I've been experimenting with browsers recently, and have spent most of today mucking about with a bunch. (My catalyst was this javascript virus going around, but I'm meant to try these things for a while now.)

I've had Opera for a while now, but I've never gotten around to really trying it out. It's a pretty good piece of software, really. The interface is a little clunky; by which I mean the buttons are large and (as of yet) I've found no way to trim them down. It's totally barebones though, which I like, actually. Machine font text at the bottom telling me how far along the document is, along with the download speed for the page, and how long it's been loading. It's tabbed, of course.

Then comes the twin Mozilla beasts. I had an awful problem with Firefox 0.9 for about a week, then I got frustrated and uninstalled it. I installed it again a few days ago to show Superopie, and somehow managed to fix it. The problem was this: the toolbars would inexplicably jiggle and gyrate. It drove me crazy. But that's fixed now. I like it quite a bit, actually. Looks clean. Nice buttons, nice tab look. You have to dig around in the options so the tabs will always show (it defaults to hiding the tabs if only one's open, and I want to see them all the time), but the options are there. Of course, the draw of Firefox is the extensions. Sarah Lane did a little feature on a bunch of nice widgets and doohickeys. There's a Googlebar, with more functionality than the IE Google toolbar. The buttons are over-large for my taste (I prefer small buttons, always), but there's a slick keyboard command to hide/show the entire bar, so that's fantastic (you should all know I love keyboard commands). It's Ctrl+F8, if you're gonna try it out. There's also a nice LiveJournal extension, called "Deepest Sender." I think it's an anagram for something, but whatever. It's handy. Now if only I could find a Blogger extension.

I also tried out Mozilla proper. Version 1.8, I believe. Personally, I hated the thing. I hated Netscape, and I think the Mozilla dinosaur is the appropriate mascot for the app. Jeez, do I hate Netscape. So if you want Mozilla apps, go with Firefox. Though I've heard some people are having terrible problems with it. None so far, for me.

Now if only I could find a keyboard command for opening new tabs in Firefox. Ctrl+N opens a new instance. Poo.