I’ve been using web browsers since Internet Explorer 1 and Netscape Navigator 3. I’ve blogged about my browser history quite a bit. I’ve ended up using Chrome on all my platforms. It works on Linux and Windows and I can have my bookmarks synced up across all those platforms. Now, I’m not a huge user of bookmarks. From my earliest days back in the 1990s when I used to perfectly curate my bookmarks into folders and subfolders to the mid-2000s when Epiphany and Firefox implemented tags on bookmarks, pretty much anything I’ve ever bookmarked has gone into a status of “out of sight== out of mind”. In fact, the only way I’ve been able to effectively use bookmarks is to use the space under the address bar to store them so I can see them. This is what Chrome looks like on my machines:

Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me.  I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.  Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook.  I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot.  In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar.  I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year.  It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring.  In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task.  I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up.  A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash.  I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora.  There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program.  So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.

Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5.  I noticed a huge cosmetic change.  Observe:

[caption id=“attachment_3272” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Opera 10.5 new gui”] [/caption]

Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome.  The tabs are now above the address bar.  Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change.  Also, although I can’t share it in a screenshot, they have changed the tab animations so they are really slick like in Chrome.  Overall, the animations are one of those things that really add to the experience without doing much.  It just feels nice to have things slide in and out rather than pop into existence.  They also seem to have REALLY sped up the startup to the point where Opera is once again a joy to use.  They also made a change to the way the text searching works:

Ever since I last wrote about Opera and Chrome, some things have changed about my browsing habits. On Windows, I’ve gone from always using Flock to always using Opera. I just found out that Flock finally released version 2.0 because I wanted to check up on my facts before looking like a dork on my own blog. So I haven’t used version 2.0 and that doesn’t figure into what I’m going to say here.

My excitement over Flock has faded a bit. It’s a bit bloated. I understand, because of the software involved in Flock’s features, why Flickr is so slow. However, Flickr is one of the sites I visit more often than any other, so I need it to go fast. Right now I have to load up Firefox whenever I want to do anything in Flickr for more than just a couple of minutes. And watching videos (such as on youtube or vimeo) is next to impossible on Flock. It keeps skipping and stuttering. Also, Facebook’s recent changes to the pokes page make Flock’s Facebook features less attractive to me. 111

At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN.  Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape.  I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5.  I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer.  Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version.  As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft.  You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular.  But I digress.  Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences.  I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.