Desktop Browser of Choice in 2013?
Displaying poll results.30818 total votes.
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Firechrome (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Firefox and Chrome, because both are broken in different ways.
Almost makes me fond of the AOL days, it's so frustrating.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost makes me fond of the AOL days, it's so frustrating.
You know what really annoyed me about AOL and every other firm that does business like them: you could sign up instantaneously with one of their CDs and a credit card but to cancel their service required it be done in writing and took 2 months - and they billed you for those two months.
Of course, it made Steve Case a billionaire when he suck...convinced Time Warner to buy it.
I had a B-School professor who owned a website - doesn't matter what because many websites do business this way:
1. Offer a 2 week free
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IIRC one of the elements of the lawsuit was that whoever they outsourced it to was comped based on cancellation rate.
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Same here. Chrome locked me in through my Google account, and I use Firefox for work related stuff and some websites i like to keep separated (at home).
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Same here. Chrome locked me in through my Google account, and I use Firefox for work related stuff and some websites i like to keep separated (at home).
Chrome is like Democracy, the worst solution except all the alternatives. I'd like Chrome a lot better if Google would stop changing things for the worse. I swear it was at its peak about 2 years ago. It is seriously aggravating now.
Shared user account? (Score:2)
What are you using, Windows 98? Every operating system that I know of allows you to create multiple user accounts. My wife has her own computer, and I have an account on her computer. She also has an account on my computer, as well as each of the son's computers.
Creating profiles within a browser only makes those profiles available to the logged-in user.
I can't imagine sharing my account with other people. It's not a matter of having anything to hide, it's a matter of having the desktop set up MY WAY, a
Re: (Score:3)
It is always good to have a back up web browser. For me, it is whatever OS came with like IE in Windows, Safari in Mac OS X, etc. On my own machines, I always use Mozilla's SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org].
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Seamonkey.
Firefox if I absolutely have to, but given the chance I open up about:config and reset the critical values. Thinking about it, I should create a user.js file and carry it around on my USB-stick.
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Yeah, I've got a list of about 7 about:config options to unfuck every time I install a new copy of Firefox too :P
Not a single new feature I've wanted or needed since 3.5 at the latest. Wish somebody would fork it.
Re: (Score:2)
may I ask what are those 7 settings you change in your about:config?
JigJag
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I use Chrome as the lesser of two evils. Face it: everybody who is in the browser business has an agenda.
Almost makes me fond of the AOL days, it's so frustrating.
I remember a flight (circa 1995) when I got an AOL trial floppy disk with my complimentary bag of peanuts and lousy coffee.
...laura
Pale Moon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pale Moon (Score:5, Informative)
I was curious about Pale Moon, so I googled it. Turns out it's a Firefox build optimized for Windows. They disabled some stuff they didn't think most people would need and enabled compiler optimizations that might exclude some older machines. See technical details [palemoon.org].
No Linux version, though :(
Re: (Score:3)
That IS the whole point... building a 64-bit browser that's lean and fast. I don't want options and features and backward compatibility with 10 year old computers, I want the bare minimum that will run most sites acceptably. Note: "most". We shouldn't be burdened with obscure cases where people are still using IE 5.5 proprietary javascript extensions or dot-com era shorthand HTML notations.
Other options (Score:4, Insightful)
Or other option- Chromium (Chrome with most of the Evil removed).
Should they count as separate browsers?
--Coder
Mozilla's suite! (Score:4, Interesting)
SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org]. Yes, I still use this bloated one since I use e-mails, usenet/newsgroups, web browsers, etc. :P
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SeaMonkey for me too, but because it maintains a more comprehensive browser chrome than modern Firefox.
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I use SeaMonkey as it's less bloated and faster then Firefox. Most add-ons work and page display much the same as Firefox excepting a few sites that seem to think it is a mobile browser.
Pentadactyl (Score:2)
I use Firefox with Pentadactyl [5digits.org]. That way I don't care what UI changes Mozilla is making.
Cause with Pentadactyl the only Firefox UI that shows, is the Tab bar.
But I get all the advantages of Firefox: use of gstreamer for mp3 support, and much more.
Chrome, but IE for important provider applications (Score:2, Insightful)
For enrolling in health benefits (not Obamacare as it happens), managing my bank statement, etc, I use Internet Explorer. Not because I trust Microsoft, but because I know the provider is going to focus on making their application work correctly with IE. I don't want some subtle discrepancy in browser behavior to route my transaction to underspace. I don't care if it is Microsoft who is not following the standard, they are the de facto standard for most of these services.
