was incompatible with the Sun JRE. So that apps written in MS-Java wouldn't work properly with Sun Java. The idea was that MS would use their huge dominance of the browser market to supplant the original Java with their own proprietary Java, which they could control. The reason they were scared was that Java is essentially OS agnostic, and thus applications written in Java would work just as well under UNIX or BeOS or Windows or whatever. And with applications becoming increasingly Web-centric they couldn't tolerate that. And of course anyone wanting to write in MS-Java would have to licence the MS-Java SDK from them, instead of the Sun SDK. Sun sued, and won after a long court battle - MS eventually dropped MS-Java.
IE is horribly insecure, though to their credit they have hardened it substantially recently. One of the worst holes was allowing Active-X controls to be installed with little warning to the user. And since most Windows users, by necessity, run with Administrative privileges, installed Active-X controls could do anything they liked to the users system.
And then of course the spyware nature of IE, which allows MS to keep tabs on every website you visit and what your system is up to - folks don't like the implications for their privacy.
