Alternative Browsers: Why Use Only One?
When it comes to browsers, most web workers rely on the usual suspects: Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera. There are many alternative browsers, though, and some of them are useful for targeted types of tasks. Here are six examples that I like.
Camino is a favorite with many users in the Mac community. It’s based on the Gecko rendering engine, which Firefox is also based on, and many users favor it for its lightning-fast speed, which includes opening and closing itself very quickly.
Flock is an extremely popular browser for people who do social networking. It has many social networking features built right in, and its whole interface caters to media you share with others, the channels they are on, and more. In its new version, it also integrates tightly with Gmail, letting you instantly access your Gmail messages and sending all messages in Flock through Gmail, if you wish.
K-Meleon is an open source browser which, like Camino, is known for its fast speeds. It load and unloads very quickly, and is based on the Gecko rendering engine used by Camino and Firefox. There are many third-party plug-ins available for it.
OmniWeb is based on Apple’s WebCore technology, which also drives Safari. Handy feature: You can save your sessions as workspaces and then come back to them.
Konqueror is an open source browser that functions as both the browser and file manager for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). If you haven’t gotten into KDE, there’s a new version in beta now, and free.
The OffByOne browser is an extremely small and fast application, with a footprint of about a megabyte. I wouldn’t it use it for every task, but I keep it on a USB thumb drive I carry and occasionally use it for quick-and-dirty tasks.
Do you use any alternative browsers?
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Why Use Only One? Because the one (firefox) is the best of all browsers and no other browser even comes close to it.
Ramesh
The Geek Stuff
If you do data analysis with data from local files, external databases, web data and/or web APIs, Kirix Strata (http://www.kirix.com/) is a specialty “data browser” for this sort of thing. It incorporates Gecko for the web rendering.
There are some other specialty browsers out there besides Flock too — like Spacetime (3D browsing), Wyzo (media browser). For general browsing though, it’s hard to beat Firefox and, in particular, their cadre of extensions.
I recently started using the Colorful Tabs add-on for Firefox and now it is my favorite. I try to use Flock, but like my grandma would say, it is a little too busy. I’d rather have 2 monitors than everything all going on at once.
Sunrise for sure -
http://sunrisebrowser.com/en/index.html
Open source, mac, based on WebKit.
I use the “print web page as one-page pdf” very often. Creates a pdf with a page size the length of the website.
Visual bookmarks, download by url, a few other cool features.
Good developer browser.
Shiira (http://shiira.jp/en) is a decent browser as well but unfortunately it has not been updated in a while.
Samuel,
I truly love Firefox for plenty of reasons (plugins, configurability, ad blocking, woot plugins, etc) but Offby1 really intrigued me as I use portableapps on a 6gb usb drive and wanted a faster browser that the 2.x FF that was included.
OB1 was truly a wonderful program and I see the usefulness of programs like these at places where people work and don’t want to make it obvious that they’re killing time on the corporate dime.
But, because I like the speed at which it runs and loads websites I will likely recommend it to friends, colleagues, and fam for their use. Thanks!
didn’t know tequila makers make web browsers too.
camino…
I just switched from Firefox 3 to the new Flock Beta and I love it! It makes keeping up with my various online profiles so much easier.
Ugh. As long as we don’t have to check compatibility on all of these pieces of fringe freeware, I guess it’s fine. Otherwise, this proliferation makes the design and development staff fume. Can you say “No!” to IE8?
I’ve been a fan of both The World Browser 2.0 and Avant, and run them off my thumb drive. They’re fast and come with lots of customizable features, skins, and of course, tabbed browsing.