Posts tagged ‘avant’
Google Chrome Out of Beta
But first of all, that means Avant and Orca have updated versions. Chrome is here. All three are very fast. Chrome being out of beta means that they quit being ridiculed by the industry, while having a browser that offers significant conveniences like most-visited pages being “home”. Rendering on the old version of Avant was less than perfect. Orca was lightning-fast. All offer incognito modes; Orca lets you open the windows last open. All are worthwhile checking out. The security of Mozilla Firefox (such as it is) appeals to me. So in its day did its predecessor Netscape. Chrome is likely to have more money put behind it than any other browser except IE and Apple’s Safari, with the latter being as yet probably unsafe for PC users. The interface between Windows and OS X Leopard has been less than smooth from what I’ve seeing as far as utilities being imported. And no, I think any trojans employed between the two are for personal rather than business use.
–Glenn
P.S. Revising the post, the new release of Chrome seems flawless. There’s another browser on the market that beats it for speed, but it’s not something I’m familiar with at this point.
Avant, an Update
As far as I can tell, don’t use Avant with Vista on the current update. On two different downloads and installs (I haven’t yet gone to uninstalling, cleaning, and re-installing; I intend to, but I am actually writing what I’ve been thinking and studying about for forty years, and it just comes first–in many respects: the PC [that was interesting: Caps Lock with Firefox on this account (*.post-new.php)…tries to navigate away from the bloody page] was merely a thought in an SF-writer’s mind (Robert, mainly) and in fact the computer was on the level of “That’s really neat; now what do we do with it?”–and I can’t see doing most of it on a computer. Why? computers crash and go down)…it crashes (sometimes the computer too) and goes down. Make that simpler. Right now Avant looks unusuable. The display problem is fixed pretty well, although print sizing is unreliable, for instance. Looking up some bookmarks is slower than [JC, who did that to the caps key??] IE at its worst.
Enough. I’ll try another browser or something and see if the Caps key works. But don’t use Avant. Orca seems to work perfectly now, however. Then again, I haven’t loaded the absolute latest update as in installing it.
–Glenn
grrrrr
ZDNet, take on Firefox vs. IE
The headline pretty much covers it. This is one current article, again. Over the years, at least since Netscape’s demise, there has been unceasing coverage of some, of any, competitor to Internet Explorer. I’ve never really heard of a competitor for the Apple/Mac market, though admittedly I’ve also never followed it closely.
Avant has amazed me since the first try, and continues to rather surprise me. It surely didn’t on first acquaintance (I seem to remember it being touted as the production of a college student or two in their spare time, with no interest at all in sales, documentation or anything else). This is version 11 and I couldn’t easily be more pleased.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Firefox, just as I liked Mozilla. The fact that Firefox requires Thunderbird for e-mail capabilities doesn’t particularly please me. The idea of a web-based OS for everything related to the internet continues to intrigue me. It seems there are a lot of possibilities there for making badware harder to to use. Weed out the executables somewhere along the way…but then there are Power Point addicts. And the like. For me Active-X and the like are generally things that slow down site response.
I like IE 8 a lot better than anything since something like 5 or 6, although rendering is in fact back to hit-or-miss. WordPress’ response was ‘it’s a beta and not supported’ which is quite reasonable. The only current free browser I’ve seen that has anything in particular to commend and recommend it is Avant. The only one to definitely avoid (if you’re running Windows) is Safari.
Whatever.
–Glenn
Avant Browser, After Some Experience
It would seem to be my new browser. There are enough features that an exhaustive list would be <ahem> exhausting. Don’t disable the tooltips on startup. I am only recommending this for Windows; I intend to go a couple of other places today and freely advertise it. Its home page is here. Note that I don’t necessarily recommend this for any Apple product and that I’ve hinted that before in a hundred-word post. Read any applicable warnings before trying it with a Mac. Please. Pretty Please.
–Glenn
Avant Browser, 1 Entry
“WYSIWYG”*–and by the bye, for all of those newbie developers, that acronym comes from…Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, circa approximately 1972. As in this entry is being made from Avant, and as far as I know WordPress has made no attempt to claim they support this browser. There looks to be around 12 meg difference in RAM footprint between IE and Avant (it uses less memory so you get better response). I opted as usual for a graphics card instead of going with the built-in processor–I’d bet I could run this browser with a gig of memory (which I have) and no graphics card.
–Glenn
*What You See Is What You Get–and Bob Heinlein was talking about social institutions at the time.
Avant Browser
Many people know there are basically ‘the big three’ in browsers, or rather companies producing them; Microsoft, AOL, and Apple; IE, Netscape->Mozilla->Mozilla Firefox and Safari. The first two are safe for Windows users to some extent, while Safari isn’t simply because of incompatibility issues between the Apple and Windows OS protocols. Firefox is arguably the safest browser; currently it can certainly contend to be the speediest Windows app for the purpose. Internet Explorer is simply the most-used and therefore most-attacked of all browsers (it’s got something like 87% of the market as I recall, with Firefox taking up about 8% of what’s left; Opera, while capturing the hearts of a few users over the years, isn’t compatible enough and isn’t part of any OEM package, even for an ISP). [OEM is one of the most misused acronyms. It’s supposed to mean “Original Equipment Manufacture” and so started with actual hardware and now can be extended to software/hardware interfaces according to industry usage.]
Anyway, Avant is back. It’s featured in a ZDNet read. I tried it. I could swear first version was dialup, which would make it truly ancient. It had real crash problems in the days of Windows 98, but then so did Windows 98. I’m going to be trying it on and off for a while.
I still use Firefox, incidentally, although I have main browser and my e-mail with Windows default (sigh). Firefox doesn’t have an e-mail client, and I like reading my mail off my PC not the web (even through an IMAP configuration I’m more comfortable). That is one problem; Gmail won’t support it. It finally does support Thunderbird (Firefox’s mated e-mail client). My main browser is IE8 on an IE7 emulation because of this site (IE 8 is still a beta).
So I’ll be using Avant on and off. It runs as a search window that’s just up to start with, now. The ‘greenprint’ facility that I was talking about I have tried and it essentially works as advertised. It takes the setup print job, gives you a page preview–and does things like allow you to take out the pictures and ads you could do without.
Right now I’m running with less than a gig of RAM, so I want to do a soft boot and see what happens. This would be a result of the Avant browser as far as I can see. I haven’t checked out defaults. I also for that matter haven’t checked out Firefox 3.0 since it was released from beta (I’ve been running it for about 45 days and had an incompatibility problem with links and Avanquest System Suite).
–Glenn
oregonnerd: differing views 