Re:Chrome, but IE for important provider applicati (Score:5, Informative)
For enrolling in health benefits (not Obamacare as it happens), managing my bank statement, etc, I use Internet Explorer. Not because I trust Microsoft, but because I know the provider is going to focus on making their application work correctly with IE. I don't want some subtle discrepancy in browser behavior to route my transaction to underspace.
Hah! If only Internet Explorer worked like that.
Internet Explorer 11 at it again, breaks Microsoft's own CRM software [theregister.co.uk]
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LoL, I don't think this still applies.
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I've tried 'em all, and sometimes IE just doesn't work, period. But the fact is it has the best built-in RSS feed out there. No muss, no fuss, no "add-ons": It's just there. Everything else is a hassle and you never know when Google will say, "We're removing this because we don't like it."
Started with Firefox, ending with Safari (Score:3)
I've used Firefox for a lot of years, but lately I'm finding I prefer WebKit more. I did try Chrome for a while, but Google is just getting too pushy.
The web developer bits used to always pull me back to Firefox. Nowadays similar tools are available for most browsers though.
Opera, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used Opera most of the year, but recently switched to firefox.
Opera 12.16 was good for a while but far too many websites were nagging me about me browsing supposedly not working on them properly and often I had issues with a page's formatting not displaying properly.
Ever since Opera Desktop team switched from Presto over to Chronium for their latest releases (15+), Opera has been lacking every features that even retained me into using the browser(mail, irc, bookmarks, etc...), which was why I stayed on 12.16... But I couldn't take it anymore, it was truly starting to show it's age, especially in the HTML5 department.
And thus, I switched over to Firefox about 2 weeks ago, installed a few extensions like Speed Dial, All-In-One Sidebar, Scrapbook, Chatzilla, Greasemonkey, Firegestures, undo closed tab button... To make it closer to what Opera 12 was to me. I'm just sad I lost my integrated email client, but Thunderbird + close to tray extensions filled that gap.
And after a few tweaking around, I've basically transformed Firefox into what Opera was/should've been, I'm happy again. It's not perfect, but still better than what they did with Opera 15+.
Opera because, not but (Score:3)
Site won't load without Javascript? Thanks for letting me know. I immediately reconsider whether I want to load the site at all. Ever.
I turn on Javascript again and give the site a try. "This site is best with some other browser..." Ok, thanks for the warning. Do I really REALLY want to load this site? Also, make a menta
Re: (Score:3)
The only feature it is really lacking is GPU acceleration.
They should have waited until they implemented more features in the Blink version before they made it the new official vers
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Whatever gets stuck in the VM or sandbox? (Score:3)
On Windows, I usually use one Web browser in a VM, sandboxed, or both for general browsing. For banking, and other sensitive services, I fire up a different Web browser in a different VM/sandbox. This way, it provides some isolation. It isn't a complete solution, but so far, has worked pretty well, especially with all the Web browsers having ad-blocking extensions built in.
If one does sandbox, have the data stored on a different volume. This way, if some rogue program tries creating a loop or filling the filesystem with junk files, the sandbox can be killed, the filesystem reformatted, and things restarted.
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That's interesting. A large forum I'm active on had a string of spam posts just the other week linking to a java based video player that hijacked our users' machines. I know for a fact that at least one of the affected users in question is an Internet Explorer user.
Now, you might argue that running a java plugin is "intentionally install[ing] malware," but I guess most non technical users would disagree.
Malware developer? (Score:2)
I suppose that if you are a developer who specializes in data mining, you just might be telling people that their security precautions are unnecessary.
In depth, layered security is always a good thing. So, my browser protects me - whoopty-do. As much as I like Google, there is no denying that Google is the biggest data miner in the world. WTF would I TRUST Chrome's default settings, and promises of privacy?
121 tabs in Firefox (Score:2)
TabMixPlus and the built in tab groups make it possible for me to just leave things open to read later. Close and open Firefox and the tabs are back as they were as I left them. Bookmarks are ok for long term keeping of pages I may want to view again, but leaving tabs open makes me more likely to actually view it again during the upcoming Great Tab Purge of 2014.
I just wish that middle click wasn't stuck on the harder to click scroll wheel.
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Pshh--with Tree-Style Tabs, I've had up to 600 open. Thank God Firefox no longer loads tabs until you switch to them ;)
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Could be a psychological thing from having a horizontal tab bar. I have mine set to vertical, which also makes the tab titles waaaay more readable.
adage (Score:2)
A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.
