Alternative to IE?

[tuna]

Arch i like them because everythings findable in one place...a list of each page across the top so when i want to go look at something i don't have to go thru 7 differnt IE's to find what i'm looking for.
You can also open the one browser and have all the tabs open up preset.
I use crazybrowser and currently trying IE2


Another little tool if you like keeping an eye on Gold/Silver prices
is this, which puts the price down on your taskbar & auto updates itself...
http://kcast.kitco.com/

 

[PennyPenny]

Quote from ArchAngel:

Question for those using a tab-enabled browser -

Why do you find it such an advantage? Is it mostly a factor of not having a large Windows desktop available?

I've got a lot of desktop space, so I just open multiple IE windows. But if I don't want to take up much space, I can just stack the multiple windows on top of each other and use the Windows task bar (or Alt-Tab) to switch between them.

Curious what any of your specific experiences are that makes it worth changing browsers to get tab-enabling. Thanks.

Most people like it mostly due to efficient use of deskspace and memory usage. Also it is faster to navigate through different pages.

Right now I have 42 different sites open on my PC through MyIE2. It is taking only 96MB of memory. I tried to open similar number pages through IE. Every instance of IE is taking between 24-33MB. So, opening up 42 pages would requite around 1,197 MB of memory. That's about 12 times more memory usage than using MyIE2's tabbed browsing. Actually after opening around 15 pages with IE6 my PC just choked to crawling. There is no way I could open up 42 instances of IE and still could browse through them in a sane way. Moreover, there is only that much of space on your task bar to accommodate every instance of IE and other programs. Using Alt+Tab to browse through them would be a nightmare.

@LongShot, I agree with you, IE is not as bas as somebody want us to believe. Mozilla/firebird has some nice features but was not as stable for my likings. Fact is, I always keep around 30-60 websites open through MyIE2 all day long and it has hardly crashed upon me. But, my experience with Mozilla/Firebird/IE was not that good in terms of stability. I think after using MyIE2 I can never go back to using plain vanilla IE anymore

 

[ArchAngel]

Quote from PennyPenny:
Right now I have 42 different sites open on my PC through MyIE2. It is taking only 96MB of memory. I tried to open similar number pages through IE. Every instance of IE is taking between 24-33MB. So, opening up 42 pages would requite around 1,197 MB of memory. That's about 12 times more memory usage than using MyIE2's tabbed browsing. Actually after opening around 15 pages with IE6 my PC just choked to crawling. There is no way I could open up 42 instances of IE and still could browse through them in a sane way.

Sounds like you must be actually launching multiple instances of the IE process (i.e., clicking the internet explorer icon on the desktop or quick access icon bar) instead of just opening new IE windows (via shift-clicking on a URL or using Ctrl-N or the File->New->Window menu option to create a new browser window).

If you do it the intended way, you won't create a new physical instance of the IE process each time and thus will use enormously less memory.

As a quick test, I just opened 15 IE windows (as I described above - NOT launching 15 different IE process instances) and the single IE process only consumed about 24 MB.

Seperately - your comment about switching sites using tabs being easier than the buttons on the task bar could be right on, at least if you actually need to have 42 browser windows open at the same time - although I can't imagine ever needing to do that myself.

Thanks.

 

[PennyPenny]

Quote from ArchAngel:

Sounds like you must be actually launching multiple instances of the IE process (i.e., clicking the internet explorer icon on the desktop or quick access icon bar) instead of just opening new IE windows (via shift-clicking on a URL or using Ctrl-N or the File->New->Window menu option to create a new browser window).

If you do it the intended way, you won't create a new physical instance of the IE process each time and thus will use enormously less memory.

As a quick test, I just opened 15 IE windows (as I described above - NOT launching 15 different IE process instances) and the single IE process only consumed about 24 MB.

separately - your comment about switching sites using tabs being easier than the buttons on the task bar could be right on, at least if you actually need to have 42 browser windows open at the same time - although I can't imagine ever needing to do that myself.

Thanks.

You're right. I almost forgot that I could reuse single instance of IE and open up new pages. Guess what? .... It's been long time that I didn't touch IE

So, I did another test with 15 similar webpages opened with IE6 using Ctrl+N and again using MyIE2. MyIE2 took about 41MB whereas IE6 took about 106MB memory (about 2.5x more memory). This might not be solely due to tabbed browsing though. Part of it could be IE6's inefficiency in rendering webpages. Actually I was trying to open up 50 different pages to do the test. But after opening up 36th page IE6 just crashed. So, I had to be satisfied with only 15 pages test after the reboot. Not to mention that opening up every new page in IE6 (using Ctrl+N) took about several times longer than just opening another tab in MyIE2. Switching through them by clicking on taskbar took thrice as much time than flipping through tabbed browsers.

I always like to keep all my needed pages open for my ready reference. Every morning I start with reading news (technical, general, financial about 15-16 of them), couple of discussion board (audio, video, music, technologies, sports), investment related sites (Yahoo, discussion boards, quotes etc). And I open up all these sites with a single click. It takes me less than 50 seconds to completely load around 40 sites in one shot. I would be surprised if I could do that using IE6 in less than 5 minutes and without crashing.

But if you don't need to open up that many sites, then you can get away with using IE. But hey, don't we always say - it's never enough?