10 Jan, 2004
Miscellaneous
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MyIE2 (Maxthon) versus Opera: A Review of the IE wrapper

A very, very nifty add-on to Inter­net Explorer which makes your web expe­ri­ence nearly like Opera's — secure, tabbed and con­fig­urable! Here's hold­ing the glass to MyIE2 (now called Max­thon), and see­ing how the two compare..

A very, very nifty add-on to Inter­net Explorer which makes your web expe­ri­ence nearly like Opera's — secure, tabbed and con­fig­urable! Here's hold­ing the glass to MyIE2, and see­ing how it matches up to Opera..the browser that clearly seems to have inspired MyIE2 (now called Max­thon) in the first place. The stu­dent chal­lenges the teacher!

Microsoft's Inter­net Explorer is inad­ver­tently the most "pop­u­lar" browser — in num­bers at least — but since it is basi­cally free (read: unlu­cra­tive) MS has decided to dump the IE browser. In the wake of such com­pla­cence from MS, a clutch of other snazzy browsers have sprung up — Mozilla, Fire­bird, etc from the Gecko fam­ily, and most notably Opera. All of them are more stan­dards com­pli­ant, secure, faster, con­fig­urable etc etc. Well, all that sort of changes with the release of an ubernifty MyIE2 wrap­per to IE!

First, get a load of the features

I won't regur­gi­tate, the MyIE2 web­site has a tour with screen­shots or a handy list of fea­tures in their guide. Go ahead, read 'em up, then click BACK and read the rest of this piece.

It is a nice lit­tle tweak­able sarong for IE. I won­der if it has the mal­leabil­ity that one has come to expect of Opera, but hey, who tweaks every­thing! Tabs are neat (have existed before in Crazy­Browser as well) but my minor quib­ble is that the tabs font can­not be edited — and the font sizes are small, inten­tion­ally per­haps to save screen real estate — although I am allowed to bold the Active Tab text etc. What is really neat though is that I can close tabs in a num­ber of ways: by double-clicking the tab (and clicks are cus­tomiz­able). It sports a bunch of short­cuts and the beauty is in the grow­ing array of plu­g­ins!

IE was slow, irri­tat­ingly slow after you have used Opera. This is espe­cially true if you are sub­jected to slower con­nec­tion speeds (as I recently was, when in a remote Indian city.) Some­how MyIE2 seems a touch faster than IE but below the hood it is the same beast. Opera's ren­der­ing engine is unmatched.

IE had pop-up block­ers utils galore. Even Google Tool­bar does it. But MyIE2 imple­ments this with great flour­ish and allows you to cus­tomize it on a per-site basis!

MyIE2 brings skinnabil­ity to the vanilla world of IE. There are some cool skins because it is easy to develop them. Per­son­ally though, I pre­fer a skin­less MyIE2, and Opera with the "Win" skin which is really sim­ple. Skinned behe­moths such as Neo­planet have taught me that KISS is indeed a very crit­i­cal con­cept, but we digress.

IE did not have a cool forum where peo­ple actu­ally get solu­tion to their woes and gripes. MyIE2 intro­duces com­mu­nity to IE. (Btw, Opera does this fab­u­lously, plus IRC!)

Things I love about Opera

  1. Sim­ple but thought­ful thin­gies like Notes, "Paste and go" etc. These things are sim­ply too many to enlist here, the proof is in the pud­ding. Once you use Opera, you get addicted. (Adden­dum: please read com­ments below for how to achieve this in MyIE2.)
  2. A totally cus­tomiz­able search inter­face (only a search.ini away) that makes it easy to have your own short­cuts e.g., dic­tio­nary, vivisimo, ama­zon, ebay etc. MyIE2 does give you a search bar (hint: CTRL E) which *is* cus­tomiz­able but geeks wouldn't set­tle for any­thing lesser than *.ini files, now would they!
  3. I can change font-size in Opera with a sim­ple 9 or 0. I can get back to nor­mal with a 6. Noth­ing sim­i­lar in MyIE2, although they tell me that if I had a "num pad" (the right hand side num­bers thingie on reg­u­lar key­boards) then I could achieve this with CTRL + and CTRL -, but I have a lap­top. Siz­ing in Opera is actu­ally pixel-based which means images, flash movies etc are all sized along with the text seamlessly.
  4. Opera: switch­ing between per­sonal style sheet and the page style sheet is a cinch. This is sim­ply not easy in MyIE2 although a plu­gin would solve it.
  5. Print Pre­view in Opera is unmatched ("p"). MyIE2's print pre­view is still the same as IE: ugly. Btw, if a "media=print" stylesheet is spec­i­fied in the web page, Opera's print pre­view will show you the print­out accord­ingly. Is this use­ful, or is this useful!
  6. One minor fea­ture of Opera that has been a life saver for me on many occa­sions is that when you are typ­ing some­thing in a form, then you inad­ver­tently click to another page, and then come BACK, your form input is still retained. In IE, Mozilla etc, what you were enter­ing in the form is vamoose. I love Opera for this fea­ture alone!
  7. Opera's pass­word wand is more intu­itive and less obstru­sive, IMHO, than Robo­Form that comes shipped with MyIE2. I par­tic­u­larly don't like the popup win­dow of Robo­form, with fur­ther pop-up menus (e.g., on the but­ton "NEVER"). Some­how Opera is also bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out when to leave me alone — e.g., on an HTTPS website.
  8. Say what you will, the down­load engine of Opera remains the one to beat, with­out the need of any addi­tional down­load accel­er­a­tors or man­agers (e.g., DAP)
  9. IE doesn't sup­port zil­lions of stan­dards, so by exten­sion nor does MyIE2. Still.
  10. Tweak-freaks love the cus­tomiz­abil­ity, and PORTABILITY of Opera's con­fig­u­ra­tions. It's all in one INI file.
  11. Speak­ing of porta­bil­ity, Opera works on all con­ceiv­able OSes. I can use my same set­tings at home at work, at friends' etc etc.
  12. MyIE2 is secure, but you need to steel­wire it by dis­abling ActiveX etc. It surely makes the process MUCH eas­ier than IE. Yet, security-wise Opera is unbeatable.
  13. Win­dow his­tory — if you inad­ver­tently close a win­dow that you were surf­ing and want to get it back, Opera gives you a win­dows his­tory. Just CTRL ALT Z away (or Win­dow –> Closed) and you can resume any Win­dows from your cur­rent ses­sion. MyIE2 also pro­vides some­thing sim­i­lar (see below.)
  14. Also read: Why Opera?

