Did you guys see this?

[etoven]

Look at the browser market share for 2012:
[TABLE="class: reference, width: 633"]
<tbody>[TR]
[TH="align: left"]2012[/TH]
[TH="width: 19.5%, bgcolor: #E5EECC, align: left"]Internet Explorer[/TH]
[TH="width: 16%, bgcolor: #E5EECC, align: left"]Firefox[/TH]
[TH="width: 16%, bgcolor: #E5EECC, align: left"]Chrome[/TH]
[TH="width: 16%, bgcolor: #E5EECC, align: left"]Safari[/TH]
[TH="width: 16%, bgcolor: #E5EECC, align: left"]Opera[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]May[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]18.1 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]35.2 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]39.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2.2 %[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]April[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]18.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]35.8 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]38.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4.5 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2.3 %[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]March[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]18.9 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]36.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]37.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4.4 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2.3 %[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]February[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]19.5 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]36.6 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]36.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4.5 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2.3 %[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]January[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]20.1 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]37.1 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]35.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]4.3 %[/TD]
[TD="align: right"]2.4 %[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]

I looked at IE's numbers and I was pleased.. :)

[A Black Falcon]

Good news indeed.

Seamonkey's still better than Firefox, though. :)

[Dark Jaguar]

I know Seamonkey has a lot of extra tools unrelated to browsing like development and such, but what of the browser itself? What features does it have for browsing that make it stand out from Firefox in your view?

The death of IE6 will be a great moment when that last grandmother running Windows ME finally updates her computer, and it was a bad call for MS to decide to just not even bother supporting XP with IE9 (I think it would have been better to wait a few versions for that, at least until official MS support for the OS ends a couple years from now). However, the latest version of IE is actually a truly competitive browser. They actually have their act together with IE9 and the upcoming IE10. Sure, their release cycle is slower than the competition, but they've got enterprise to think about so stability and compatibility are very important. At least now that compatibility is entirely standards based instead of some esoteric rendering quirks of their specific interpretation of how HTML should function.

[Weltall]

I see Chrome in first place and still rising. That makes me happy.

A few months ago I tried Firefox again just for fun, and it was the sort of feeling you'd get climbing behind the wheel of a malaise-era car: it was bulky and ugly and ran like shit. Chrome has irrevocably spoiled me in terms of what I expect from a browser.

[Great Rumbler]

Heck yeah, Chrome.

[Fittisize]

I'm part of the 2.2 percent that uses Opera! I don't think I've used anything else since like I dunno, '04? I like being able to go "back" and "forward" with simple mouse gestures (holding down the right-mouse button then pressing the left-mouse button goes back to the previous page, for example). When I use other browsers I find it more cumbersome to toggle between sites. I like the Speed-dial, too. I think Chrome borrowed that idea from Opera. It slows down considerably when I'm trying to stream several videos at once, but that's probably normal. Sometimes I'll use Chrome for certain applications that Opera can't run, but over the years this happens less and less.

[Dark Jaguar]

Chrome is great in many respects, but there's one big problem with it for me. It has NO bookmark button. The "bookmark bar" just goes completely against the whole idea of streamlining the interface and eliminating clutter. Plus, since only a fraction of one's bookmarks end up in the bar to begin with, most of the time you still end up pressing what amounts to a dropdown bookmark button anyway, only with an entire row dedicated to it.

They HAD a perfectly good button in earlier versions accessible only via a special command line code, but stripped it out saying "something like that can just be done by an addon". Every addon I've tried is sluggy and glitchy though.

Firefox has a bookmark button. It wins.

[Great Rumbler]

I use my bookmark bar all the time.

[A Black Falcon]

I know Seamonkey has a lot of extra tools unrelated to browsing like development and such, but what of the browser itself? What features does it have for browsing that make it stand out from Firefox in your view?

Seamonkey is a lot like Firefox, yeah -- it runs on a version of the same Mozilla core, many plugins work on both browsers, etc. What do I like more about it? Well, for one thing I'm used to its look and interface -- Seamonkey uses the classic Netscape-style interface and menu design, while Firefox uses an Internet Explorer-inspired design. As a result, I like the layout and design of the menus better in Seamonkey. Seamonkey has a classic design, so it's got the big Forward, Back, Reload, and Stop buttons to the left of the address bar, for instance. As a result of this wider bar, the interface does take up a bit more of the screen than Firefox's.

