BTW, no memory problems here. And I can keep Opera with 20+ tabs on overnight. 🙂

“I must have misunderstood Tim Berners-Lee’s original scheme, but I had the idea that displaying pages and following hyperlinks to open URLs were the whole points of a browser. I don’t care what else they can do.”

Actually you do care – for example you complain that ie6 doesn’t implement style-sheets properly. 😉 Style sheets contain no information, merely presentation … (although often they are important to making the information readable).

Unfortunately, rendering the web `properly’ has become an almost impossible task. The original semantic content idea was hijacked by designers and artists as soon as there was money to be made. So a ‘web browser’ went from being an information navigation device to including complex type-setting and layout systems. Add in some scripting system and now you’ve got what amounts to a whole virtual operating system running in a window, with a compositing graphics engine, typesetting system, animation system and widget library all sitting on top (along with persistent data storage, network access layer, security and authentication subsystem, customisation, etc etc). And all of these standards are in constant revision and expansion and subject to mis-implementation which needs to be copied if the competition did it first.

Even just displaying a simple line of text requires a staggering amount of code – xml/html parsing to unicode, unicode character to glyph conversion, basic layout and justification based on glyph metrics, font outline renderers, anti-aliasing and compositing into the displayed graphic.

And they can’t even agree on something as well specified as unicode – windows-based editors often use the wrong character set so quotes are encoded incorrectly.

And then on-top of the basic difficulty of the problem in the first place, add on the intentional incompatibilities added by a certain vendor to try to control the market (“see, you can’t use mozilla, it doesn’t show this page properly”), and it’s a wonder they manage to get anything to work at all.

It does somewhat astonish me that nobody has yet managed to write a good browser, though. Chrome seems to be the closest attempt so far in terms of not trying to do too much besides browsing (especially if you turn off the ‘new tab’ page) but it’s too young yet.

It’s either that or lynx: http://csant.info/lynx
😛

FF crashes every single time I try to close it. Every time. No matter what I do. Around 1 in eight links kill it for no apparent reason.

I have safari – which doesn’t so much crash as just be erratic. Sometimes it displays pages, sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes it uses the stylesheet, sometimes it doesnt.

Opera is the most stable but it is a brutal memory hog. It is no longer the sleek, fast, lightweight brower of yesteryear. Now it uses more system resources than IE.

I have opera on my phone. It is terrible. It displays pages in a weird way – fitting the height rather than the width, so the text is about 1/100000th of a point and not readable. Zooming improves things but is still a PITA.

Chrome isn’t bad. It is fast and doesn’t eat ram. It does try to “help” to much though. I haven’t used it enough to say much more though.