Most Popular Browser

[Kaligraphic]

The reason Chrome is so fast is partly because it uses WebKit, which I believe is the fastest HTML rendering engine now

It's not the fastest. If you have a *nix machine, try out Dillo. Of course, Dillo doesn't support all the fancy stuff, but I've yet to see a graphical browser beat it in terms of pure speed. It even feels faster than links.

[ShiroiHikari]

Been using Firefox for years now and I still love it. It hardly ever gives me any trouble.

The ONLY thing I use IE for is Netflix Instant Viewer. :\

[SnoringFrog]

Well CAA seems to prefer Firefox overall. Firefox must be the Christian thing to use, or perhaps it's something with us liking anime...lol.

Since we're on the topic of browsers, anyone know of any good topics for an article about any browser(s)? Or anything someone wants to know how to do with a browser? I'm supposed to be writing articles for favbrowser.com and I can never think of any decent topics.

[Lady Kenshin]

Safari ftw! So user-friendly!

[Midori]

I think diversity in this regard is a good thing. The fact that we all have our own favorites means we all have different ways of thinking and doing things.

Of course, that may change pretty soon, since Firefox 3.1's new Javascript engine, TraceMonkey, is supposed to be as fast as V8.

I've been using the Firefox 3.1 beta recently (exclusively). It's much faster than Firefox 3.0, at least. It starts up in about a fifth the time and does javascript actions really fast, and it only crashes occasionally! CAA Chat still slows down though.

[EricTheFred]

Internet Exterminator must die!

I use Firefox, except when going to netflix and a couple specific operating system maintenance sites.

[shooraijin]

Camino on Mac OS X, Firefox on Windows/Linux (and Mac OS 9 via an elabourate method of cheating).

[Fish and Chips]

I tend to prefer FireFox, but lately it's been jerking me around so I might move up.

Could be that my computer is just terrible though.

[Mithrandir]

CAA Chat still slows down though.

Have you tried it both wired and wireless? I'm curious...

[blkmage]

Ah, I'd forgotten about it since I'd read about it so long ago, but one thing that excited me about Firefox 3 was its support for kerning and ligatures. I'm pretty sure that almost no one will notice or care about that though.

[Robin Firedrake]

Kerning and ligatures? *Non-genius dragon is confused*

[blkmage]

Both are related to typography, so pretty much anyone who isn't involved with web design will probably not be excited by it.

Kerning controls the space in between characters in a font. In most fonts, where the width of each glyph is different, it's important since certain pairs of letters will look awkward if the spacing is the same. For example, the space between A and V (AV) should be different from the space between S and T (ST). Each font usually contains a table of these pairs.

Ligatures are alternate glyphs for characters who interfere with each other. For example, in a lot of fonts, the curved part and cross in f and the dot of i are really close together. It's usually replaced with fi. Other pairs of characters are ff, fl, and fj. Historically, & was a ligature of 'et' which was latin for "and".

Until recently, most programs didn't support these. It wasn't until Office 2007 that they recognized ligatures. Usually, it was design programs, like Illustrator and InDesign, or typesetting programs, like LaTeX, that would worry about stuff like proper typography. It's something that a lot of people who have moved from print design to web design would be happy about.

[Mithrandir]

Strictly speaking, I would have preferred check boxes to radio buttons for this poll...

[SnoringFrog]

[quote="blkmage (post: 1308107)"]Both are related to typography, so pretty much anyone who isn't involved with web design will probably not be excited by it.

Kerning controls the space in between characters in a font. In most fonts, where the width of each glyph is different, it's important since certain pairs of letters will look awkward if the spacing is the same. For example, the space between A and V (AV) should be different from the space between S and T (ST). Each font usually contains a table of these pairs.

Ligatures are alternate glyphs for characters who interfere with each other. For example, in a lot of fonts, the curved part and cross in f and the dot of i are really close together. It's usually replaced with fi]

I'd never heard about these, but they sound cool; I suppose at some point it could become useful. How is one supposed to work with those though?