Can someone confirm or deny, I remember using IE and it was fast, like faster then Chrome and Firefox. I think this was around WinXP or Win7? I remember loading up large websites and comparing speeds with the other browsers.

Chrome looked better, sleeker with animations and tabs, but slightly slower. IE looked like ass, some sites were broken, and maybe some features weren't supported?

The IE = slowpoke memes never made sense to me because of this. Maybe it got slower later, Win7 or win10?

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day ago

IE was really bad for web compatibility in that it really did not properly support the specs.

Ignoring that, I’ve found any browser you don’t normally use is a lot snappier only because you don’t have any extensions installed

[–] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

opera was the fastest of the bunch.

[–] Vince@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I remember opera features were wild. At some point they cached websites on their servers to load them faster, they had a builtin torrent client, they automatically created mobile versions of pages, probably more I'm not remembering

[–] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There was also a built in webserver, email client, irc client. I was quite sad when they sold out and became yet another chrome clone. Vivadli carries on the spirit, but i've since switched to firefox purely because i dont want the web to be dominated by chromium.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

They’ll never live down (to me at least) that they tried to charge money for a web browser.

[–] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean... so did Netscape.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

TIL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator

[–] lime@feddit.nu 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

how many hours a day do you use a browser?

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

[–] lime@feddit.nu 0 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

i'd definitely pay for the development of something i use that much. unfortunately i can't donate directly to development of firefox, otherwise i would have.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

When the competitors are free and doing just as good a job?

Remember, we’re taking about the 90’s and Opera.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 1 points 5 hours ago

opera was so much more than just a browser. it's the closest thing to the old idea of "internet suites" that netscape and later mozilla tried to create, that we ever got.

[–] ignotum@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I remember trying to create websites with some fancy features that would work on all the major browsers. Every time i looked up some browser functionality it would basically say "supported by all major browsers except IE", like every goddamn time

IE was waaay behind in functionality, but yeah it wasn't particularly slow from what i can recall