Modern web browsers

[Stephen Coates]

I've been a bit frustrated for some time, with how some web browsers have got rid of lots of their functionality, or at least hidden it away, in order to appear dumbed down.

Fortunately for me, Opera 12 hadn't yet done this, but I just found that Opera has completely changed recently. I didn't know this, because the changes are only on Windows, and I use the Linux version. So, I decided to give the new version of Opera a go in a virtual machine. For quite a long time, Opera has had lots of advanced functionality, which has surpassed that of other browsers, but now, they seem to have got rid of practically everything. No longer do I have a nice set of options in a menu bar. No longer can I use my left and right mouse buttons to navigate. The sidebars are gone. I may as well not bother.

Many other browsers seem to have adopted this dumbed down look, with hardly any buttons, and hardly any menus, making it virtually impossible to do anything with it. Even lesser known ones like Epiphany and Midori.

I tried a recent version of IceWeasel (pretty much a FireFox clone), and it had pretty much done away with the status bar. Instead of having a permanent status bar, one would pop up, covering a small part of the page, and I would have to wait a while for it to appear. I had to install an extension to get the conventional status bar functionality back.


Why?


I've been pondering changing to the Uzbl browser. This looks to be quite a promising browser for Linux, but it does seem to have a bit of a learning curve, for those who aren't accustomed to software like vi.

[Harrison]

You can blame Chrome for this. It has hardly anything viable to begin with, although you can make parts of it visible if you wish.

For me I still like Firefox the most. It does also hide a lot compared to old versions, grouping everything under the one main menu, but again you can switch most things back on.

The reason is good for the most part because it gives you much more webpage space on screen at once, which is an offshoot from mobile device design.

I have actually been using Chrome a bit more recently because I like it's cloud syncing. If you are using it on a tablet, then load it on your PC it can instantly mirror everything. All your favorites are there across all of your synced copies of Chrome, and even you're currently open tabs will mirror over. Very cool. I've also started using Google Keep for the same reason and thinking of ditching Catch for this job.

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