Where MyIE2 really shines

  1. It's free ;-) (had to get it out of my system)
  2. For me, this is a killer-app idea: the "BOSS" fea­ture! You can assign a key com­bi­na­tion (in my case CTRL Z because the two keys are so close together) which when pressed just totally makes MyIE2 dis­ap­pear from the screen — very use­ful if you really have a nasty boss! When you press these keys again, the whole MyIE2 reap­pears, tags and win­dows and all. Mar­vel­lous! :cool:
  3. A bevy of plu­g­ins from weather to image sizing!
  4. Because it is IE, when you COPY text from a web page, it copies the text along with the for­mat­ting plus the images, which you can then PASTE into an email or a doc­u­ment. Many users may find this very use­ful! Opera and Mozilla will not pick up the for­mat­ting or the images, which I per­son­ally find use­ful at times when I just need the text. YMMV.
  5. An "Undo" func­tion for Win­dows his­tory. If you close a win­dow, and regret it, you can always "undo" and reopen it. MyIE2 main­tains the his­tory. Super.
  6. Groups: like ses­sions in Opera, or fold­ers on your per­sonal bar. If you have a folder on your per­sonal tool­bar (instead of just links) in Opera, you can "Open all folder items" and all your book­marks in that folder are opened auto­mat­i­cally in new win­dows of their own. MyIE2 achieves this func­tion­al­ity a sim­i­lar GROUP func­tion, and you can spec­ify groups quite eas­ily. What is really nifty in MyIE2 is to add the cur­rent win­dow to any group. Just right-click on the tab, then "Send to" …this fea­ture seems to me to be a lot hand­ier than in Opera, where for ses­sions you'd have to have all pre­vi­ous ses­sion win­dows open, then open the cur­rent one, then save the ses­sion again. You can spec­ify the group that MyIE2 STARTS with. Finally, access­ing dif­fer­ent groups is very sim­ple — it's a drop-down on the toolbar.
  7. As much as I hate to say this, unfor­tu­nately many web­sites are just plain devel­oped with IE in mind. My cor­po­rate intranet for instance, and it is a VERY sophis­ti­cated one (ERP ring a bell?), uses ActiveX pro­fusely. And frankly, if I wanted such func­tion­al­ity avail­able from ANYWHERE in the world, in my browser, I'd rather have it exactly like this than to have Java applets or sim­ple pages where every­thing uploads again and again. I'm sorry I can­not show you screen­shots but in some ways there is a solid busi­ness case for why IE is a very, very pow­er­ful browser. (and no, mak­ing Opera iden­tify itself as IE doesn't do much ;-) )
  8. It doesn't crash much. Opera does, truth be told. Yes, even ver­sion 7.23. Crashes many times daily, which btw I dont mind as it resumes where it left off when I restart it, and besides I love Opera too much. Yet, it needs to be men­tioned as it is a clear brownie point in MyIE2's favor.
  9. For many media files (e.g., on Amazon.com's music sam­plers), Opera can be con­fig­ured to launch the right app (which is why it is super flex­i­ble in the right hands) but it is not always easy for the layper­son. MyIE2 has all the right asso­ci­a­tions built in because under its panties it is still really IE.
  10. Con­tent fil­ter­ing is nice. You have sev­eral options:
    • Load Images
    • Load Videos
    • Load Sounds
    • Allow Scripts
    • Allow Java Applet
    • Allow ActiveX
    • Allow Flash
  11. Auto­Hide is very nice, although Opera can come close to this with some work.
  12. The per­sonal tool­bar also has prox­ies as a drop-down, which makes it easy to switch between prox­ies. In Opera, ALT P etc etc. More clicks away.
  13. Encod­ing is easy to switch too. At least 2 – 3 clicks lesser than Opera. Speak­ing of encod­ing, IE sim­ply *is* bet­ter at show­ing mul­ti­ple lan­guages on Win­dows as long as the charset is spec­i­fied in the page. In Opera I need to move between the EDIT –> ENCODING –> "Auto" mode to "West­ern" to "Shift_JIS" all the time.
  14. Pop-up block­ing is quite sophis­ti­cated, based on indi­vid­ual sites and this included wild­card expres­sions. Get your­self Spy­bot Search & Destroy though, and enable their host file replacements!
  15. Ad-blocking is phe­nom­e­nal. Although again, get Spy­bot.
  16. It sup­ports Gecko ren­der­ing now, in ver­sion 0.9.12, but this makes page load­ing slower (for me — Win­dows XP Pro, Pen­tium 4 non-Centrino, 512 MB RAM.)
  17. A minor fea­ture, but very use­ful for some news web­site etc: Auto­scrolling.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT:

