After seeing the demo have to say it's worth giving a try. I'm using MyIE 2 all the time at the moment and it's very cool especially with the tabbed interface. So I'm real curious to see how iRider's one works.

Aqua, in regards to your comment on right mouse usage, if you hold the right mouse button down for a second, it brings up the context menu.

Chris,

As for the favorties, you can have multiple favorite tabs open at once thus get to a page by two clicks.

I didn't even realize MyIE2 had aliases so you just taught me something.

I am finding that some of this is not that great for casual browsing but for research, this browser is slick seeing as how I can keep open the pages I want.

Hey, ya know I never knew MyIE2 has aliases either! So ya taught me too, and yes yes I know........if I ever bothered to read the readme's it's probably in there, but I'd rather just leap head first in to an app and be sorry later hahaha!

" Super duper memory hog - this comes from keeping every single page you've visited in memory... at all times. After an hour or two of browsing this is like having 80+ tabs open in Mozilla. "

That's not quite right. iRider utilizes available memory to cache pages, but will purge them to accomodate other applications or other pages. Mozilla doesn't do this -- open lots of tabs and it'll thrash.
http://www.irider.com/help/ToolsMenu.htm#MemoryTab


" IE rendering engine (the Mozilla Gecko engine renders pages much better than IE does often, and supports more advanced CSS features) "

IE does seem to be falling behind the latest standards, but I think "much better" is a stretch. It's extremely rare to run into problem sites with IE/iRider, for the very reason that IE is so common (for better or for worse ).


" However, there are two features that are really lacking. One is the a standard Favorites menu. Instead you have to open a favorites page and navigate it by clicking thought it (assuming you have your favorites organized into a hierarchy) in which each favorite folder corresponds to an entry on the sidebar. "

Compare the two. In other browsers with a menu:
-- Click the Favorites menu. (In IE this'll be a single column with its silly scrolling feature)
-- Click intermediate folders if necessary
-- Click an item to open a page
(Then do the above again if you want to open more than one.)

With iRider:
-- Click the Favorites icon, or the item in the page list (which can be a subfolder), or press F8
-- Click intermediate folders if necessary
-- Click an item (and possibly more than one with Surf-Ahead or opening selected bookmarks)

Granted, there's more mouse motion, but the number of steps is the same, isn't it? And there are mitigating advantages. When you're on a page (perhaps a page you want to remove from Favorites), click Parent (F9) and you're on the Favorites folder where it came from.

" It just doesn't seem right to pay $30 for a browser... "

Yeah, I mean after all, there are some games that cost that much! I've been granted permission to say that sales are brisk.

" MyIE2 and AvantBrowser are both excellent MDI/tabbed browsers "

If tabs do the job for you, then there are freebies out there. We believe iRider is qualitatively different: a visual map of pages, organized by site, that you can riffle through, opening multiple links/bookmarks at once in various ways, bookmarking multiple pages, etc.

Dave
Wymea Bay - iRider

As for the memory, I went to "Great Rides" page, clicked on the "California Coastal Records Project" link and memory usage zoomed well past 200Mb. Fortunately, I have 512Mb RAM and so I was able to keep working, but it would have super slowed my old computer that I got rid of in May. Even so, it took several hours for all of those links to load (over dial-up). On the positive side, once I closed out all that stuff and went back to the original list, it released its memory much better than the Mozilla based browsers do when you close tabs. I was also able to keep memory usage around only 35Mb by changing it to navigate within the same window instead of opening a new tab. Of course, this eliminates part of what they were trying to do about having a graphical history, but I think that is overrated.

Usability increased (for me) once I moved the surf ahead to the middle mouse button and made the context menus available normally through the right mouse button.

Another positive I didn't mention above, their search page is excellent, very useful, well thought out categories, and good layout.

A minor complaint: Nearly all Windows apps skin well with WindowBlinds, but iRider doesn't. What I'm mainly referring to is the background of the toolbars and stuff which are just a plain gray.

