WHAT BROWSER DO YOU RECOMMEND?

i use both IE and Netscape, they both have their good defects and their bad defects.

All browsers are shoddy but since IE draws over 90% of web users webmasters design for IE's buggyness.

I strongly recomend IE.

Opera and other browsers get rave reviews for their small footprint and low memory usage but they are minority browsers and just as buggy as IE, the difference is that webmasters won't go out of their way to design for anything but IE.

Internet Explorer is by far the best if you want to see the website in the way the webmaster intended.

In spite of its "bugginess", IE is my choice too.

As is frequently the case, Craven has made a point that I had not even previously considered.

Why would one even contemplate another?

Thanks for asking, Mapleleaf, and thanks for answering, Craven.

I agree much with the Boss - IE is first choice
I also have Opera loaded and Modzilla.

I think the next best question to be asked by someone, is what POP3 email programs do folks use?
Outlook
Outlook Express
Eudora
Integrated (within the browser?)

I LEAVE FRIDAY ON A FAMILY TRIP, SHOULD BE BACK TO ATTEND TO THREADS ON SATURDAY, JAN. 4.

I've toyed with many, browsers and mail clients, but find, for all their faults, IE 6 and OE 6 in their current iterations do well enough for me. Mrs Timber likes MSN6 and uses Hotmail as integrated therein exclusively. To my experience, Netscape is overblown, slow-loading, has difficulty displaying some web pages, and crashes more often than do the M$ browsers. Mozilla cuts down some on the "Bloat" of Netscape, but is pretty much the same thing, really. Opera is fast, has a very small "Footprint", and can be toggled among multiple windows with ease, but again, there are frequent page-rendering issues. An IE variant called Neoplanet, from Lycos, I believe, has some interesting features, but is really more or less just a "Skin" for IE. MacAfee, the Anti-virus folk, offers a proprietarily named version of NeoPlanet. Eudora is an excellent mail client, but I've manged to get fairly comfortable and adept with Outlook and Outlook Express, in fact I now use OE almost exclusively, though I have taken advantage of many of its customization options.

My take on the issue is that most of The Web is designed to more or less work with M$ product. Resistance is futile. They Are The Borg. All our base belong to them.



timber

I started on the web with Netscape 3/4.72 (first Internet course I attended and was teacher's favourite); have ended up using IE for banks and other secure sites which have not been checked against anything but IE (except Amazon which works seamlessly with Mozilla and probably everything), and Mozilla for everything else. I like the "Open in new tab" feature, which allows you to browse a site opening several windows one after another, and then close them all with just one click. I also like the fact that the first item on the right click menu is "Open in new window" - IE has a rather redundant "Open", and then next is "Open in new window", which you could do by just clicking, no need for a contextual menu, so why have it up there first?

A2K likes Mozilla too, so that's OK; Composer's almost there as simple web design tool, but is still rather cumbersome, the Mail and Newsgroups module is fine, but doesn't allow you to create identities on top of an existing e-mail account, so you can send *as if* from another (when you went to reply to redirected mail for example).

There are quite a lot of sites now which validate against version 6 onwards of most browsers and under Windows and Linux too. Following site in Spain does, anyhow (list at end of page), and it's going to be easier in future as everyone gets on the standards bandwagon, or will find it increasingly difficult not to:

http://www.alertaantivirus.es

I find Eudora really confusing, though I know lots of people who swear by it; never used Outlook in my life (know lots of people who say it should really be called Lookout); still, the bigger you are, the sooner someone somewhere is going to find a bug.

I am on a dial-up - so I use Opera for speed in places like this when I am moving around a lot - though it tends to gradually slow down for some reason if I am browsing for a while.

My Opera will not open Abuzz - lord knows why - so I use IE for that and most browsing- probably cos it opens from my email and that is often where I get an idea for a site to visit.