where technology is simplified
Archive for October 31, 2007
Why I picked Avant over Internet Explorer
Oct 31st
Avant browser is a relatively lesser known competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. But it has quite a few interesting features that make it an attractive alternative to IE 7 and undoubtedly a winner over IE 6.
Why I chose Avant over the XP’s built in IE 6?
Avant offers several significant enhancements over IE6 such as tabbed browsing, integrated search, delete browsing history and temporary interfiles with one click, integrated password manager and several others. Al of these features combined make it a very attractive alternative to IE6. From download.com review:
… options for blocking the download of Flash media, pictures, video, sounds, and ActiveX components, so users can efficiently use their bandwidth and speed up page loading. All opened pages can be stopped, refreshed, closed, or arranged with one click. It also comes with built-in RSS reader.
Why choose Avant over the Vista’s built in IE 7?
Both have tabbed browsing features and pretty similar looks. In fact Avant uses IE’s core – this means under the hood Avant is basically Internet Explorer with a few extras. But the primary reason why I chose Avant is speed. And not just millisecond speeds. Avant takes just an eye blink to open since the time you click on its icon.
Unscientific Experiment
I tested both browsers on a 2 year old Dell machine running XP with a 3GHz processor and 1GB memory. IE took anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds depending on how soon after computer start up I clicked on the shortcut. Avant on the other hand took less than 1.5 seconds – even when I clicked the shortcut directly after computer startup. I understand this is not a scientific test by any measure. But according to CNet statistics downloads for Avant has crossed 18 million mark while Firefox is at 11 million. Obviously I am not the only one noticing an advantage by using this browser.
Features
Avant also has a bunch of other features. I will let the Avant site say it like it is. The several awards received by Avant are displayed on a dedicated page. It has also been featured on Download.com and has a 4.5/5 score.
Top Rated Features of Avant Browser (from Avant’s site)
Online Profile Storage AutoFills Flash Animation Filter Built-in AD/Pop-up Blocker Built-in RSS/ATOM Reader Additional Mouse Functions Multi-Window Browsing Real Full Screen Mode and Alternative Full Desktop mode Built-in Search Engine Full IE Compatibility Control Your Privacy Safe Recovery Customizable Skins
Yahoo! Search – The Next Generation
Oct 31st
Google vs. Yahoo – the two major internet giants go head-to-head against each other in online search. According to the latest Nielsen-NetRatings U.S. Search Share Rankings Google caters to 54% of the total web-searches trailed by Yahoo coming in at about 20% But this has not slowed down the development of Yahoo Search in any way – in fact Yahoo seems to have taken on this challenge. Yahoo is currently testing out their next generation search engine on an isolated corner of the web – on the Yahoo Australia site.
Yahoo! alpha search results include a sidebar on the right showing results from a variety of other sources in addition web-search results in the main window. This is quite similar to the Searchmash results that I had previously discussed. Sidebar shows results from – Photos by Flickr, Yahoo!7 Answers, Videos by YouTube, News by Yahoo!7 News Search, Wikipedia, Opensearch & Sponsored Results by Yahoo! Search Marketing. This can be customized to a great extent by going to the Preferences page. If you search for ebay auctions a lot more than Yahoo Answers then you can set your preferences accordingly.
Y! Alpha Search provides a number of site-search widgets that can be customized for your site. You can select the color of the search box, copy paste the code and done!
Simply customize the sources for your users (such as adding your site as the primary info source), prioritize the layout then copy and paste the code below into your web page and voila! Your users will be getting a great search experience in no time.