Irre­spec­tive of the browser that you feel most com­fort­able with, the bar in the "IE camp" has cer­tainly been raised!

Admit­tedly Opera's ren­der­ing engine rocks (as does Firebird's) and I'm patiently wait­ing for a component/control of some sort to be made (e.g., Adobe?) so devel­op­ers can use the Opera ren­der­ing engine in their appli­ca­tions, since it is faster, more secure, and uses less memory.

Per­son­ally, I am some­what ball and chain attached to Opera still, although for surf­ing those noto­ri­ous bank­ing web­sites that fol­low the lame "We only sup­port IE" dic­tum, MyIE2 is cer­tainly a more pleas­ant option. (P.S. With Opera > 7.23 this prob­lem of non-IE sup­port is a lit­tle better.)

But for most peo­ple who use IE, or your uncles who'd have their zip­pers in knots if you were to ask them to switch from their default browser (the you-know-which), or for peo­ple who do not want to shell out the lit­tle cash it takes to buy Opera, MyIE2 is a very very decent, addic­tive, all-encompassing alter­na­tive. IE takes a lot of time to open new win­dows, MyIE2 doesn't, so it offers a bet­ter over­all surf­ing expe­ri­ence even with­out the whole fea­tures shebang.

Have I missed out on any­thing? Have I not explored either MyIE2 or Opera well enough? Penny for your thoughts!

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43 comments
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  1. Mandy says: Jan 10, 200411:41 am

    Nice. How about com­par­ing with Mozilla browsers? They have tabs too and a lot of plu­gin exten­sions to boot.

    Btw, if the win­dows in MyIE2 open up right after the win­dow I am click­ing them in, that's a fea­ture not a bug. I would like to have the links open a win­dow "close by" instead of at the end of the tab order. Maybe it just needs get­ting used to?

    Mandy

  2. Jade says: Jan 10, 20045:55 pm

    I love Opera too, but when I can't get to a web­site (they won't let me), I use Mozilla Fire­bird. It has all the fea­tures you men­tioned (like sav­ing opened win­dows, etc) although it won't work on cer­tain intranets that use HTML edi­tors or things like that.

  3. Moebius Street says: Jan 11, 20041:08 pm

    Regard­ing place­ment of new tabs, this is eas­ily cus­tomiz­able. In MyIE2 Options, go to the Tab sec­tion. Turn OFF "Dis­play New Tab Next To Current".

    Regard­ing Notes: well, I've never used this in Opera, but I'm guess­ing this is sim­i­lar to MyIE's "sim­ple col­lec­tor" fea­ture, acces­si­ble from the right­most but­ton in the statusbar.

    Regard­ing cus­tomiz­able search, MyIE2 has this. The side­bar page can be replaced; I'm using one from http://myextra.netfirms.com/ (where you can find a ton of other plu­g­ins as well.

    Actu­ally, it's these plu­g­ins that make MyIE2 so pow­er­ful, I think. It sup­ports 2 types: side­bar plu­g­ins that appear in a fly­out pane on the left side, and util­i­ties acti­vated by a tool­bar. Here's what I've got run­ning now:

    Side­bar plu­g­ins:
     – Cal­cu­la­tor (includ­ing Jscript expres­sion eval)
     – Cal­en­dar
     – Google advanced search
     – View page par­tial source
     – Weather

    Tool­bar plu­g­ins:
     – Analyse pic­ture
     – Check page size
     – Decom­pose frame
     – Dis­play link source
     – Dis­play pic­tures
     – Edit page
     – Enable right click
     – Ency­clo­pe­dia look-up
     – Flash file save
     – Google results
     – Gray-out page (remove annoy­ing col­or­ing)
     – High­light key­words
     – Link­ages pre­view
     – M-W dic­tio­nary lookup
     – Merge split­ted pages
     – Pic­ture resizer
     – Split page hor­i­zon­tally
     – Split page ver­ti­cally
     – Text high­lighter
     – TinyURL
     – Up a direc­tory
     – View­Source
     – Zoom

  4. sniptools says: Jan 11, 20049:07 pm

    Wow, Moe­bius, that opens a whole new bot­tle of cham­pagne! Will give these plu­g­ins a swing and get back to you/update the arti­cle accordingly.

