Cought in Browser Limbo

I’ll come back to the pros and cons of working in a text-only web-browser a bit later, but let me first vent a little frustration over why I’m in this situation to begin with.

Camino and the gecko that died

Usually, my browser of choice is Camino. Simply put becuase it provides the best balance between style, CPU-hunger, function-set and speed.

The trouble began when I was trying to “be on the cutting edge”, as it so fittingly said on the development pages for the Camino-project, and download a nightly build.

The problem with cutting edges is that sometimes you end up cutting yourself in the finger. And so I did. And of course I didn’t back up my old version of Camino. Backups is for n00bs.

So now I’m stuck with a Camino-browser that won’t show Flash-content. Which is kind of a bad bad thing. (think YouTube, Flickr’s Organizr et cetera). And what’s even worse is that however much I upgrade or degrade Camino, it still won’t work. I have cleaned it off my system, and reinstalled both Camino and Flash several times. Nothing works.

And the same goes for all Gecko-based browsers. (Like Firefox)

Safari

Well, I hear you ask, why not just use Safari, then? Take pride in your machood, I hear you say. Well. I did. I have used Safari for some weeks now in fact. But I honestly cannot stand the way Safari suddenly decides it wants to use ALL my RAM-power! It just isn’t right that my web broser should demand 800MB Ram! Heck, InDesign doesn’t need that much power!

Sorry Steven. You know I love everything you ever stood for, but you have got to make a less demanding browser!

Shiira

So I tried to live with Shiira. But Shiira is just too much of a Diva for me. She is pretty, she knows her stuff and she amazes in most anything she does. But she constantly gets upset over nothing.

Open a new tab - Crash! Close a tab - Boom! Search - Death and destruction! Sorry. I need to be able to do those things. And if you can’t let me do it, then it doesn’t matter how pretty you are.

The others

So I tried desperately to live with Opera. It’s Norwegian, and so am I, so I figured it might work out. But let’s face it. Opera is too bloated, slow and ugly I wouldn’t use it if it came from frickin’ Wonderland...

Then there is iCab. You know.. I’m all for function over style, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I love the built-in validator, but I in equal amounts hate the way it takes URIs from my history, and replace the one I’m actually trying to reach.

Seamonkey crashed within a minute of me starting it. That’s a no-starter. SunriseBrowser seems like a good idea, and I love the whole opensource-thing... But it just seems sooo far from finished that it’s just unusable...

Heck, I even tried Netscape... But then I figured that one should probably be allowed to rest in peace.

Lynx

Which leaves me with Lynx. I’ll admit - I first downloaded Lynx as just another browser to test my sites in. But in fact, it is a complete browser, and it has some interesting aspects to it.

Of course, Flickr and YouTube looses all meaning in a text-only browser. But in a way, the Internet actually gains a lot of meaning.

During the last few days of using Lynx I have learned a lot about site structure and styling, that I guess I already knew, but didn’t really concider.

And what surprised me most, I guess, with Lynx is the user-friendlyness. I remember reading a blog-post once, that concluded that noone could ever use Lynx as their main browser. At the time I agreed with the author. But after doing so for the last couple of days, I am fully convinced that you could.

I still miss Camino, and I guess I’ll be going back to a visual browser soon (any suggestions?) but for now, I really enjoy the life in Web 0.9.