I'm also used to it more, so I know where to find things. It's got the options menu (Preferences) in Edit instead of Tools, for instance, as Netscape used to do (Firefox's location comes from IE), and has a few more things in Tools, such as a direct link to the Password and Data Managers, which can be useful; in Firefox you have to go into tabs in the Options (Preferences in Seamonkey) window to get to that stuff.

Another menu difference (and this is just a difference, not a Seamonkey advantage) is that in Firefox, History is an item on the menubar, so you can see recent history there. With Seamonkey though, you have to open the History window, accessible from the Go menu, to get the history. Both have "recently closed tabs" and "recently closed windows" menu items, with lists, available from the Go (Seamonkey) or History (Firefox) menus though. If you do open the history, each history window works differently -- Seamonkey has a single window with dropdown tabs, like in Seamonkey's Bookmarks window, while Firefox uses a window with a left sidebar with the day/date/etc choices. You can see only the currently selected thing (on the left bar) in the main right window. I can see advantages and disadvantages to each design.

As for the bookmarks manager (library, in Firefox), they are similar to the above menu, but a bit different. Seamonkey still has dropdown tabs in the bookmarks manager, so everything is listed together, but it also has a sidebar with a list of all the folders, so you can see the organization and quickly go to anything. Firefox uses a more Windows Explorer-like design, with a folder tree that only displays the current folder in the main window. I'm much more used to Seamonkey's design, and think it works for a bookmarks manager -- it is useful to be able to see multiple subfolders all open on the list at once, when each one has only a small amount of stuff in it. Can't do that in Firefox. That also makes it possible to see your entire bookmark collection all on one list in Seamonkey, but not in Firefox.

I also like its tab management a little more. The two are very similar now, with the tab bar and a dropdown button at the end to show the complete list of currently open tabs, but Seamonkey has only one "close tab" button, at the very end of the tab bar, and it's always there. In Firefox, each tab has its own "close" button on the tab. This means that it's easier to close a bunch of tabs quickly in Seamonkey, and overall space is saved, because in Firefox there's an X at the end of every tab, until you get more than a couple open, at which point the Xes only appear when you actually select the tab. You can of course also right-click on a tab and hit close, but overall I do like the Seamonkey tab-close design better. In addition, Seamonkey has an "open new empty tab" button on the lefthand side of the tab bar, while Firefox doesn't have one, and you have to use a keyboard hotkey to open a new tab. That's a win for Seamonkey for sure.

Oh, and I almost never use it, but Seamonkey has a better Sidebar, too. In Firefox there are two separate sidebars, one for history and one for bookmarks. Seamonkey has a single sidebar, with four tabs, for search (with a choice of search engines), history, bookmarks, an address book, and the DOM Inspector. You can hide any tabs you don't plan on using.


As for things I dislike about Seamonkey, one would be that there are a good number of addons that only work in Firefox. Quite a few work in both, but the ones that only work in one always only work in Firefox. Also, themes are not compatible, and Seamonkey certainly has a lot fewer of those than Firefox. And on that note, I am mostly talking about defaults here; I don't really use many interface-changing addons in either Firefox and Seamonkey. I have various things on both, of course, such as Sort Bookmarks (only in Seamonkey), DownThemAll, NoScript, Adblock, etc. The Seamonkey sidebar has single-key access (F9), while the Firefox ones require Control-button commands to open. [On the note of DownThemAll, the Seamonkey version has an odd, but irrelevant, little bug -- the "open folder" button on the screen where you select where you want to save the stuff to is invisible. The button is there, right next to the end of the bar with the current address, you just can't see it. Click in the empty space and the menu appears. :) ]

Oh, and last but certainly not least, Seamonkey updates less frequently than Firefox, as far as major updates go. Of course it gets security updates, and now auto-updates just like Firefox, but it has less frequent major updates. That means that it's less likely to have broken updates, and new features Firefox adds that don't always work well at first don't immediately end up in Seamonkey as well. Major Firefox changes do usually end up in Seamonkey too, because it is based on the same core, it just follows it a bit behind, makes sure it's stable first, and keeps with as much of the familiar Netscape/Seamonkey interface as they can. I think that those are good things, overall. And on another note, going with the whole "classic browser, but with some modern features" style that defines Seamonkey, Seamonkey's current version is 2.10.1. They haven't copied Firefox in its stupid "we must match Chrome in version numbers" game that has resulted in Firefox's current version being 13.0.1. Seamonkey's version number is a better reflection of the actual version, with the first number for the major changes, and the second and third for smaller ones.

