Web Browsers

Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null

It all started way back in 1996 ... Along with the first desktop PC (PC meaning IBM compatible blah-blah-and-so-on, we'd already had both C64s, Amigas, Macs and an old laptop) in the family came the first modem and the first internet connection. I did have some extremely limited experience with the internet before that (so limited I tried to type an email address for URL, those were the days :-), using Mosaic in school and probably some nice old Netscape version too.

The first time was a bit back and forth between Netscape and Internet Explorer. Downloading either was of course out of the question on a 28.8 modem (even if they were a lot smaller these days), so we switched a bit back and forth depending on which one I could get my hands on a more recent version of. Once I got Internet Explorer 4 installed though, it was pretty much IE all the way. Especially since I was doing schoolstuff experimenting (the nice, basic copy-what-someone-else-has-done-and-try-to-change-it-a-little-kind of experimentation) with the DHTML capabilities of IE.

So, for a long time I was an Internet Explorer person, liking it for the way it supported cool things and the way it started fast once it snuck its way into Windows itself. But then Opera started maturing. I had tried it a time or two before and liked some of the ideas it had, but too many pages didn't show up good enough so I mostly kept it around for testing. Since version 5.something though I've been converted, especially once I discovered mouse gestures and the charm of a tabbed interface.

IE is seeing less and less use these days, just jumping in on the few pages that do things in silly, IE-centric ways (I've grown away from that myself :-). I keep both IE and Netscape around and up to date though, switching a little can be fun sometimes (am writing this through Netscape for example) and it's never wrong to do compatibility testing ...