Some of desire - no, DEMAND - clutter. You can't work on a clean desktop. Call it madness, but most of us have method to our madness.
Firefox for Less Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome is becoming evil for the Web. Patent-encumbered video codecs, Native Client, and now they're joining with Microsoft in promoting DRM. The Mozilla Foundation continues to promote an open and accessible Internet.
Also, I got tired of how I can't control Chrome's font rendering. It looks stupid on my monitor in portrait mode. With the bizarrely decreasing stability of Chrome in the middle of 2012, it was easy to switch to Firefox.
Re: (Score:3)
Agree with this. I use Firefox simply because I don't trust for-profit groups and avoid them as much as I can. It's a shame, because Chrome is a pretty slick browser and would be fun to try, but even when I do, I'd have this horrible nagging feeling that Google is spying on me in whatever way it has been engineered to do (even if I'm using Chromium instead).
Though I still think Firefox is better from a technical standpoint anyways. The speed and memory footprint have improved drastically for quite a while,
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A poll we can actually verify to some degree... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be interested to see how this lines up with Slashdot's web user logs....
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Chromium (Score:3)
Like Chrome, but does not phone home to Google.
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Chromium has leaked identifying information to Google before, I think it's asking for problems running Chromium.
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Seems my Google foo or Bing foo for that matter isn't strong enough to find the bug right now.
It was one bug years ago, where update checks or submission of telemetry information (the last one could even be opt-in) went to a google domain and by mistake would include the normal cookies it would send for that domain.
I do remember it didn't apply to everyone, so that could be because of the telemetry opt-in or because not everyone regularly visits that Google domain.
Also I don't know how long that bug existed
I said firefox ... (Score:2)
As that is my main browser; I have plenty of plugins, eg: noscript, ghostery. However I also use opera for those sites where it is too much of a pain to work out what scripts/references to allow, etc -- and then get it to forget everything once I have viewed the site. The combination works well at maintaining privacy.
Firefox has good plugins that help with web development, but Opera's Dragonfly is very much worth using as a complimentary tool. I also use Lynx to check pages, partly because it shows me how s
oh Opera, why..? (Score:3, Insightful)
Been using Opera since v5 days in early 2001 and still remember the big banner it had back then as the company moved to a free but adware supported version.
I've lovingly used Opera due to its mouse gestures, tabs (many tab placement options, the more recent grouping features), session manager, and good customization for key bindings, resisting the complete switch to other more well 'web-supported' browsers when it's rendering wasn't good on some sites I was frequently browsing, always using it as the main browser.
This year however they decided to switch to the Chrome rendering engine.. and have since (seemingly) forgotten about us Linux users, with no (new) Linux version available since v12 in July before the transition, while the Windows/Mac versions are now up to v18 (and v19 developer preview). There have been rumors of a Linux version but no concrete proof there will ever be one, and soon I will jump ship to another browser which is showing good care for Linux users.
Goodbye Opera.. I'll be very sorry to see you go.
Re: (Score:2)
So what is your plan ? what will you be moving to if there will be no Opera for Linux ?
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why dont you just stick with an the latest(last) version of Opera for Linux? What actually is your need to upgrade?
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There's a bug in v12 which resets your default search engine to Google and prevents you from reassigning the G search word.
No no, that's a feature! Totally.
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TenFourFox (Score:2)
While I mostly use Firefox, I have an old mac mini, and there I use the 3rd party "Keep firefox working on PowerPC, because they won't" TenFourFox
Reality = FireChrome Explorer (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
As a network professional, few things beats telnet to port 80 and openssl s_client to port 443. Or a non-switching hub and packet sniffing.
Nothing beats seeing what is [i[really[/i[ sent. And quite often, errors are due to developers not understanding the underlying technologies and what happens behind the scenes,
One of the reoccurring problems I see are developers who think that when they send a cookie to a client, they are guaranteed to get that cookie back, and that it can be trusted to always follow
Web developer (Score:3)
Midori? (Score:2)
I've used it for years on *nix with on decrepid old Pentium II laptops, but never considered it for more powerful machines, sticking with Opera or Firefox. As I've become more unhappy with both, I've looked at Midori again.
The rendering engine is ridiculously fast, HTML5 support works well (better than Opera 12.15), WebGL works well and you can use Greasemonkey scripts. With the built in plugins you can block JS as well as ads.
