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Looking for suggestions on a replacement for Internet Explorer
jothki
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Up until recently, I've been using Internet Explorer and have been completely satisfied with it. However, since it's being depreciated in favor of Edge, I figure that I should look into a replacement for it. This concern has been accelerated by the appearance of some sort of data corruption that is preventing my normal account from downloading things through IE, which doesn't appear to be fixable without flat out recreating my account, which I want to avoid if I can.
Since I actually like Internet Explorer, which alternative browser would provide the most similar experience?
Since I actually like Internet Explorer, which alternative browser would provide the most similar experience?
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For reals though, Firefox or Chrome would be your best options. What version of IE have you been using up until now?
They all look/work just about the same way these days, some slight changes but nothing that you wouldn't get used to in a few days.
And chrome/Firefox have a ton of add-ons that I'm sure could make the experience closer to IE if you really really wanted that.
So um, just pick one and try it out.
Just IE11.
So none of them have any sort of "features" that I'll grow to loathe, then?
I'll probably get Firefox, thanks for the help.
Nothing we can say will help you get over the "blerg, it's new and I don't like it" hump. You have to do that yourself.
What we can tell you, however, is that if you want a standards-compliant browser that has the ability to be customized to your liking via plugins and themes, you're going to have to do away with IE.
Failing that, I might have to look into Opera instead.
I still don't like some of the design decisions, but it's at least workable now.
You may just have to get used to it if you don't like the heme/look in FireFox. It's mostly there for legacy now.
Edit: Tabs on bottom, background color extended to menu bar. Excellent.
Holy necropost, J. Get back in your Timberwolf!
Chrome suffers from the disadvantage of resembling Chrome, though. Firefox did as well out of the box, but I was able to fix that with an addon that lets you restore a bunch of stuff that was in earlier versions. If Chrome has something similar that can fix the interface, that would be helpful to know.
I looked at some screenshots of internet explorer, it looks almost the same as chrome in some cases except the tabs are below the address bar.
in IE you can return all of the legacy toolbars if you want. Personally I've long moved past them. Hated it at first, in any app, like Office 2007 when I first tried it, but man, a few years later, and I try to use an app that has the old style file-edit-view style toolbars and they just feel so inefficient it's kind of hilarious.
Though now that I look back at it, so is Internet Explorer's. Though that's more a fault of modern Internet Explorer too. I guess I've already become so used to what Firefox lets me do that I've blanked out on what things used to be like. Having toolbars with some heft to them just feels so nice after having to deal with everything crammed together at the top.
Though I'd probably still be hating Firefox if I hadn't found the Classic Theme Restorer addon. The newer versions of Firefox make some GUI design decisions that get in the way of what I want my browser to look like, but the addon adds a bunch of customization features that fix that.
If you like pre-FF29 Firefox: https://www.palemoon.org/ currently supports Windows and Linux with a beta version for Mac.
Maybe the bookmarks button, but I bet there is an extension for that OR you can have the bookmarks bar always-on in Chrome anyway.
Other than the File/Edit menu, my Chrome is exactly the same.
Me, I use that stuff.
It's mostly just a bunch of little things, like a full titlebar, a little minimally functional icon at the upper left instead of a clickable menu, and the icons and tabs shuffled around a bit. Everything where I want it, rather than being shoved off to the side in a corner menu.
I'm trying to think of a piece of software I've used in the last several years that still has them and aside Photoshop and lightroom I'm coming up blank.
Though when I opened up Paint for the first time in years in order to paste and save that screenshot...ugh. Now that has to be the worst design that I've ever seen. It's like they ran down through a checklist of every single modern Windows UI element, and made sure that all of them were implemented somehow.
Edit: I went and poked around in Windows Explorer for a bit, and was surprised to find that there isn't an in-program options menu. It still exists, but for some reason it's shuffled off to the control panel. I can see why that makes sense to put it there since it'd likely affect desktop icons as well, but why isn't there a link to it inside Windows Explorer itself?
Edit again: The moderniest thing that I use is probably Matlab, but even then I find the ribbon to just get in the way of things that I could do more easily if it would let me have menus.
Performance is pretty neck-and-neck in most places. Standards support is also back and forth between them. I've seen sites that break on Firefox, but it's usually the site that was doing something screwy, not Firefox.
Pretty sure Chrome passes way more web compliance tests than firefox
I'd be interested in seeing which tests Firefox has trouble with. Do you have any links?
Edit: I've used this site in the past. Doesn't look like either one has a huge lead?
Here's the very first link I pulled out of Google. It's from back in April so the results are going to be unkind to Microsoft Edge (which was still named Project Spartan at the time), and there's certainly been improvements in most if not all of the browsers in the past few months, but it shows Chrome having a definite lead on HTML5 compliance.
Note that, unless there's majority browser support for any given HTML5 feature, supporting said feature is mostly academic because it'd be a very bad choice as a web designer to build a feature that only a small percentage of your users could take advantage of.
The real web standard is whatever browser works the least well between Chrome, Edge, IE and FF.
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