Linux Browser Options

Short of running Internet Explorer through Wine, are there any decent linux browsers?

I have had enough of Firefox, it's slow, unreliable and costs us hundreds of dollars a year in incorrectly printed pages.

Chromium is based on WebKit.

Konqueror is...bundled with KDE, I think they have their own engine.


Honestly though, if you think Firefox is costing you in incorrectly rendered pages, then just about nothing on Linux will save you. If you want the ubiquitousness of IE, then you need IE. Personally, I have almost 0 problems with alternatives anymore, but I guess it depends on where you go.

I'm not sure how incorrect rendering costs you money?

Incorrectly printing pages, as in physically printing. Cost time, paper, toners, etc. Firefox seems to randomly decide to change to the settings which means, need to re-print, and will always jam the inkjet (though don't really use that anymore).



Yeah want one?

Problem with IE is that it's very slow under Wine as well. Clipboard and printing still doesn't work well under wine either.

And after setting up a virtual terminal in Windows XP two days ago on a direct internet connection to find out overcome with popups while I was installing updates, "your system may be infected with viruses", and other bullshit popups (forgot how insecure Windows XP is - thought it might last long enough to installing updates). Had to do a fresh format again, put a firewall on while I install all the updates. I don't think I'm ready to go back to windows on a system that needs some reliability.

What's weird though, our server runs Windows Server 2k3 Standard, direct net connection, no firewalls, anti-virus or other such nonsense and has never had issues, if they can design an secure OS, why don't they make the commercial OS secure? Or do they want to force enterprise clients onto enterprise prices?

Also hate how the clipboard sometimes doesn't work in ubuntu's Remote Desktop.

Chronium I found very slow (they're Atom processors). What's odd is, Windows Firefox is faster under Wine than linux firefox.

Anyways this is my random rant. Maybe I should switch to Macs. :P

Honestly though, how does the every day use cope with Windows? Don't their systems get filled with crap? Sure most are behind a router, but many will have direct net connections. Or do they buy into Norton's, "Intel gave us 6 processor cores so we can use 5 for anti-virus and 1 dedicated just for the user."

There are any number of stripped-down Netscape derivatives out there you could try, if you are into basic functionality and not worried about appearance.

There's Epiphany browser, which is based on Mozilla Gecko.

Of course, there's Opera for Linux, don't know how well that one works.

If you want text-only (rare, but occasionally useful), then I believe Lynx is still around.

Yup. D1 mentioned Opera.

I'd say that Opera 10.01 "feels alright" in both Fedora and OpenSUSE.

Flock is also based on the Gecko engine.

Should you want to try another engine-based browser, try going for Arora - it's built on top of WebKit.

As for your Windows-related rent, I guess it goes without further explanation why I am using Windows Server 2003 on my main workstation machine since ages, and on my laptop I've got now Windows Server 2008 R2 Ultimate. At work XP SP3 is fine.

And there there are people like me. I've used a yea+r XP, ~2 year Vista (both 32 and 64 bit) and since there appeared Windows 7 beta I switched to that. Than growing up to RC and finally RTM, I can't say I regret any of the switches. I never experienced penalties for doing so. I must mention that I have a quit good spec PC and I game rarely and even then some old school games like Warcraft 3. The last games "heavy" games I played were more than a year back Gothic 3 and Assasins Creed. (both of them shortly after they appeared).

PS. And yeah I do like to work in a shiny, moder looking environment. I am the kind of guy that hates the classic look in any OS. (I also have Ubuntu installed and I tuned that also with Compiz for some nice effects). I have a good CPU (E4300) with a fairly good video card (Geforce 8800GTS) that should offer me at least a good looking OS with decent performance.

PS2. Opera user here. Although to be honest for Linux FF seemed to me a little faster, however that was back with Opera 9.64. Things may have changed with the new version 10.

LE: So concluding all this I think that saying: "Intel gave us 6 processor cores so we can use 5 for anti-virus and 1 dedicated just for the user." fits me. You know what? As long as with that 1 core I can complete all the task as fast as I need them I don't give a s....t. I mean why the hell complete a task with 30% faster if in that 30% my CPU is sitting idle cause I cannot complete to keep up with that task faster. God dammit, instead give me with that cores some nice effects.

There's no point bringing up classic vs. new-style Start Menu debate. That'd be off-topic. Either way, not to sound like a broken tape, this issue was thoroughly discussed over here. And there are 3rd party solution for that, too. You cannot take away toys that are stored in the shell32.dll of other operating systems. And while Microsoft claims over 85% of people prefer the new Start menu, they said this at PDC, which I don't doubt (people like shiny things), more than a few IT professional still stand by their classic-menu preference (link - 67 vs 204, that's roughly 25%).

As for myself, my Windows-computing "needs" will always be satisfied by their enterprise-level products. And that's completely fine with me.

The thread is about browsers. I, for one, feel the most comfortable inside Opera. And only real Opera users understand this, such as Itsacon and Yeti from this place. And yes, we like being part of those 2%.

In the meantime, you could give us few more clues or anything about the kind of documents or pages you're "printing incorrectly" in those mentioned browsers. Maybe we can help otherwise or help us understand and imagine the situation.

Actualy, Konqueror is surprisingly good. Same with Epiphany.

It's just a front end system that prints invoices. Often I need to reset the margins/print background images/don't bring those ugly headers and footers, etc, otherwise it fits the invoice on two pages (and looks ugly). Also on the inkjet the paper size it always selects (and won't save the changes of) will cause the printer to jam, but that's not a problem anymore.

Epiphany sounds good.