What home PC browser do you use?

cmonex: Probably will not make much of a difference, however, have you tried WIndows 98 Second Edition...

Then why does it steadily become more unstable over time?

It always starts out nice, but add a few programs, and things get worse.

I'm happy to see there is at least one other person using Opera here.

I've tried Firefox, but after years with Opera, I really can't see any advantages to using it--in fact, having to deal with and sort through all the plug-ins seems to me to be a huge disadvantage compared to the complete (and smaller) package that is Opera.

Here's a pretty in-depth look comparing almost all browsers in terms of speed:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#winspeed

And here's a link about all the Firefox myths:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html

PS: I only use Win 98 for booting in DOS.. It is pretty fun too ...
Alphacrumb: To be fair, I tried Opera (Free Version), however I uninstalled it because of the ads...

Hi tenjeangosi. Yes, the ads were awfully distracting--in fact, I ended up purchasing Opera back in 2001 so I could get rid of them.

Fortunately, I'm happy to report that Opera now has NO ADS. Opera became completely FREE sometime last year. And with Opera version 9 coming out this spring, the buzz is that it will be one killer browser.

If you're willing to try it out and compare it to Firefox, you might be surprised by how fast and complete Opera is right out of the package.

NOTE: I hope I don't sound like I'm slamming Firefox. Each to their own (we are HPC users, afterall). It's just that I--and I think other Opera users, too--have a sneaking suspicion that Firefox's popularity is more due to hype, since we've been enjoying the same 'revolutionary' features for the last six years.

Edited by alphacrumb 2006-02-28 3:12 PM

I'm back to MSIE 6.0.2900.2180 - happy days.

98 gets steadily worse because there is no isolated driver layer, no isolated runtime layer, abysmal memory management, little run time error recovery, no dll version management and it runs on FAT.

Nice myths web page. I'll refrain from commenting any further

Are they all true for Win ME as well?

Yes'r.
Millennium is even more unstable for some reason, there is a bad update in the patch chain which always kills its reliabilty. If you don't update it, it is similar to 98... but has kernel exploits.

I have 4 home PCs: 2 running XP Pro and 2 running Linux (Mandriva 10.1 and Kubuntu Breezy Badger). I use Firefox on my Windows boxen, but as both the flavours of Linux I use have KDE, Konqueror is pre-installed and I use that instead. Although I really have no problems using the Konqueror interface, I am thinking of installing Firefox, both for consistency's sake, and for the ease of sharing bookmarks. I only use IE at work because nothing else is available!

Firefox is still in the lead. I am glad for it

Yes, worse, and WinME is really a filler OS. Trust me on that one.

Trust you? I thoughtI wrote the book on Windows Millennium being a filler OS... have you read it?

Still using MSIE 6 here

Ok a bit off topic but... Does WinME have native unicode support? IIRC Win98 does not, and XP obviously does, and so does CE.

It has limited bitmap glyph support, unlike CE it is not a Unicode OS though. What specifically do you need to support Unicode?

Firefox, no doubt for me. It runs on all my computers, both at work and home, on Mac OS X, Linux and, yes, also several Windows flavors. Running on all major platforms makes it very simple to synchronize bookmarks, using a standard environment on all OSes.

Further, the possibility of customizing it with extensions really allows to adapt the browser to everyone's different necessities. At the top of my list of extensions is ScrapBook: a real must have! Second comes SessionSaver, which mimicks Opera's sessions saving feature.

It is a pity that Firefox 1.5 runs considerably slower than previous versions.