    Btw, have you fig­ured out how to:

    (1) Change the font size on the win­dow tabs
    (2) Change font size eas­ily within the win­dow web-page (Opera's 9 or 0 for instance)
    (3) Play Flash files (mine doesn't play for some rea­son, on two PCs, which leads me to believe there's some­thing wrong with the set­tings I have in the tool)

    Btw, have you tried snipurl instead of tinyurl? ;-)

    Shanx

  5. TripleHelix says: Jan 12, 20045:26 am

    It is an improve­ment on IE but still can't match Opera for speed, or Mozilla for stan­dards com­pli­ance (due to the IE core).

  6. ragsi says: Jan 12, 20047:47 am

    MyIE2: "It has an "Undo" function!"

    Opera has this too. Ctrl+Z when you've closed a page will restore it, with his­tory and all. Also see "Win­dow > Closed"

  7. sniptools says: Jan 12, 200410:01 am

    Thanks ragsi. For Opera's his­tory, did you mean CTRL-ALT-Z? It works for me, but it's not fool­proof. It some­times doesn't work with dynamic pages, for instance, try some page from Amazon.com. (But yes, I stand cor­rected, Opera does have this feature!)

  8. Seeolfreeloader says: Jan 12, 20047:53 pm

    Almost every­thing where Opera "scrored" over MyIE2 is untrue. And MyIE2 is *not* an Opera clone; it's actu­ally a Net­Cap­tor clone which is a Neo­Planet clone :)

    1. Notes: use the Sim­ple Col­lec­tor which is more powerful

    2. To zoom text, Ctrl + numpad's '+'(zoom in) or '-' (zoom out). Ctrl + * undoes any changes

    3. Change the order of new win­dows (see Options|Window New)

    4. Robo­Form is not an essen­tial plug-in; you can dis­able it (I hate all pass­word man­agers as they are a secu­rity risk :)

    5. Opera's down­load engine does sin­gle stream. MyIE2's add-in sup­port allows for mul­ti­ple stream downloads

    6. You can rename tabs (right click|Set Sticky Name)

    7. MyIE2 is an IE-wrapper, so log­i­cally it'll only work on Win­dows unless MS re-releases an IE for UNIX version

    8. Opera is over-secure and has issues with MS-technology cen­tric sites (we some­times do need to visit them).

    Other nice thin­gies: select hyper­link URL from in-page con­tent and drag-right to open in new win­dow. OR select text and drag to search using default engine.

  9. sniptools says: Jan 13, 200412:06 am

    Hi See­ol­free,

    Thanks for the note. I am learn­ing (and get­ting addicted to) MyIE2 as well, but I don't recall say­ing that say MyIE2 was an "Opera Clone"! I said Opera has clearly inspired the MyIE2 wrap­per, which is true.

    About your comments:

    1. Opera's Notes = MyIE2's Sim­ple Col­lec­tor, yes, that was men­tioned in a com­ment above. Also, Opera's Paste And Go = MyIE2's PLUGIN called Paste Go. Other sim­ple things such as aliases etc are now in MyIE2 0.9.12 so there's no real argu­ment. I agree with you. (But notice Opera inspired these fea­tures! :) )

    2. I use a lap­top (as do many peo­ple I know.) There is no num pad. Any tips on this one?

    3. Thanks, yes, win­dow and tab order­ing works as per Moe­bius' sug­ges­tion above.

    4. Pass­word man­agers that are exter­nal to the browser are almost always a pain, but native to the browser, and on a per­sonal machine that never leaves one's house, they are very very use­ful. I even like IE's default pass­word mem­o­rizer (which auto-fills pass­words ONLY if the user­name is cor­rect.) Opera's Wand is incred­i­bly effec­tive in this regard, and it stores data encrypted. Not stealth level salts etc but it serves the pur­pose for a per­sonal comp.

    5. How should I use MyIE2 to multi-stream reg­u­lar web surf­ing? I have been using MyIE2 for over a cou­ple of weeks now and Opera is sim­ply a very very good expe­ri­ence. (No, I do really like MyIE2)

    6. Rename tabs is a very cool feature!

    7. Yes, it is an MS only browser, which needs to be men­tioned as a big chunk of the world is mov­ing to other OSes. Opera and Fire­bird work on sev­eral of these OSes. Btw, IE exists on a Mac. Does MyIE2 work with Macs? (I haven't been able to find any Mac-only download)

    8. I am not sure what you mean by Opera is over-secure, but for non-geeks users (i.e., 99% of com­puter users, includ­ing on occa­sion Yours Truly) this is most likely a GoodThing. As for Opera not work­ing with MS web­sites, I do men­tion that in my note, and there are 2 – 3 web­sites that did not work with Opera before — but they do now. Try Opera 7.23.

