So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?

The complete text of our reader’s question was a little too long for the Deepest Sender grid. To wit: “In recent months, you’ve said, ‘More soon on the browsers and other software’ and ‘if you’ve got links on your desktop to 11 Internet browsers (yes; 11, about which more later)….” So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?”

Did I say 11? I currently have icon-links to 14 browsers on my desktop. The browsers I use at least somewhat regularly are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, OffByOne, and iRider. I also click into Deepnet Explorer now and then. I still have a set-up project going with Deepnet.

Until I switched to the new laptop several months ago, IE, Firefox, K-Meleon and Navigator were the browsers I typically resorted to. I knew about Opera, but didn’t realize it was now free and somewhat more robust than when I had last checked it out.

A big discovery was iRider, which allows the user to open many links simultaneously (or seriatim very quickly) and to “pin” open pages so that they’re retained in permanent memory to be opened each time the browser is opened. IRider is fast and versatile, and the only browser I’ve ever paid money for. However, after I bought it I learned a lot more about Firefox add-ons and also the “group” feature that Firefox and many browsers now have, including Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, and Internet Explorer 7. This feature allows the user to save a bunch of related pages under an assigned name in the browser’s permanent memory. That’s helpful for quickly starting up research within a particular category of web pages, for example the portal pages of a major client’s web site, or the home pages of major newspapers. Or say you’re a film buff, you could make a group of all the sites you like to visit for movie news and reviews. It’s a more efficient kind of bookmarking.

OffByOne is the most stripped-down browser for windows. If you don’t care about a web page’s format, just want a bare-bones page for reading text and prefer to use as little memory  as possible, give OffByOne a try. I’d install it on my Asus eee if the eee had an XP instead of a Linux OS. If you have a clunky old PC with not a lot of RAM, try OffByOne. The makers call it “the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support. It is a  completely self-contained, stand-alone 1.2 MB application with no dependencies  on any other browser or browser component. For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows  ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.”

K-Meleon and Crazy Browser are both pretty nimble. Crazy Browser will list the groups you save so that you can just click on the collection of web pages you want to work with, whereas K-Meleon asks you to type in the name of the group.

Firefox tends to be my default browser, and it’s what came pre-installed in my mini-laptop, the Asus eee. I’ve installed most of the same add-ons in both the eee’s Firefox and the Dell Vostro 1000’s Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 is a pretty good browser, but seems a little slow to me. It has tabbed browsing, but I think every major browser has tabbed browsing these days. I need IE7 to view Netflix movies online, and to most efficiently send pages to Microsoft’s OneNote notetaking software (pages can be sent to OneNote using the print function in other browsers).

Deepnet Explorer combines a browser and a news reader. I haven’t yet explored this browser as deeply as I’d like to (get it? a pun!) but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Other browsers on my Dell, which have been praised by partisans but which I use only occasionally:

Safari - The Apple browser, now available in a Windows version.

Opera - Supposed to be very customizable with widgets, but these widgets don’t seem to be as easy to install as the Firefox add-ons.

Netscape Navigator - Owned by AOL now. They’ve thrown in the towel and will no longer be publishing new versions or supporting the latest one. Navigator was of course the first big browser to give Internet Explorer a run for its money.

Wyzo - Supposed to be especially good at downloading media.

Avant and Maxthon - Two of the browsers based on the Internet Explorer “core.” Crazy Browser is another. I don’t know quite how this works. Does Microsoft have to give them permission? Anyway, I gather that these shell-browsers won’t function if you don’t have IE also installed.

Flock, based like Firefox on something called Mozilla, had me at hello and then lost me shortly thereafter. Flock is a so-called “social” browser that helps the hipsters stay plugged into Facebook and YouTube and whatnot. I liked that it includes a blogging utility compatible with WordPress. But it seemed to be impossible to choose the right category for a blog being posted (unless it was among the first few categories listed in the scrollbar), which meant I had to log in to WordPress directly anyway to pick the category… I’ve had better luck with the Deepest Sender add-on for Firefox. Perhaps the problem with Flock’s blogging feature is easily solved.  But if you’re giving somebody a utility to do something faster and better, and it doesn’t work perfectly immediately, you risk losing the user to another utility that does work perfectly immediately. That is the way market competition goes sometimes, especially in the lickety-split world of software. (Yes, even freeware is in a market.)

I was a bit surprised to learn about all these browsers. I could have found out about many of them a few years ago with a Google search or two. There are many more out there in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned, some of them very specialized. If you want a sports-themed browser geared to guiding you quickly to all things sporty, there’s something called Sportsbrowser.

The next question to ask me is what Firefox add-ons I’ve installed.