Hmmm, from the maker of FeedDemon I’ve understood that the Gecko plugin has not been developed for a long time anymore, which made me wary of this great feature Sleipnir seems to have: Gecko rendering. I couldn’t find the version of the Gecko engine used on Sleipnir’s site, but I did find this post about an error message regarding it:
[ogasawalrus.com]

If you look at the error message, you see that the plugin is using Gecko 20051003, i.e. a version of the rendering engine released early October 2005!!! That version will likely have many bugs and perhaps even security problems.

In other words: this is just another shell for the IE Trident engine, anyone should forget about the Gecko option.

Yikes! I didn’t realize that was the case at all. That would be terrible if it’s using a version of Gecko that is that old.

If you look at the error message, you see that the plugin is using Gecko 20051003, i.e. a version of the rendering engine released early October 2005!!! That version will likely have many bugs and perhaps even security problems.

In other words: this is just another shell for the IE Trident engine, anyone should forget about the Gecko option.

They’ve made a browser that can run two rendering engines, one of which is Gecko, and has extensions. Am I missing something or did they just invent Firefox 2?

I know that a lot of readers will laugh at what I am about to state, but it really irks me to no end that mostly all of these supposed IE shell “replacement” browsers repeatedly fail to offer cut, copy, and paste buttons to place on the toolbar. Yes, I am well aware of being able to copy & paste via right-click commands, but I don’t always like to do that. It is much faster for me to simply click on the button for each of those commands, so I am curious if Ryan can tell me why these new browser developers omit such basic funtion as cut, copy & paste buttons? Some of us still like having those buttons in our toolbars.

That’s something I never really thought about. Personally I always use the keyboard commands, and I’ve never been one to use toolbar buttons for these sort of things. I’d have to imagine that the developers would add these buttons if they were requested though.

Besides, most sites are compatible with the Gecko engine so why would you want the IE engine then?

It really depends on what country you’re in. I think it’s Russia or something who’s developers never really test with Firefox, and so a lot of sites don’t even work with it.

I’ve actually been wondering lately if Opera should just switch over to the Gecko rendering engine. They can then work with Mozilla to make it better, and then everyone really wins. I think that would please a lot of the Opera users, and it would definitely fix a lot of the rendering problems the browser has.

Strangely enough Ryan, on my PC Maxthon uses around 30MB RAM, while Sleipnir around 60MBs. However, I have to say that I have installed 3-4 plugins on both.

Sleipnir’s options panel is a bit confusing. Maxthon and Avant, on the other hand, have a more simplified interface plus many more features. I couldn’t find any options for blocking Ads (like the Adblock feature in Maxthon) but I guess you can install an existing script just like in Opera.

The only reason I would use Sleipnir over Firefox would be because of the low system resources it uses. I’d use it over Maxthon because of the Gecko engine. However, at this point Sleipnir has less features than both browsers, thus I’ll stick with those.

Having said that, Opera seems to combine all the good features of Firefox, Maxthon and Sleipnir, without any drawbacks (apart from some sites not rendering properly), so Opera is at the moment my fav browser.