    Any­way, net net: I quite like MyIE2, and am find­ing myself using it more often — the fea­ture that wins hands-down is GROUPS. Superb stuff.

    –Shanx.

  10. BuffcorePhill says: Jan 13, 200412:14 am

    hey guys; peo­ple may pla­gia­rise opera to their heart's con­tent but opera rocks sim­ply because of its speed in brows­ing; the very "liq­uid" user inter­face; and above all the pixel-level siz­ing which allows me to mag­nify images and text in a win­dow to what­ever level i want and then with a 6 to get it back to nor­mal level; cool!

  11. mustermind says: Jan 13, 20043:26 pm

    All this is fine if you have the lat­est Intel chip and enough mem­ory. I run my machine on a Pen­tium II with 128 MB of RAM, yeah its archaic, but Opera works like a charm. MyIE2 makes a whole song and dance about so much as appear­ing from my win­dows sta­tus bar even if I only have 4 – 5 tabs open. Its a great tool but for peo­ple who dont know about mozilla and opera, and there are plenty of those!

  12. StWendeler says: Jan 15, 20045:39 am

    I cur­rently use Fire­bird, but am annoyed that I can't get into some of my banking/finance sites that require IE (or only have full func­tion­al­ity with IE). Have installed MyIE2 and really like it, but have 2 impor­tant questions:

    1. If MS deter­mines a secu­rity hole in IE and posts a patch, does MyIE2 get updated as well (through Win­dows Update) or will I have to wait for the MyIE2 devel­op­ment team to release their ver­sion of the patch?

    2. Main rea­son that I installed Fire­bird was secu­rity. How­ever, when run­ning both Firebird/MyIE2 and look­ing @ Ram usage in w2k processes win­dow, I see that Fire­bird appears to take up sig­nif­i­cantly more mem than MyIE2. Is there any bench­marks some­where that shows this?

    I pre­vi­ously used Opera6 but didn't upgrade to Opera7, pri­mar­ily b/c of the new mail client (and the fee asso­ci­ated w/ it). Like Fire­bird and like MyIE2 skin… try­ing to decide between the 2.

  13. forward -> says: Jan 15, 20043:32 pm

    We all have our pet peeves with IE or IE mutants and mine is the font sizes. I have my own css goign in the acces­si­bil­ity tab of IE from Tools:Options but this doesn't match Opera's siz­ing flexibility!

    Great arti­cle btw.

  14. Chumass says: Jan 16, 20042:10 am

    Neat post. My IE has a cus­tom CSS as well. Here is what I recommend -

    body, td, div, input, select, option {font-family: Ver­dana,
    Arial;font-size: 12px;}
    body, a, div {padding-bottom:18px}
    textarea {font-family: Courier;font-size: 12px;}
    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {font-family:Arial;font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold}

    This is good enough to read on 1024 res. Btw you men­tion Crazy­Browser but you did not men­tion SlimBrowser -

    http://www.flashpeak.com/sbrowser/

    This is what I have ended choos­ing up everytime.

    Cheers.

  15. Grimila says: Jan 18, 20042:46 am

    I've also ended up using Slim­browser after try­ing out MyIE2, Crazy­browser and Mozilla. To me, Slim­browser is more sta­ble than oth­ers. And it has all the func­tions I need..maybe more than I need..

    List of fea­tures of Slim­browser from http://www.flashpeak.com/sbrowser/

    1. Mul­ti­ple site browser based on tab-page interface

    2.Seamless inte­gra­tion with AI Robo­Form FormFiller/Password Manager

    3.Built-in Popup Killer based on intel­li­gent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and pre-defined fil­ter­ing
    Site win­dows killed by mis­take are FULLY RECOVERABLE

    4.Ability to turn on/off Flash Ani­ma­tion
    In-Page Ad Fil­ter: Fil­ter flash, float­ing images and ad ban­ners inside any pages

    5.Convenient access to major search engines by Quick-Search Bar

    6.Seamless inte­gra­tion of most Inter­net Explorer toolbars

    7.ScriptPad: Built-in VBScript/Jscript/HTML/Text editor.

    8.Hidden Sites : hide and show a site at users' request

    9.Skinned win­dow frame.

    10.Free-zooming of any web page.

    11. AutoLo­gin: auto­mat­i­cally con­nect and log into spec­i­fied web­site with just one click.

    12.Seamless inte­gra­tion with online trans­la­tion engine and dictionaries

    13.Ability to sup­press script error mes­sage dialog

    14.Site Group: Open and save a col­lec­tion of sites as a group

    15.Flexible con­trol of startup actions

    16.URL Alias: Type short alias instead long URL.

  16. Louis says: Jan 19, 20041:46 am

    It is extremely inac­cu­rate (and per­haps libelous) to sug­gest that Microsoft will no longer sup­ply a stand­alone browser, because the free soft­ware does not gen­er­ate revenue.