The only caveat is that flash is a bit delicate on it. Other than that, Midori is
Internet Explorer 2% (Score:2)
NSA (Score:3)
Other: SeaMonkey (Score:5, Interesting)
My preferred browser is SeaMonkey. It has the same "guts" as Firefox but a different user interface that I consider far superior to Firefox. By "guts", I mean the same HTML rendering engine, the same Internet interface, the same SSL processes, and often the same third-party extensions. However, SeaMonkey allows experienced users to tailor the browser in ways that Firefox does not.
It appears that Mozilla has been slowly "dumbing down" Firefox. In the process, the developers have also gone overboard in attempting to make Firefox super-safe for users, which is the main cause of the loss of tailoring. This safety is not restricted to browsing the Web safely but also in configuring the user's own computer. This sometimes means a loss of functionality, overcome by a proliferation of third-party extensions.
Overall, many experienced users feel that Mozilla is trying to make Firefox too similar to Chrome in order to compete against Chrome. What Mozilla refuses to accept is the fact that, if a user wants Chrome, that user will install Chrome and not Firefox.
So far, Sea Monkey has been able to avoid these Firefox deficiencies.
agent strings... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
With both Firefox and SeaMonkey, it is very easy to spoof agent strings, to lie to Web servers by indicating I am using some browser that I have not installed. Actually, the default configuration of SeaMonkey has the user string
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 SeaMonkey/2.22.1
which says it is both Firefox and SeaMonkey.
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it is very easy to spoof agent strings
Indeed. Anyone who actually thinks I'm running Mosiac v42.0 is probably very confused! ;)
Internet Explorer (Score:2)
From IE9 on it has seemed like the least broken to me.
Dillo (Score:2)
Chrome mainly (Score:2)
Been Using Opera for years... (Score:2)
I even paid $30 for it... If they would have taken a free, as in beer, stance in the days of the Netscape ie battle, we might all be using it now.
Which I still do.
I'm back to Firefox (Score:3)
Chrome had won me over (some of the 'features' of Firefox in the last year or two, started bugging me -- slowing responsiveness, what felt like bloatware, and some stability issues) BUT, then as I've followed Google more closely since the NSA - Snowden thing broke, and learned how cozy Google has gotten with what to me are very dubious PACs and government officials, as well as their horrific lack of respect for privacy --- Firefox has called me back
Safari on Windows? (Score:2)
Since Safari for Windows was deprecated, I've found myself missing it. I keep the ultimate version installed, but I've been forced onto Firefox, as even iCloud has dropped support for Safari.
It had a better memory footprint than Chrome or Safari, and didn't choke under a heavy tab load (hundreds). Apple's 64-bit-first philosophy probably had something to do with that, even on Windows. And it was snappier. Chrome pulled me off it for a while, but then it got slow and bloated and now I only ever use Chrom
Chrome - because of the easy sync (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
Safari! (Score:2)
Because it sucks the least for what I do. They've ALL become fugly, bloated messes that add crap and remove good features willy-nilly; made worse by an accelerated release schedule. At least Safari only gets worse once or twice a year.
I'm patiently waiting for the day (that has been promised for decades) when software will be completely modular and I can pick and choose what I want. Safari 5.0.5 was great, but the way it handles JavaScript is death on the current web.
Safari 6.1 would be mostly great if "dow
Re:Chrome but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Chrome but... (Score:4, Informative)
If you customize the toolbar you can just get rid of the dedicated search box. The address bar also handles searches. I stick with Firefox due to some of the plugins, but I've made it look more like chrome
Re: (Score:3)
First you tell us you want to get away from Chrome because of how Google collects a lot of data.
Then you say you would like the URL- and search-bar combined.
Clearly you don't know why they are not combined:
to prevent Google (most likely the searchengine of your choice) collecting lots of data.
Obviously when the URL- and search-bar are combined you can't prevent anything being searched on Google while you type.
Re: (Score:2)
There's an Omnibar extension for Firefox which you could install if you would like that.
I seem to remember reading a post by Mozilla (though I can't find it now) that stated privacy reasons for not doing the same thing in Firefox. In Chrome, everything you type (including pages from history or URLs) are sent to Google's servers, even if you didn't intend for that. I far prefer Firefox's awareness of user security, and I rather like that it allows you to scroll up and down to choose different search engines.
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> Somehow keeping the search box and the URL
> box separate seems backward.
Different strokes for different folks. I hate, hate, HATE a combined URL/search box. Safari held out pretty long but now they have it. Ugh. HATE it.
