Dobar text na temu browsera, uglavnom potvrdjuje sve sto smo rekli za Netscape/Mozillu i Operu. Vredi procitati.
Upstarts Attack Microsoft Slackers November 26, 2002
By John C. Dvorak
Once a product achieves over 90 percent market share, you'd think the competition would be over. That may be true in most markets, but in high technology, monopolies can fade if alternatives are free—and better. A lot of people have been switching their browsers from Internet Explorer to Mozilla 1.1, Opera 7, or even the new Netscape Navigator (now based on the Mozilla code). Count me in. For most of my browsing, I've moved from IE to Mozilla. The way I see it, Microsoft has simply dropped the ball, and there's no reason I should suffer for it.
Mozilla, available free at
http://www.mozilla.org, has a weird history. In 1998, Netscape released the source code for its Communicator suite and began the Mozilla open-source project. The original idea was that if enough smart people started playing with the source code, all sorts of cool browser ideas would emerge. Nothing seemed to come of it until recently—four years later—when the first version of the Mozilla browser appeared. For most purposes, Mozilla is a better product than Internet Explorer and better follows the edicts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that is supposed to be calling the shots on what goes on with the Web.
Although Mozilla has dozens of interesting features, three of them in particular attracted me. First, I can enlarge all the fonts on the screen, including those that are pumped out by a database engine and appear to be fixed in size with Internet Explorer. Now, I'm not going blind, but I use a 1,600-by-1,200 LCD, which makes fonts like those in PC Magazine's forum, for example, around 6 points. Since I can't enlarge them with IE no matter what I click, I have to stick my face up to the monitor to read the forum posts. I don't like doing this. I prefer to sit a good distance away from the monitor, and I use an IBM keyboard with a track-point controller so I don't have to be hunched over the desk with my hand on a mouse. Using Mozilla, I can pump fonts up to 14 points and see them from across the room. The Opera browser can also do this.
Another very cool feature of Mozilla turns off the auto-open function. This is an incredible annoyance in IE and older Netscape browsers, as when you stumble onto a porn site and get a pop-up porn storm. And in general advertising, a bunch of pop-under browser windows open behind the main window, and you have to close them one by one. With Mozilla, I don't have to deal with unwanted windows all over the screen.
Finally, printing Web pages works better with Mozilla. Too often, I have tried to print a page from IE and the words on the right margin were cut off. Is this rocket science?
Having complimented Mozilla, I want to mention the Opera browser as well, which matches many of the Mozilla features and has one feature none of the other browsers have: a blazingly fast HTML compiler. I have no idea what this thing is doing, but if you have to power-browse, then this is the browser for you. Opera seems twice as fast as Mozilla and IE. It also introduces new ideas into the browser concept, such as the unusual multiple-document interface and mouse gesturing, which gives you additional commands when you wag the mouse around in specific ways. Opera also specializes in multiplatform capabilities and might be the absolute best screen-rendering browser for Pocket PCs and other small devices. An ad-free version of Opera sells for around $30, and a free version with banner ads is also available at
http://www.opera.com.
Neither Mozilla nor Opera seems to be as prone to security hacks as IE. This may be because the Microsoft browser—although touted to be an integral part of the Windows OS—is really hacked together from all sorts of code the company bought. Just open IE, click on Help, then click on About, and read the copyright notice. Compare this laundry list to Mozilla's copyright statement.
So what the heck is Microsoft doing? Is this another example of the company ousting the competition and then contributing nothing to progress? I don't think IE has improved since version 4. It's certainly not any more compact or speedier. With all of Microsoft's resources, you'd think the company would build a perfect killer W3C-compliant superbrowser from scratch. Makes you wonder what Microsoft does with all that money.
[ Izmena poruke: Indy na dan 2002-12-19 02:34 ]