    Explorer is not "being dumped" due to "com­pla­cency", or any other fab­ri­cated rea­son. Explorer is not going away any time soon. One sim­ply has to read the orig­i­nal Tech­net arti­cle at Microsoft, or be even remotely famil­iar with the future devel­op­ment of Win­dows, to under­stand this.

  17. sniptools says: Jan 19, 20049:40 am

    Thanks for the note Louis. I am very famil­iar with Long­horn beta prg, so I am not exactly late to the party. Do you have a link for MS plans? Try deci­pher­ing the devel­op­ment path from here, which to me sug­gests that IE stand­alone will surely be phased out:

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/desktop/business/components.mspx

    Mean­while, I quote Microsoft Pro­gram Man­ager for Inter­net Explorer, Brian Coun­try­man, who in a May 7 2003 Microsoft Tech­Net chat, restated what he seemed to think was the obvi­ous: "As part of the OS, IE will con­tinue to evolve, but there will be no future stand­alone instal­la­tions. IE6 SP1 is the final stand­alone installation."

    From:
    http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itcommunity/chats/trans/ie/ie0507.asp?frame=true

    Would love to hear otherwise!

    Mean­while, I also believe call­ing MS com­pla­cent is not alto­gether erro­neous because users need not wait until the Long­horn hits shelves (with a much more tightly tied in IE..which in turn means you need to shell for it again) while SO MANY other options are already on the market.

  18. sniptools says: Jan 19, 20042:43 pm

    Chu­mass & Grimila,

    I've tried Flashspeak's browser and it kicks butt! Excel­lent, has almost all the fea­tures of MyIE2 and the inter­face, to me, is a lit­tle eas­ier. I quite like the win­dow and font resiz­ing func­tion­al­ity as well!

    Thanks,
    –Shanx

  19. mavenport says: Jan 19, 20044:19 pm

    the sin­gle best fea­ture of slim­browser has got to be the autolo­gin fea­ture which is incred­i­bly use­ful for per­sonal com­put­ers. it remem­bers bet­ter than ANY browser i know of because if you have three pass­word fields, it will remem­ber all of them. opera's wand can­not do this. i have never tried mozilla so can­not com­pare. –mp

  20. I know says: Jan 19, 20044:24 pm

    It is not true that myie2 is "IE wrap­per" because you can also use Mozilla with the patch http://aab.spin.ee/misc/ie2mozilla/

  21. sniptools says: Jan 28, 20044:36 pm

    Hi "I know",

    Actu­ally MyIE2 *is* an IE wrap­per because it uses IE under­neath. It is not a full and com­plete browser in and of itself. The Mozilla patch is just a good-to-have util­ity which uses the Gecko engine to ren­der pages (which, in my expe­ri­ence, is a lit­tle slower but YMMV)

    Cheers,
    Shanx

  22. Seeolfreeloader says: Feb 02, 20045:43 pm

    Shashank, bad news on "MyI2 will run Opera engine add-in" front. Seem Opera is .no plan­ning to license the engine as a stand­alone unless you pay (like Adobe?) big bucks!

    Sue the lap­top man­u­fac­turer is your NumPad is miss­ing. It's usu­ally there, but you need 5 more fin­gers to work it — Fn + x + x — or some­thing like that :)

    I didn't get the bit about using M2 to stream mul­ti­ple sites!!! The more the tabs you open the more the site you can view. I think I men­tioned M2 sup­por­ing 3rd-party down­load man­agers that stream mul­ti­ple file bits for quicker downloads.

    As for Opera & secu­rity, well the 7.5 Beta is very neat. But often chokes on Java-related stuff; even with the Sun JRE installed.

    M2 don't work on Macs (I have access to one) but the files are w32 bina­ries :( Still for Macs Fre­bird, Camino & Safari browsers do multi-tabs. IE5.x/Mac is still in the stone age!

    Groups is neat, but so is the Proxy Sup­port, intel­li­gent con­tent block­ing, and the address bar search.

    As you use, you'll fall more in love.

  23. Benjamin Kellner says: Feb 15, 20041:56 am

    1. I think MyIE2's options and plu­gin sys­tem makes it supe­rior to Opera. There is no good plu­gin sys­tem for Opera like there is with MyIE2. And the default stuff for Opera (or the lim­ited num­ber of things you can do) is not enough for me.

    2. I think MyIE2's Mouse Ges­ture sys­tem is a lot bet­ter than Opera's. And as for zoom­ing, goto View->Zoom Page. You can even set the zoom options as Mouse Ges­tures. +20%/-20%

    3. You not only have an easy to use URL Alias, Groups, and URL Key fea­tures, but Quick Search as well. Just like Opera's, but eas­ier to customize.

    4. Paste and go IS built in to MyIE2, but requires you to click the drop­down (or rightclick) the menubar New but­ton and select Clipboard.

