{"id":1549,"date":"2007-12-11T07:15:39","date_gmt":"2007-12-11T12:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=1549"},"modified":"2007-12-11T07:15:39","modified_gmt":"2007-12-11T12:15:39","slug":"on-the-browsing-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=1549","title":{"rendered":"On the Browsing Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Say it ain&#8217;t so, Joe!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2007\/dec\/08\/stephenfry.firefox.internetexplorer\">Mr. Stephen Fry is a Firefox user<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A Firefox user!<\/p>\n<p>:sick:<\/p>\n<p>Fry writes, &#8220;I have many friends who can, so to speak, drive around the web, but who have never thought much about the software vehicle taking them through the traffic.&#8221;  And he goes on: &#8220;IE is pants, pure and simple. Safari is clean, elegant and fast (and now comes in a superb Windows implementation), but Firefox has one advantage: customisability.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I agree with Fry that Internet Explorer <i>is<\/i> pants. :cheers:<\/p>\n<p>I agree with Fry that Safari is clean, and it does have an elegant look to it, but I don&#8217;t find it particularly fast.  And despite the elegant look, it&#8217;s, well&#8230; I find Safari kludgey to use.  Things don&#8217;t work they way I expect them to, and it renders fonts strangely. :drunk:<\/p>\n<p>But is Firefox&#8217;s customisability <i>really<\/i> an advantage? \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n<p>I find Firefox to be very slow.  Its rendering engine isn&#8217;t any great shakes.  And things like ad-block?  That requires an extension.  Setting up tabs for frequently visited websites?  Why, that&#8217;s like&#8230; <i>work<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen Fry is the man with the brain the size of Kent.  And he&#8217;s telling people to use Firefox.  Except!  There&#8217;s a better browser out there.  There&#8217;s a browser that&#8217;s faster and lighter and isn&#8217;t IE.<\/p>\n<p>See, I&#8217;m an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opera.com\/\">Opera<\/a> user. :merlin:<\/p>\n<p>I <i>love<\/i> Opera.<\/p>\n<p>Opera does everything I need to do on the Internet.<\/p>\n<p>Opera is like a high-performance sports car.<\/p>\n<p>Speed Dial does the tab thing that Fry talks about in his column &mdash; I have quick links to nine preset websites of my choosing.<\/p>\n<p>Opera&#8217;s rendering engine is super-fast.<\/p>\n<p>Opera does &#8220;Content Blocking&#8221; out of the box.  No extensions necessary.<\/p>\n<p>Opera has a built in feed reader.  Built-in newsgroup reader.  Built-in e-mail client.  (Okay, the e-mail client isn&#8217;t any great shakes, but it&#8217;s there.)<\/p>\n<p>And all in a download half the size of Firefox.<\/p>\n<p>Extensions <i>can<\/i> be done, as Widgets that run inside Opera.  But you don&#8217;t actually <i>need<\/i> them to improve the browsing experience or to make the browser functional.<\/p>\n<p>And the great thing about skinning Opera is that you don&#8217;t need to restart the program like you have to with Firefox.  If I want a new skin, I can change it <i>on the fly<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>For anyone that&#8217;s curious, I use Phoenity as my skin, with the Sea color scheme.  You don&#8217;t expect to use the words &#8220;pretty&#8221; and &#8220;pleasing to the eye&#8221; and &#8220;comfortable&#8221; when describing the &#8220;look and feel&#8221; of a browser, yet I feel <i>completely<\/i> comfortable saying that I love the look and feel of my Opera browsing experience.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s any personality quirk that one&#8217;s choice of browser reveals.  I&#8217;m not sure what being an Opera user says about <i>me<\/i> &mdash; except that I&#8217;m not a sheep, that I strike out in my own direction. :party:<\/p>\n<p>Earth to Mr. Stephen Fry.  There&#8217;s a better browser than Firefox out there.  It&#8217;s called Opera.  Take <i>that<\/i> for a test drive sometime. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Say it ain&#8217;t so, Joe! Mr. Stephen Fry is a Firefox user. A Firefox user! :sick: Fry writes, &#8220;I have many friends who can, so to speak, drive around the web, but who have never thought much about the software vehicle taking them through the traffic.&#8221; And he goes on: &#8220;IE is pants, pure and<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=1549\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;On the Browsing Experience&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[372,498,373,499,107],"class_list":["post-1549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","tag-browser","tag-firefox","tag-internet","tag-internet-explorer","tag-stephen-fry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}