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Free Alternatives: Part 3
Nikhil Rastogi, Oct 21, 2007 1244 hrs ISTOffice suites, Web browsers, email clients, and download managers
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Web Browsers
There are several browsers out there, each with its own benefit. Most browsers have become more of a personal choice than just a mere necessity.
A little bit of history: There were several Web browsers when the Internet had just started. The explosion of the Internet was triggered off by NCSA Mosaic web browser, which had a graphical interface released in 1993. The team-lead of Mosaic quit and formed his own company which was called Netsape. Microsoft entered late (much like the search engine wars) in 1995 with a free browser bundled with Windows. This sparked off the browser wars. (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0) After occupying close to 80% market share, Microsoft pretty much forgot about the Internet Explorer when they left version 6 infrequently updated. This is where alternatives such as the now popular Opera and Firefox took hold.
This brings us to the 2 most known browsers across the Internet: Opera and Firefox; both of which are excellent examples of safe, secure, and constantly fine-tuned Web browsers. They re both equally good and recommending one over the other would be difficult. Therefore, this becomes more of a personal choice. Both browsers are available on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac) and offer all that a modern browser should, namely, tabbed browsing, integrated search, RSS, spell check, session restoration, popup blocker, etc. Opera is often rated as the faster among the 2 and is much more popular for mobiles and devices such as Nintendo Wii, which has inbuilt Opera browser.
I personally prefer to use Firefox, as I've found that it's the only browser that lets you grow with oneself (let the flaming begin!), that is, if you need a particular feature or need something removed, Firefox has numerous extensions that allow one to change the browser to ones own liking. For example, I'm so used to using Ctrl+N to open a new tab (back in the days of Maxthon) instead of the pre-programmed Ctrl+T that I got an extension to change the key configuration. This sort of uber-functionality is not provided by any other browser.
Maxthon
For those who still like to have the familiarity of Internet Explorer, but still want something that has more oomph can breathe a sigh of relief. Maxthon is a great Internet Explorer add-on. But do note that it's not a browser by itself, but adds loads of great functionality which even the Internet Explorer 7 misses out on. Check it out here.
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