    5. Auto refresh tab any­one and Import/Export Favorites and Proxy Lists? (MyIE2)

    I think MyIE2 is a lot faster to get where you want, less clicks, eas­ier to fig­ure things out.

    Also, Opera didn't run fast for me. I'd browse to the same page on MyIE2 as I would on Opera and they'd take the same time. Opera would leave me with blank [Image] boxes for the first 1 – 2 sec­onds, while MyIE2 was try­ing to ren­der. I really never noticed a render-time dif­fer­ence with any of the browsers. Per­haps I just can't see the dif­fer­ence in miliseconds.

    There are a few things I miss about Opera. The Refresh/Stop but­ton were the same. The Skins and GUI look a LOT nicer. The Progress bar was some­thing I enjoyed. Also the Trans­fers Win­dow was nice. I wish I could get that in MyIE2.

  24. sniptools says: Feb 15, 20045:16 pm

    Hi Ben­jamin

    Thanks for your thoughts. I agree MYIE2 is a decent browser, but after much trial and error, I've set­tled in with Slim­Browser for my IE needs now. All the ben­e­fits you men­tioned re: MyIE2 are built in with Slim­Browser, plus there are these fea­tures that make me pre­fer SlimB –

    (a) Paste and Go is in the right click menu itself.
    (b) The "AutoLo­gin" fea­ture of Slim­Browser is some­thing all browsers should emu­late! It's *the* bench­mark.
    © The inter­face of Slim­Browser, with "small icons" and "show images with selec­tive text" is a lot closer to orig­i­nal IE, and more visu­ally pleas­ing for me.

    My main browser is still Opera though. Its ren­der­ing engine is per­cep­tu­ally faster for rea­sons you men­tioned — it's per­haps opti­cal illu­sion, but I like this idea, how­ever triv­ial it is (i.e., I like the text in the page to appear before the images.) Opera now also does not have prob­lems with my bank­ing web­sites that require IE etc.

    What I really like about Opera, and what I dis­agree with in your post, is that the siz­ing (with a sim­ple 9, or 0, or 6 for back to orig­i­nal size) is unbeat­able. MyIE2 and SlimBrowser's resiz­ing is not at a pixel level, it's pretty ugly.

    Just my thoughts.

    Thanks,
    Shanx

  25. homer says: Feb 26, 200412:17 pm

    Thanks for a very use­ful resource. I have one browser that is now MyIE2 and one which is 5.5 using your other tuto­r­ial on mul­ti­ple inter­net explorer installs on the same pc.

    happy homer

  26. Adam Lasnik says: Mar 03, 200410:24 pm

    Kudos on a very thought­ful com­par­i­son (and great fol­lowup com­ments, too!). Just wanted to acen­tu­ate, though, that I find myIE's URL alias fea­ture sim­ply amaz­ing and mas­sively use­ful. For those who aren't famil­iar with it, it means that I can assign a short key­word to any page I want, and then when I type that key­word and hit return on the address­bar, that page springs up.

  27. vanhiorn says: Mar 05, 20049:46 am

    opera has many new things
    http://my.opera.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44865

  28. avk says: Mar 06, 200412:03 am

    This thing is way too biased. Obvi­ously [the author]'s an Opera geek. But for nor­mal peo­ple (non-geeks), MyIE2 is way bet­ter. Look at all their stuff. Its in 1 of 20 lan­guages. For geeks, you can cus­tomize in your own lan­guage or make stuff like plug-ins and skins (which can be done eas­ily by non-geeks too.) Any­way… MyIE2 is way bet­ter than Opera. Why pay $40 for Opera when MyIE2 is free just 'cuz this guy says its not. I love MyIE2 and so will you. btw… NO SPYWARE. thats one of the rea­sons I took it. Its true that they should get rid of Robo­form… I did in a day of use. It sux and puts MyIE2's net rep down. But still, MyIE2 is awe­some. It even comes with a Flash Saver to save .SWF files to ur Hard drive.

  29. sniptools says: Mar 06, 20041:16 am

    Hi avk,

    Thanks for your thoughts. You'll notice that your sen­ti­ment echoes what I said in my review above. I like MyIE2 as well, and rec­om­mend it to peo­ple who are not will­ing to try Opera — the peo­ple you loosely term "geeks" as though it were a BadThing to be one.. :)

    But for those who have tried Opera, there's no going back. It's not just me and my minor­ity ways, it goes for almost every­one I know who has worked with Opera. (And no, it's not a mind­less cult to be devoted to any one browser, I'd be the last per­son to be blindly fer­vent w.r.t. any par­tic­u­lar technology.)

    MyIE2 is a superb effort, Slim­Browser is at par if not a touch bet­ter, but both of them are still IE under the hood. That's a *big* draw­back as the ren­der­ing engine of IE is, well, the ren­der­ing engine of IE.

