Since 4.5, Netscape has done two things which I liked a lot. The first they did was that rather than trying to beat the competition with "more", they've stayed with basically what they had and tried to make it "better". The second thing is that they've gone open source. The result is a leaner, cleaner browser. I think this is a far better paradigm than the typical, "more is better" approach, which leads to more features, but more bugs and problems. But, why is still seem more buggy? My uninformed, unsubstantiated opinion is that since 4.5, people have begun to tinker with the engine itself; something Netscape didn't do prior. That's why I think the older browsers seemed more reliable.
Internet Explorer 5 is still clinging on to the "more is better" approach. Though proprietary, it's hard deny Microsoft's vast amount of resources available at their disposal.
Despite advances in both fronts, the truth is that both browsers are still buggy in their own ways. I used Netscape exclusively, while my wife is still using IE5 exclusively. And both of us were still crashing roughly once a day.
I got so fed up with the crashes, I've decided to try something radical. Typically, I like to have anywhere from 3 to 8 windows open. I may download in one, read forums on another, and download yet another page on the third for example. Don't always care for frills or graphics, I want them to load up as fast as possible. Most importantly, I am sick and tired of crashes. My user profile just happened to fit
Opera perfectly. And that's what I'm using right now, Opera 3.60. I've only been using it for the past week or so. So far, I am happy to say that I have YET to experience a single crash at home, despite the increased demands I've placed on this browser. The ONLY time I've ever experienced a crash was when I ran it from a lab and tried to load ONE Geocities site. Forgot which. But I am inclined to think that this is an isolated incident since I wasn't doing anything else but loading that one site. And this occured in the computer lab, where the computer wasn't mine. Still, it didn't crash my windows though. I just re-ran Opera and picked up where I left off!
There's another reason why I am heavily focused on Opera. Through their program called "Project Magic", they've already ported a beta version over to
BeOS. Now, this is way off the beaten track, but can you imagine the kind of potential the combination of BeOS and Opera has?!? Both are designed from the ground up to be, among other things, rock solidly dependable. In my limited experience so far, Opera has proven to be more crash-resistant in Windows than both IE5 and Netscape combined. But the BeOS version is still Beta, so I don't recommend even trying it yet.
Anyway, give Opera a try. Their browser is smaller than a floppy disk to download and it's a free 30-day evaluation. I don't think their latest version will disappoint you. If you like it and really want to get exotic, try to get BeOS running on the side and wait for BeOpera to release. In fact, E-mail Opera and encourage them to get moving. No browsers are crash-proof. But BeOS and Opera? I've always wanted to see what's it like to drive a Humvee and a Ferrari at the same time.
[This message has been edited by SB (edited October 27, 1999).]
