Hi everyone. I’ve decided to try out a new browser. Since Netscape Navigator is going out of business, I need to move off or face EOL on support. I’m running Mac OS 10.3.9, so I’m not going to try out Internet Explorer. Firefox 2.0.0.x has always been slow and heavy to me, so I’m a little turned off. Firefox 3 sounds promising but its still in Beta. Maybe when it is released.


Browsers

For some reason, Flock doesn’t work on OS X 10.3.9. Not sure why. Safari is a good choice, certainly, for the most part. I’ve had a lot of crashing problems on Safari though, maybe I just have bad luck.

Camino is interesting, and renders really fast. It also has the Mozilla core / Gecko rendering engine. There isn’t a reason not to try it out. However, I’ve decided to give Opera a chance. I downloaded v9.25 for Mac OS X, and am running it right now, and am loving the test drive!

I changed to the Neo skin, created by Ilya Baranovsky, pretty cool. :-)

One thing that is hard to let go of is the mountain of Firefox extensions that are ready to go. I was using a great Feed Sidebar written by my friend Chris Finke. I decided to give Google Reader a try, and it is working out really well too.

First off, as an engineer I truly appreciate speed. Opera is the fastest rendering browser I’ve seen. Secondly, I appreciate features that are useful and elegant. I really like the Speed Dial feature, and I’m taking a look at the widgets tonight to see if there are useful ones.

Sad to see Netscape Navigator go as my primary browser, hoping that Opera keeps up!

Update (Jan 20th, 7:42am EST): As you see from the comments below, Clayton and Evan Hamilton stopped by to let me know that Flock v1.0.5 fixes the bug(s) stopping it from running in Mac OS 10.3.9. I tried it out, and they are absolutely right. Great job guys! I do understand that Apple is stopping support for 10.3 soon (just went out and purchased 10.5, $499 for the server edition ugh), and I appreciate that you still fixed it. I’m sure other Panther users are happy to see this. As for my mad affair with Opera, we’ll see. Its only Day 2. :-)

Update #2 (Jan 20th, 9:00am EST): Just saw here that Flock did inform the Mac OS 10.3.9 community of the fix, back on January 7th. Where was I? Sorry guys, missed that one. :-)