Alternative programs...

[joroho]

[Moderators, if I'm too far off topic please forgive me and remove this post]

Gang, I'm not a professional graphics designer but it seems to me that Xara would not be considered the "mainstream" for the industry -- more like an alternative.

I mention this because I tried an "alternative" browser for the first time last night: Opera 5.12. I was blown away! Forget Explorer and Navigator, I love Opera. To boot, I also use an "alternative" e-mail client: Pegasus.

I'm curious if I stand alone in my desire to break away from using what everybody else uses simply because everybody else uses it. (?)

What say y'all? What browser and e-mail client do you use?

.joroho.

[joroho]

[Moderators, if I'm too far off topic please forgive me and remove this post]

Gang, I'm not a professional graphics designer but it seems to me that Xara would not be considered the "mainstream" for the industry -- more like an alternative.

I mention this because I tried an "alternative" browser for the first time last night: Opera 5.12. I was blown away! Forget Explorer and Navigator, I love Opera. To boot, I also use an "alternative" e-mail client: Pegasus.

I'm curious if I stand alone in my desire to break away from using what everybody else uses simply because everybody else uses it. (?)

What say y'all? What browser and e-mail client do you use?

.joroho.

[raffon]

I use Pegasus also, have for about 6 years 'cause it supported Novell MHS mail way back when. haven't tried Opera.

Ich bin ein New Yorker

[Peter Clifton]

Joroho

Pegasus for email

Gravity 2.5 for newsgroups

IE 5.5 for browsing, but with all Java scripting, VBS and Active X and Java turned off for general Internet Browsing. If I find a site that simply must have any of these features then I add it to the Trusted website section of IE (Having first changed the default security model for trusted sites from low to medium).

Peter

[juergen]

that beat of lot of their competitors..

Pegasus or Calypso for e-mail. Calypso is freeware too, no nags, no ads
(www.calypsoemail.com)
filzip (www.filzip.de)
irfanview (www.irfanview.com)
openoffice (www.openoffice.org)
www.sysinternals.com (nice utilities)

juergen

[ashwinjain]

I use opera, I use xara. But I use them because I like the way they satisfy my needs. Not just because I want to break free or something

[ajreed]

Use Pegasus!

Tried Word - use Impression Style.

Use Artworks - became Xara dependant.

Use IE5.5 simply cos it works (well enough for me anyway). Use NS4.7 just for checking web designs but am not impressed with its comprehensiveness. Fails to do too much, although I hear v6 is alot better. NS is faster (locally anyway) than IE but its so often the web thats slow, that browser speed is seldom an issue.

On the issue of 'breaking away' I fully understand how you feel. 2 feet to the left of me is an Acorn A7000 which is my main workhorse for WP and other serious issues. Its very reliable, very very reliable. Reboots only at power up once a day, whereas PC.....

Joined the PC clan mainly for the net, compatability and loads of free stuff, and as such regard my PC as my recreation machine (especially since Xara installed!).

It seems there are some definite groups out there. PC users who do because they know no better. PC users cos they like a challenge and like to work out how to bend the rules to get it to do what they want. PC users who *have* to use it for work whatever. Then there are Mac users for whom I have always had respect, albeit never having tried any of their later systems. They plough on in the face of massive PC competition but good luck to them.

So yes, some of us might be Xara users for the hell of it, but I suspect there are a goodly number of us who are Xara users cos we know something good when we see it, and if the rest of the worldly community haven't latched on yet - thats very much their loss. Just so long as there remain enough of us to pay the wages at Xara Ltd then our little community will continue to survive and hopefully thrive!

Alan

[nwilkinson]

I work for a browser company (in the embedded systems market place), and I use IE on the desktop: it's reliable (-enough), it supports the standards far better than any of the others, it's powerful, it's standard.

OPera is okay, and it's very quick, but it has its quirks. Also, it is so pedantic sometimes that sites fail to display properly. Also, DTHML menus often won't display, leaving you stuck at the front page of the site.

NN4.7 is good for checking HTML for older browsers, but its table layout is rubbish, it only supports half the standards, and it is not as nice to use as IE (opinion, that last one).

Mozilla/NN6 is quite good. However, it still doesn't support enough of the standards, it is slooooowwww, it requires bucket loads of RAM, etc. It's definitely an improvement on 4.7, but IE is still better.

I use IE6 at home, IE5 at work. Oh, and I also spend a lot of time using our own in-house browser, but it's not a desktop browser, so there's no saving downloads and the like.

As for news: again, MS are pretty good. I personally like Outlook Express because it does what it says it does with a minimum of fuss. Some people go on and on about Pegasus and Free Agent, but I couldn't get on with them -- clumsy layouts and indecipherable icons. MS have a huge UI design dept, and they are much better at making "useable" products, even where the feature set is limited compared to the competition.

You asked, we told ya.

Nick Wilkinson.
IsoCalc.com

[traceyp]

I tried Opera 5.12 several months ago and persisted with it for a long time and really tried to get it working properly. I failed! I even tried getting help from the Newsgroups but it was no good, everything failed. Not even the techies in Norway were able to help!!! The problem??? Javascript!!!

There are many features about Opera that are very good and quite appealing but the implimentation of Javascript is appalling to my way of thinking. I spend quite a bit of time on the internet and as a result visit a lot of sites whose pages include Javascript and the vast majority of these pages threw up errors in Opera. In Netscape 4.7 and IE5/5.5, there was no problem. Not even the Opera techies were able to help, all they could say was that their implimentation of Javascript was the only correct one - a rather conceited attitude to my mind when their implimentation of Javascript doesn't work. This attitude is fine if everyone was to write code to the standard they have implimented - but they don't. After all, not every coder is a professional so code WILL have bugs and even code that doesn't have bugs seemed to throw up errors. I fully believe that both NS and MS have built in a tolerance which ignores any incorrect code it finds but Opera? no way, that throws up errors. Anything that isn't absolutely 100% right appears to be thrown out.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to use Opera but I MUST have a system where Javascript works. I don't want to have to keep changing configs just so I can do something you can do with NS and IE as a matter of routine. I'm sure that if you don't need Javascript then Opera will be fine. Currently though I'll stick to IE5.5, NOT because I'm an MS lover (can't stand 'em personally) but because it works and appears to be fairly robust. If IE wasn't around I'd use NS but certainly NOT Opera for the reasons above.

Tracey

[stlewis]

I agree with TraceyP on Opera - it seems willful in several places.
I use IE5.5 as my standard browser - again it works. And Outlook 2000 - I have an Access database as my main store of data eg on Contacts but have scripts to pump data into Outlook - which in turn synchs with my beloved Visor.
For me the hassles in changing tools are just too great, and I have been using them long enough to work round the bad bits.

www.thelondonhouse.co.uk