The death of IE6 will be a great moment when that last grandmother running Windows ME finally updates her computer, and it was a bad call for MS to decide to just not even bother supporting XP with IE9 (I think it would have been better to wait a few versions for that, at least until official MS support for the OS ends a couple years from now). However, the latest version of IE is actually a truly competitive browser. They actually have their act together with IE9 and the upcoming IE10. Sure, their release cycle is slower than the competition, but they've got enterprise to think about so stability and compatibility are very important. At least now that compatibility is entirely standards based instead of some esoteric rendering quirks of their specific interpretation of how HTML should function.

DJ, as always TC's biggest defender of Internet Explorer...

I use my bookmark bar all the time.

Bookmark bars are useless, you can fit only a tiny number of bookmarks on them. Bookmark buttons are the only way. I didn't remember that Chrome has no bookmark button, that's bad design. Something I do remember about Chrome is that for some insane reason, it puts the tab bar ABOVE the navigation bar. This just makes absolutely no sense, you're much more likely to want to change tabs than to actually type in the navbar!

[A Black Falcon]

Another thing I forgot to mention is that in Seamonkey, you can either open up the Downloads window and watch all your downloads there, or you can, classic-style, open individual windows for each download. It lets you do either one. Firefox, however, requires you do use the downloads window; you cannot open individual things for each download. Also, in Seamonkey, if you do use the downloads manager (it's optional, you can set it to open on downloads or not. I don't have it open), it's easily customizable. You can choose which columns appear, including the name, size, etc, but also start and end times and the download source (ie, the site the file is coming from).

In Firefox, you get no options. It tells you the time remaining, progress, speed, and amount downloaded (current and filesize), but that's it. Maybe there's an addon that gives you more info, such as the site you're downloading from, but it doesn't exist by default, and that's annoying.

So yeah, in two ways, I think that Seamonkey does downloads better than Firefox. Firefox has fewer options and is less customizable, and I like some of the things Seamonkey gives you but Firefox doesn't. I can understand why Firefox did this stuff, its downloads window is simpler and more modern-looking, but it's less informative and less customizable. That's not good.

Another very cool thing Seamonkey does is that when the "save to" box appears, it defaults to the last folder I downloaded something to from that site. Or at least, it usually does; sometimes it's wrong, but it's usually right. This is really, really useful. In Firefox I don't remember ever seeing this happen, it seems to just default to the last place I saved something to period (big difference there), but I don't use it often enough to be certain that it doesn't. I just think it might not.

[Great Rumbler]

Bookmark bars are useless

Clearly it's not since I use it all the time.

[Weltall]

I use mine all the time, the bookmarks I access most frequently are on it and I don't have to hunt through a list to find them. A bookmarks bar is basic functionality every browser should have.

Plus, my Bookmarks Bar has 27 items on it. That's the advantage to using high screen resolutions. :D

Also, I know for sure that I've used Chrome since the version 2 (which is 19 versions and counting) and I've always had a bookmarks button.



Also, I like having the tabs on top. It's less cluttered. I quit using Mozilla browsers because they were inferior products, but I don't miss the mess that was the Firefox interface.

[etoven]

I use mine all the time, the bookmarks I access most frequently are on it and I don't have to hunt through a list to find them. A bookmarks bar is basic functionality every browser should have.

Plus, my Bookmarks Bar has 27 items on it. That's the advantage to using high screen resolutions. :D

Also, I know for sure that I've used Chrome since the version 2 (which is 19 versions and counting) and I've always had a bookmarks button.



Also, I like having the tabs on top. It's less cluttered. I quit using Mozilla browsers because they were inferior products, but I don't miss the mess that was the Firefox interface.

You have 607 unread GMails!?!? :) Why does that not surprise me. This is the guy once tried to see if he could get a cell phone that couldn't make phone calls only surf the web.