If I type a character wrong, I don't want to land at a search results page, I want my browser to show me an error message and LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE ALONE so I can change the one character that needs changing and get on with my day.
If I type "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit" it takes me
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I've never understood why people like the All-in-One. I much prefer the "classic" Firefox way (which you have to tinker in about:config to restore) where if I type e.g. "xkcd" in the address bar, it goes directly to http://www.xkcd.com./ [www.xkcd.com] If I want to search, I'll use the search bar, dammit! Now get off my lawn! :)
Granted, it took me a long time to find out that you can switch the selected search engine with Ctrl+Up/Down, but with that, Ctrl+K, and F6, I'm happy.
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To be fair, the only way someone can get to that clear-text is by logging into your user account, which requires a password (unless you've stupidly set your PC up to auto-login or not have a password). Or I suppose they could pull the hard drive and read that directly, but I don't know how Chrome actually stores the data on-disk so that might not work either. On Chromium/Linux/KDE, at least, chromium links to Kwallet and requires you to enter your Kwallet password to get access to that information, and yo
That's no less secure than bad encryption/encoding (Score:3)
Some pieces of software "encrypt" passwords with base64 or XOR and make them look garbled and that gives you false sense of security. But in reality these passwords can be decrypted in milliseconds by anyone.
--Coder
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To be fair, Firefox does it the same way unless you set a master password.
Last I heard, Pidgin also refused to encrypt user passwords on security through obscurity grounds. Not sure how I feel about that.
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome would have been a shoe-in just for speed and reliability, but Google's borg like insistence of capitalizing on every tidbit of data is starting to wear thin. They are starting to resemble Microsoft in many respects.
In my experience, Chrome has had decreasing stability in the past few months. Google is even joining with Microsoft against Mozilla, in adding DRM to the Web. "Don't be evil" has definitely gone out the window.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it's about joining Microsoft as much, they want to make it easy for, for example, Netflix to work on ChromeOS.
But DRM on the web is asking for problems though and the model is probably anti-open source.
bookmarks (Score:2)
I put Chrome b/c I use it for web dev work. I have 100s of tabs open at times and on my machine it's just too much for FF.
I'd *love* to use FF, if nothing else for the bookmarking system.
Chrome treats your bookmarks like it is a google search...just a huge barely specified pile. Chrome has folders w/ sub-folders but their manager is clumsy.
FF lets you use tags and you can make a folder that automatically includes all sites w/ a certain tag, just for one example.
also I agree that Google is starting to resemb
Re: (Score:2)
I run different versions for different tasks on different machines: stable, beta and nightly.
Re: (Score:3)
Bah, real nerds pick up the phone and shout bits into the microphone and then wait for the response!
Nope (Score:3)
Real nerds don't shout. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they mutter, other times they whisper, they often talk to themselves almost inaudibly. But, they don't shout.
Fledgling nerds sometimes shout, to the embarrassment of real nerds.
Re: (Score:3)
Real nerds use telnet to manually send http GET and POST requests, and then read the returned code in their terminal. Browsers are for wimps.
You should not use Telnet protocol to connect to HTTP protocol. Sure, it usually happens to work, but Telnet is not a synonym for "raw communication".
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Real nerds use HTTPS.
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Are you joking? netcat is a nice little building block that you can make other things out of. telnet is decidedly not.
Re: (Score:2)
As of now, Misrosoft's unholy abomination Internet Exploiter is cruising at 2% of voters in this poll. I wonder how many people of those currently 26 votes voted for it ironically, by mistake, or as a joke. If these others had been options, I suspect the number of people who voted for it, and who really DO actually use Internet Exploiter as their primary browser would be even lower than it is.
It's currently losing out to Lynx.
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A lot, if not most users only use it because they're stuck with it at work.. It's amusing how the user-agent stats swing significantly at weekends and evenings on some sites.
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We should develop a secret handshake ;-).
What's not to love: some pages don't work. E.g. I can't save slashdot accounts slashboxes, the save-button isn't visible. Mostly it's non-functional video. For this I have firefox as stopgap.
Re:LYNX RULES! (Score:5, Informative)
Links [jikos.cz] is better! So there, nyah! ;)
(But actually, I prefer W3M [sourceforge.net] to both.)
Oh, and kermit is what you were supposed to use to connect *to* that dialup ksh account. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
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All of the Chrome and none of the Google... gotta love it.
Ads? (Score:2)
Does Facebook have advertising? Really? My pesky addons don't let me see any of them! Maybe I need to do something about them.