Now that I'm getting the hang of installing apps on the Eee PC (I still maintain that it's too hard but that's an old rant) I'm looking at a few apps to make the Eee PC even better.

The installed browser, Firefox 2, is competent enough but it's a little long in the tooth. After a little research I've settled on two candidates - Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. Here are my impressions.

Opera 9.5

Installation was dead easy with Opera coming in a deb package that installs simply. The main trick was to download the correct version - the one for Xandros 1.0 and 1.1. The version for Versions 2 or above didn't work for me.

Once it was installed, I imported my Firefox bookmarks and was up and running in a few short minutes.

Browsing was definitely faster than with Firefox 2. The user interface is very clean with the default theme making a nice change from the regular grey/blue toolbar arrangement.

Tabbed browsing works nicely although I was annoyed that my favoured Ctrl-Click on links for new tabs opened the new tabs in front of the current tab with no option (that I could find) to open new tabs behind the current one unless I used the right click and selected the appropriate option from the context menu. However, this is a small complaint and not a showstopper for me.

Given the Eee PC's limited screen resolution, one of the key factors in any Eee PC browser is its ability to zoom and deal with wide web pages. Using the Ctrl-Minus and Ctrl+Plus keystrokes, it's easy to increase and decrease the size of pages with text and graphics scaling in 10% increments.

You can download Opera from the Opera Download page.

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is a sensational browser. It's fast, offers good zoom for pages exceeding the Eee PC's display width and offers a familiar look and feel.

I know this will draw the ire of some quarters but without this excellent guide at Eeeuser I'd never had got it up and running. I needed to install the GTK 2 library (whatever the heck that is!), edit a script file and enter a bunch of commands in a terminal window.

Once it was installed, Firefox 3 was excellent to use.The page zoom in and out feature worked well.

Where Firefox beat Opera was its ability to render pages nicely. If you take a close look at the screen grab from Opera and compare it to Firefox, you'll notice that Firefox does a much nicer job of rendering fonts.

Conclusions

At the end of the day there are a couple of things that web browsers have to do. These are render pages correctly and be easy to use. At the end of the day, Firefox, while a little less refined in its default appearance (in my opinion) is certainly easy to use and it is better at rendering pages.

While Firefox was a pain to install I don't expect that it's a task I'll need to repeat often.

So, the winnder is Firefox 3 but not by a lot.

 Eee PC • Firefox 3 • Opera