    Cheers,
    Shanx

  30. The real advantage says: Mar 07, 20044:19 pm

    The real advan­tage of Opera is that wehn I use my imac in the office or my bsd box at home I have the exact same inter­face in both the places. IE looks and feels dif­fer­ent on a mac and does not work on a bsd box at all. take care

  31. croppa says: Apr 10, 20042:45 am

    Here's one of the gazil­lion rea­sons one shd skip IE!
    http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3338461

  32. wildbill says: Apr 23, 20043:14 am

    I'm afraid I agree with almost every­one. Both browsers have their good points-and areas where they could improve.

    I'm on a dial-up and I always down­load with Opera, espe­cially large down­loads. It never needs a down­load man­ager and it sim­ply doesn't ever need to resume. If there are breaks in con­ti­nu­ity, Opera sim­ply fixes it and goes on with the down­load. I like MYIE2, but it won't do that for me.

  33. Micke Hon says: Apr 27, 20046:20 am

    Great arti­cle . 2 com­ments from me:

    1) Opera 7.x ain΄t fast any­more . I tried from 486/100 to PIV/2G . It΄s not faster than IE 5 . I΄m still using Opera 6.06 .

    2) You missed the coolest Opera fea­ture that makes me stick with it: ΄Show cached Images Only΄ . If you already loaded some graph­ics you will see them oth­er­wise it will not be loaded . None of IE ver­sions and the other IE clones can do that .

  34. sniptools says: Apr 28, 200410:35 am

    Hi Micke, Thanks for the note. I find Opera 6.x and 7.x to be equally fast in speed, I change them to a sim­ple skin with "IE6" theme. No ani­ma­tions etc. So the inter­face is faster. The most impor­tant fac­tor is the speed of the down­loads though, and that is sgnif­i­cantly faster than either Mozilla (and gang) or IE engines.

    As for your sec­ond point, "show cached images only," it may or may not be a use­ful fea­ture for every­one, but I can see why you like it! I have a CSS file which just gets rid of all images on the page, I use it for totally ad-ridden sites where I am only inter­ested in the content.

  35. mangle says: May 17, 200411:07 am

    Great arti­cle but the thing about Mozilla Fire­fox is that it NEVER crashes like Opera or IE. Go figure!

  36. mangle says: May 17, 20044:00 pm

    Oh and while we are at it here is the 589,653th rea­son you should stay at an arm's length from IE: http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/mhtmlredir.exploit.html

  37. Warren says: May 29, 200411:01 am

    I have a 21 inch mon­i­tor and work in healt­care, and it is nor­mal to have 12 – 20 win­dows open and run­ning at any given time. I tile them and expand when I need them. At the end of the day, I just close the browser, and in the morn­ing open all of them simul­ta­ne­ously. Curi­ously, I have no prob­lems with crash­ing with my Opera. I had run the Avant browser prior to this, and I pre­fer either to any­thing that IE has for me. The Wand func­tions per­fectly, and as nearly all my sites have pass­words, this is an extremely use­ful fea­ture. I still have IE avail­able for the odd web­site that Opera has prob­lems with, but these are rare. I am look­ing to Unix/Linux for my next home sys­tem, and am curi­ous as to browsers avail­able. Any suggestions??

  38. sniptools says: May 29, 200411:14 am

    Hi War­ren, thanks for post­ing. For Linux, I'd rec­om­mend Opera (as usual) or Fire­fox (Mozilla's light weight ver­sion) which does some pretty fancy pass­word remem­ber­ing as well. Cheers, Shashank

  39. Chris Smith says: Jul 01, 20048:19 pm

    I am html new­bie but you can visit my first web­site here.

    Chris Smith o

  40. Clarifier says: Jul 12, 20041:02 am

    Opera has "URL aliases": sim­ply enter a word in the Nick­name field when cre­at­ing a book­mark. Enter the same word in the address field to open
    the book­marked URL.

    Opera's wand can remem­ber mul­ti­ple user­names and pass­words for the same site.

    Opera is avail­able in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, and one can cre­ate other trans­la­tions — details: http://my.opera.com/community/customize/langs/

    Opera sup­ports Netscape com­pat­i­ble plu­g­ins / Java applets invoked by web pages, cus­tom skins, cus­tom side­bars, and book­marklets. Unlike MyIE2, Opera does not sup­port other user inter­face extend­ing plugins.

  41. Piperdog says: Aug 30, 20049:58 pm

    Valu­able infor­ma­tion for choos­ing a browser. Thanks!!!

    I'm look­ing to make my com­puter more secure, so I'm switch­ing to Opera. How­ever, I'm won­der­ing if I'm still vul­ner­a­ble to worms and viruses through IE soft­ware that is not actively run­ning, but still loaded on my hard drive.

    Thanks.

  42. jkue says: Aug 30, 200411:32 pm

    "I'm look­ing to make my com­puter more secure, so I'm switch­ing to Opera. How­ever, I'm won­der­ing if I'm still vul­ner­a­ble to worms and viruses through IE soft­ware that is not actively run­ning, but still loaded on my hard drive."

    No you can't.

  43. Twink says: Sep 22, 200410:58 am

    Found this link while search­ing Google, thanks

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