And since it seems an iRider guy is here, a suggestion: Have the sidebar start out with the largest size thumbnails, when the list of pages goes below the bottom of the pane, have the thumbnail size decrease, keep repeating this until it's just a plain button/tab list

Thanks for responding to us

I really really like the thumbnail images organized in a threaded fashion. I like to have alot of pages open and with tabs, they end up displaying in a multiple tab rows. And when you click a tab, that row comes to the forefront which is really confusing since it throws off my sense of "tab location". The threaded thumbnail list gets around this.

Sorry, but I still don't like the way the favorites are organized. It's actually only two clicks with a favorites menu. One click to pull down the menu, then mouse over a favorites folder to expand that section, then click a second time to launch the favorite. For me, that's much faster and quicker than navigating a tree control, especially if whatever node I click in the control has their own entry in thumb nail list. That's just more stuff that I have to clean up and close. That's just not a paradigm that feels efficient in the way I want to navigate my favorites.

What I'd really love to see is aliases for the address bar entries as I outlined above. This really is a time saver and is much quicker for semi-frequently accessed pages (some thing that's referenced more than most favorites, but does not warrent "pinning") rather then hunting and pecking with the mouse.

Basically, I hate unnecessary mouse clicks and GUI-navigating to get at functionality which should be quickly available

BTW, for some reason, I could not get the mouse wheel to cycle through the thumbnails. I had to hold the left mouse click down and move the mouse up and down the list. Perhaps I needed to change some configuration setting or I misunderstood the concept

I sent iRider an email about posting this newthread and am very happy to see someone show up in person. If nothing else it shows they're on the ball.

I prefer the iRider idea to tabs mainly because when I am hunting for info, shopping for products or whatever involves lots of research, having the thumbnails there is more intuitive than tabs.

If any of you have had the opportunity to see the videos MS did showing their research on interfaces, it proved that the mind is better at remembering spacial information than any other kind. Having thumbnails has proven that theory to me. I can quickly scroll down and my eye catches the visual of the page before I even have to see the name.

Tomorrow I will do a comparison with memory usage of this versus MyIE2 and see if it really makes a difference. I haven't noticed any problems here and I had 62 windows open at one point.

I second Chris' motion for aliases... great idea,

I started a thread in the Message Board about alternative browsers, and mentioned iRider. Since it doesn't do skinning, I didn't think that it was a suitable topic for the news section on this site. But, since it is here, well, I love iRider, and paid for it. But I think $30 is a trivial amount of money for a good product, even if good products are also available for free.

I personally found that adding a new page for every single navigation to be way too much, which is the default. But you can set the navigation to stay in current page. Then new pages are created only on demand. Much less clutter on the pages tab.

Some may say that then I might as well use any other tabbed browser, and it is true that I'd probably be satisfied with other tabbed browsers. In fact, some other options do have features that iRider doesn't. But, some of the nice touches like the way they do the search, and the browse ahead to me made the difference to be worth using it instead of the free options.

Whether or not it is a memory hog or not, I don't really notice. I have lots of RAM, so if iRider uses it in order to make my surfing faster, that is fine by me. But I can say that I'm a fairly "hard" user, in that I'm on the web for hours a day, most days. And although I've only been using iRider for about a week now, I've had no problems with it. So to the person that said iRider is fine for playing with, but not full time, I disagree. I'm using it full time and am happy.

But I hope they add skinning in 3.0!

so many browsers, so little time.... and it DOESN"T SKIN!!! OMG

Well, it still sounds good.

P.S. The main things I like about Firebird are the perfect pop-up blocking, the ability to easily add extensions (which are extremely useful, using the ad-block extension I almost never see any banner ads), and the fact I can customize the entire thing.

When I say customizing the entire thing, I mean I can drag and drop the GUI into any form I want, add custom elements with two clicks of the mouse, and remove any unwanted stuff just as easily.

For goodness sake why bother! You can only look at one page at a time anyway. Seems an awful lot of effort was put into something that is cumbersome and would take someone with six eyes going different directions all at once just to surf the web.

Lightstar... if you only hit one of two pages a day, sure that's fine. However, comparing prices, specs, researching, etc. having more than one page loaded at a time is a big time saver.

Chris... valid point on the go button but weren't you the one who said you don't like the mouse?