I have grown increasingly frustrated with Internet Explorer over the past year or so at how slow it takes to load and interact with ajax-enabled applications so I have been courting a few other browsers that are out there. I have spent a lot of time with Mozilla and have enjoyed it for the most part, although it’s not near as fast as it once was remembered it to be. I found the same thing with Opera, I can recall a time in the late 90’s when I first discovered Opera when it would fit on a 1.44mb floppy diskette, it was very compact and worked it’s way through the web extremely fast but these later versions that I have downloaded haven’t lived up to my expectations either. With all of this being said there are things that I absolutely love about both Mozilla and Opera browsers, there are a ton of cool plug-ins for Mozilla that assist me in my work and seo projects and for that very reason it will remain a part of my desktop forever as far as I am concerned. Opera also has some very unique features that I have taken a liking to as well.
In search of a faster browser I decided to take another look at Avant Browser again, I was impressed with it a while back and decided to give it a try. I have been using it for a few days now and have to admit I really like it. It’s noticeably faster on some heavy ajax enabled web based applications that I use from time to time and is very intuitive. It also does a great job rendering pages, it apparently taps into Microsoft’s IE rendering engine somehow, I haven’t researched all of the technical aspects of the browser yet but plan to over the next few weeks. One concern that I do have though is that I have a couple of tools that run on my Windows Live Toolbar that I am going to have a hard time getting away from, two examples are Windows Live Writer (BLog This Button), I love Live Writer and use it exclusively for managing my blog because I honestly don’t care too much for the WordPress backend. Another tool I use is the Delicious Tag where I can quickly and easily bookmark a site and categorize it from whatever computer I am on. It’s extremely convenient and out of all of the social bookmarking tools out there this one seems to me to be one of the best.
If you are frequently accessing bulky web-based applications from your browser, give the Avant Web Browser a try and see what you think of it, here”s a link to their website: www.avantbrowser.com. I snapped the screenshot below so you can get an idea as to how it’s all laid out.
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