Monday, August 03, 2009

This time next year Rodney we'll be billionaires..

I notice with interest that Firefox the open standards (Mozilla) based WEB browser passed the 1 billion downloads mark recently, this is an amazing achievement for something so recent in a market that has traditionally been so sewn up by existing players, it gives all of us the software industry some hope for our own little brain children. Firefox is a good browser, in terms of speed and compatability it beats Internet Explorer hands down IMO, however I don't use either these days having switched over to Google Chrome a while back. Chrome seems to anihilate everything in terms of raw speed and seems to be as robust and standards complient as Firefox (so far at least).


So what browser do you prefer? IE/Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari or something else, is this something most people even think about?

4 comments:

Lisa said...

I think about it. I always have about 1200 tabs open at any given time, and my primary need in a browser is that it is constantly saving the pages/tabs I have open so that if my machine crashes, I can be completely reconstructed.

I thought I found my product in Firefox, which I have been using for a few years, but still, sometimes my machine crashes and I lose all my tabs. Everything I want to read is on there, everything I am in the process of ordering is on there, all the stupid arguments made by someone on another blog that I am sending to my friends is on there. Then I have to page through my entire history to reconstruct it.

Is there any product that will solve my problem??

(PS, we're working on what the problem with the machine is that causes said crashes - first we thought it was itunes, then norton, then the motherboard, then the drive...we're still searching)

Steve Borthwick said...

Lisa, yes random crashing is a pain; graphics cards/drivers have always been a problem for me in the past but to be honest it could be anything, PC's seem to need a complete re-build every year or so IMO.

Re. Firefox & restarting go to options>main>when firefox starts> set this option to "show my windows and tabs from last time";

There is also a specific restart plug in here

Might be worth a try?

Lisa said...

Hey Steve,

thanks for the heads-up on the plugin - will have a look at it.

I do have FF set to show tabs from last time. Sometimes it works (meaning after a crash - it always works when I shut down the machine), and sometimes it doesn't. Presumably it sometimes crashes in some state where it is in the process of saving tabs or something and then it's all lost.

I get a handful of grey hairs everytime that happens. Oh well. I might just need a newer, faster, stronger machine... ;-)

Steve Borthwick said...

Lisa, yeh sounds like its not managing to save state in time.

Sounds like a great excuse to buy something new and shiny ahhhh... heaven :)