If you are like me you may think that the latest version of some browsers out there, far from being bigger and better have mastered the bigger bit at the expense of the better. Firefox is a case in point. While undoubtedly one of the better browsers out in the wild, its been getting larger and larger with each generation; ever more memory hungry and prone to problems. The fastest, most stable version of Firefox was arguably the last release of version 1.5. I installed it earlier today for an experiment and while not as pretty as its younger sibling, it is fast and it is small at around 5mb compared to 7mb for the latest incarnation. It was also the only version of the fox that I could reliably install the much used Freecycle addon. The only snag to this is that all the information on 1.5 suggests that its open to exploitation, so the choice is have the addon and be unsafe or play it safe and do without.
But all the above made me wonder if there were other cut down browsers out there that could be installing in their more venerable forms. Older versions of the Opera browser seem pretty much the same as their younger brother and the newer editions do seem to have more features and feel more up to date.
Running a fast lightweight Firefox-like browser means moving to the Seamonkey platform. Like the fox, this is based on the Netscape Navigator platform and for I tried it earlier today and it does indeed zip along speedily. You can install it with Firefox and they do seem to play nice together.
People who live on social networks should check out Flock which is Firefox customised for Facebook, Myspace, Gmail and the like.
There is no lightweight, older faster version of Internet Explorer, running earlier versions on a Windows XP/Vista platform is asking for trouble! IE is the single most targeted browser on the net, so while it may not sit well, if you have IE the best option is to keep it up to date no matter what.
Versions after IE 7 are considered safe and its worth bearing in mind that if you are running Windows 2000 you are running at best IE6 which is regarded as unsafe. Probably best to download Firefox, Opera or even Seamonkey pretty quickly unless you fancy contributing to the infected computer universe.
IE 8 is new and some people have been reluctant to upgrade for compatibility reasons. Its not much fun to find you suddenly cannot access your bank details, or credit card or some other secure site. With that in mind, its always worth having at least one other browser on your machine and again, the way forward here is Firefox. A copy of Firefox 3 sitting on your machine can be deployed with IE and a website decide they have never heard of one another.
For people who automatically assume that anything from Microsoft was even badly made or impossibly resource hungry (and I confess to being one of them during the early days of Vista) its worth noting that the old firm seems to be getting back on form. Windows 7 is getting a lot of positive reviews and Internet Explorer 8 is looking good with reports that it will toddle along happily on an XP rig with 512mb of RAM under the hood.
Its not really advisible to have the older browsers on your machine, upddates negate possible exploits and while they make the browser slower from time to time, slower is better than compromised with all the expense or hassle of the solution. My advice would be to have Firefox and possibly Seamonkey on tap to go with IE8. You can't really retro-load your browser, but with a couple of other browsers installed you can cover all eventualities.
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