Browsers: A Personal History

So I've [0]previously discussed different text browsers I've used.
Going from that, I actually wanted to discuss a lot of the Internet
browsers I've used, from my first web experiences to my latest.

1. Netscape Navigator: I'll tentatively say my first foray into the
Internet world was back in 1997 in a computer lab at my elementary
school. We learned how to connect (sort of) to the Internet and load a
web page. This was recent enough for images to take a long time to
download (doubtless a product of a lab sharing probably a dial-up
connection) but recent enough that most pages had images on them. The
table layout era (which was awful, we just didn't know it at the
time). As a young child, the intense slog of loading pages and lack
(at least at school) of fun stuff to do meant I really wasn't
interested in the Web. I was also on Macs at the time, another gaming
killjoy at the time. Oregon Trail and shareware were it, while I
wanted Star Wars. It still had that really cool lighthouse animation
that you got to look at while pages took minutes to load. :D

2. Internet Explorer (XP): At least I think it was IE. It's just as
likely I was still using Netsape Communicator/Navigator still,
exclusivly. Not much to say. It's about as bland a browser as there
was.

3. Firefox (2004): Tabs. I loved them. Security. I loved it. Add-ons:
love/hate because installing them was a pain. I really started getting
into View Source and other tech geek stuff. I came to really dislike
it, probably upsetting to FOSSers reading this: I just never saw buggy
open-source as an advantage over stable closed-source: see below.

4. Opera 8 (2004-2005): The truth: Mozilla stole tabs from Opera.
Opera was still free with very unintrusive ads. And, oh, boy, it had
"add-ons" built in. Custom CSS, custom JS, turn on/off images, custom
buttons, User Agent switcher, custom search, etc. It was the best and
pioneered so many browser features. Most of the modern web browser
options, IMO, are ripped from the Presto-engine Opera browser. I
continued using it until they bowed out and went Chromium-based.

4a. Maxthon (mid-20 00s): An IE skin that didn't disclose that. I
dumped it after a couple weeks.

4b. Lynx 2.8.6 (2008-ish): Fastest and oldest web browser by a mile.
My first baby-step into the CLI world.

5. Chrome (2008? 2009?): Fast. Simple. Not very well tooled, but speed
was king. It was #2 in terms of my browser use for a while.

6. IE7+ (mid-late 20 00s): Tabbed IE. Almost guaranteed compatibility.
MS still owned the browser share by 100 miles. Better security. A lot
less sites were doing the browser racism "best viewed in" practice.
Having had a Surface 2 RT, IE11 was the only legitimate browser, and
honestly it wasn't bad. Compatible with most everything and
astoundingly had the best pop-up blocker I'd ever seen. With strict
settings, NOTHING would pop up unless you wanted it to. Firefox (and
everyone else's) pilfering of Opera features without so much as a
single line of credit had me using it over Firefox, a plagiarist that
was far too popular, bloated, and slow to be be usable for me.

6a. MS Edge (2015): Edge is not a bad browser, or at least it wasn't
at its inception. OneNote integration, very fast rendering, good
battery life (helped out by being the Windows 10 default), and good
extension support in a Microsoft browser. Thanks to the vastly
exploited holes in IE6, MS never had a browser that wasn't ridiculed
since. An unpopular opinion, but if you have a budget Windows machine
with a budget processor, Edge isn't a bad way to go. If you have a
computer worth being useful, Vivaldi and others offer more
functionality. I think this was the start of some major browser
warring between Google and MS, as Bing pushes Edge HARD in inline
popups and Google pushes even harder for Chrome if they detect you
using the competition's browser. It's honestly pathetic. Edge also
loses points because even Windows 10 will say "Are you sure you don't
want to use Edge by default? It's rly gud, I swear." Google's
shenanigans with coding Youtube to break in Edge was a real killer.
Google is evil. I still use Edge with Adblock Plus on my HTPC stick.
MS is less evil.

7. Vivaldi (2016-ish): There is a God. Opera Presto, a product that no
longer could handle the increasingly complex web with speed and
efficiency, had been reborn. Some of the customizability (panels!)
from Opera Presto was back. Not all, but more than everyone else.
Chrome Add-on store. It was what I had been waiting for for years
after Opera gave up. Ironically, it's also Chromium-based. But I
don't care about the codebase as much as the functionality. Still
buggy, still issues with things like Netflix playing protected
content, but overall pretty clean and the devs knew what I wanted.
It's still my go-to GUI browser (and the only one installed on my *nix
machines).

8. Links2 (2017): CLI and GUI interface? Yes, please. I spent a lot of
time tinkering. The best was framebuffer images inline. I had learned
how to use lynx.cfg to delegate image-viewing to other programs, but
it still roughly takes you out of the experience just to view a single
image. Links2 -g doesn't require that. Lots of customizability outside
of font, which was a bummer, but some pages that didn't like Lynx
worked great in Links2. Form submission menu items also were a really
great addition (because some web devs think "Enter" should be the only
way to submit things /facepalm).

8a. W3m (2017): Around the same time of looking for alternative CLI
browsers, I came across w3m. I had seen it briefly while in college,
but its navigation method is too weird, and this is coming from a guy
who tries to use vim keybindings everywhere. Ultimately too cumbersome
to truly learn when I had so many other options. I wanted to like it,
but it just wasn't really for me.

9. Elinks (2018): After looking around at Links2 stuff, I found Elinks
was a more-versatile (and buggy) branch. It was pretty good, but
honestly Lynx and Links2 -g put it a solid third option as a TTY
browser.

I'll add that I used quite a few other browsers on various (mostly
Android) devices. TextBrowser, Little Web Browser (bad dev stole
Lynx's name before he changed it; was not built on Lynx at all),
Adblock Browser (crash city, a darn shame), and another one that I
can't find anymore that allowed user CSS.

[0] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~np89/glog/20190208-text_browser_wars.txt