racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

I’ve been a loyal Google Chrome browser since it came out with the first public Beta. I’ve been using Chrome on all my Windows computers since. I like the simplicity, speed, and now the availability of plugins. I like the small footprint, and the fact that each window or tab is its own process. In short, it just works. I know there are limitations, but it seems that Chrome has started becoming more mature in many respects.

Recently, Google announced that Flash support is now built-in with the latest stable release. I guess this is necessary, because Google applications mostly work on Flash and dynamic HTML.

What browser are you using, and why? Are you one of those persons who can use just about any browser you find on a computer? Or do you need to use your preferred browser to be productive?

I’ve been using my Nokia E51′s browser extensively since I acquired the phone a few months back. It lets me check emails, post blog entries, and even read my feeds while mobile. I can do this both thru WiFi hotspots or even via 3G/GPRS. My old LG had a browser, too, but the phone was simply too, well, simple for my growing needs. I installed Opera Mini on the LG and it made a big difference in terms of functionality.

And so having grown quite bored of the same old Nokia browser I use everyday, I decided to install Opera Mini. The diminuitive browser is well-praised for its speed and ability to render pages nicely on small screens.

However, I do have issues with speed. I don’t know if it’s a limitation on the part of my phone, or the software itself. Frankly, I find that Nokia’s built-in browser is just faster in most cases. From startup, to loading pages, to the general responsiveness of the interface.

I guess this is how it is with built-in software vs. add-ons.

Am I alone here?

Safari has been my preferred browser of late. One of my only gripes is that it’s not like open source Firefox or Camino, which usually have updates every few weeks or so. Still, Safari seems to be a fast, solid, no-frills browser.

One thing I like about it is that its rendering engine seems to catch mis-coded XHTML quite nicely–meaning, it displays badly coded stuff badly! Another one is the clean RSS view I just access a site using feed:// (url here) and I get a no-frills content-only view of that blog or site (now some would argue against this, but I prefer this when I want to quickly check sites for updates).

Just recently, Apple announced that the public beta of Safari 3 is now available for download. And what do you know–it now runs on Windows!

It’s still on beta, though and I know there are a lot of bugs to be found (and fixed!). I even spot a few UI inconsistencies here and there (like saying OPTION-something as a shortcut, even though Windows keyboards don’t have an OPT key). But I’m pretty optimistic about it, though.

I’ve installed it on my Windows machine, and I can say Safari is pretty spiffy. It’s like software from a different world installed on a Windows-powered computer (much like how Windows users might initially find iTunes). I’ll be installing the beta on my Mac in a while. Hopefully that will resolve some small gripes I have with Safari 2.xx (like the inability to run Google Docs).