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Why does a fix to a program that nobody here uses, written by a company that everybody here hates matter?

Second, don't just bitch about IE. If you haven't already, check out the alternatives:

• Mozilla, now in Version 0.9.6, is very feature-rich and fast and the most standard-compliant browser in existence, but not for computers with less than 128 MB of memory.
• kmeleon (Windows) and galeon (Linux) are Mozilla derivatives with smaller footprint.
• Opera, which is closed source adware and requires registration, is a very fast browser that is especially recommended for "information surfers" because of its excellent navigation and caching.
• Konqueror is KDE's built-in browser. Thanks to Qt/Embedded and/or KDE-Cygwin, it might be ported to Windows as well.
• Lynx and W3M are up-to-date text mode browsers capable of displaying most pages which do not depend on images or animations.

That's not entirely true. Caldera did purchase the assets of Digital Research from Novell, and begain a lawsuit against Microsoft, and settled for ~$250M. They must have needed the money badly because they settled, even though their case seemed very strong and an eventual win almost guaranteed. During this time Lineo (nee Caldera) did sell embedded solutions based on the DR-DOS code base. They also purchased the Arachne web browser for DOS, ported it to their Linux offering and sold it as DR-WebSpider. At the time they sold both DR-DOS and Linux based embedded packages, targeting the Kiosk market. They also made the source to DR-DOS (Caldera OpenDOS) available for the first release or two but closed it back up due to lack of interest, the difficulty of getting the build environment setup and business reasons.

DR-DOS lives on as the bootstrap for Novell Netware and I'm sure that there were a few other clients for embedded DOS (IIRC Kavouras used it, I can't remember others). DR-DOS, AFAIK, is still available for download and personal use, and Caldera has packaged it for use with DOSEmu. So while they did use DR-DOS for the lawsuit money (A perfectly valid and appropriate lawsuit if there ever was one) they also based the beginnings of their embedded offerings on it. Lineo is one of the better embedded companies right now, gunning for Wind River's marketshare, they are not going away.

Further DR-DOS history links

• http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~kkoster/micro soft/caldera.html
• http://www2.gol.com/users/joewein/dri.html

That'll learn me not to preview.

While you're at it try reading your own site without JavaScript. You have no genuine need for JS at all and yet your documentation—like your FAQ—(ostensibly there to persuade people to get your distro) can't be easily read without turning on something that is a continuing security issue and pain in the ass. I share your interest in a lean operating system distribution based on the Linux kernal but I was forced to give up on your GNU/Linux distro because I use links.

Remember: the web is about global access. Keep all of the web's users in mind.

A quick check of the HTML indicates that CSS positioning was used; Nutscrape...doesn't know how to implement CSS positioning. Internet Explorer works properly; Mozilla and Opera should work too

So, you're in agreement: It was a braindead web design. "Use my browser or don't view my webpage" is braindead web design. Period.

It's worth noting that a properly-designed page should render reasonably well in any browser, to the limit of the browser's capabilities. Try calling up the page given here in Lynx, for instance; I wouldn't be surprised if it renders properly in Lynx (sans images, of course).

If your browser doesn't render pages properly, you might want to consider upgrading to a better browser, one that properly implements the published standards.

Arachne is a good dos web browser.

Lynx has had it almost forever. Mosaic had it. Even though I'd been using <link rel="author"> since I started making web pages, I first realized the possibilities when I saw it in iCab. There are a few others. Here are a few good articles about it.

• Jakob Nielsen's structural navigation article
• Sander's <link> page (Sander now works for Opera)
• Matthias' browser page

• Opera
• Konqueror
• Mozilla
• Galeon
• Skipstone
• Netscape

The article did not review a number of browsers. Here are a some more that you may want to try:

• Arena
• Amaya
• Chimera
• MMM
• Emacs/W3
• Lynx (text based)
• Links (text based)
• Debris (text based)
• w3m (text based)
• Libwww (text/line based)
• HowJava
• Express
• Armadillo (was Gzilla)
• Mnemonic
• Kde (file manager with builtin browser)
• mMosaic
• QtMozilla
• QWeb
• Mosaic
• Arachne
• Beest
• Beonex
• BrowseX
• Grail
• Dillo
• NetRaider

And how the disclaimers: The list above by no means complete. The browers above were listed in j-random order. Some browsers are in early alpha stage, some in Beta and others are in full release. Some of the browsers may suck, some are OK and some are good. Your mileage may vary. Sorry If I left out your favorite browser. IE was left off the list for obvious reasons. Good while supply lasts or until Bill Gates takes over. I'm not a member of the FCIA. Void where cast as (void).

Has anyone tried the linux port of Arachne? I used it on an old 486 dos laptop (yes, there is a graphical web browser for dos) and it ran pretty quickly...plus it's only about a 1 meg download.

Lynx is a good browser that works under Linux, and is more stable than IE in my experience.

I suspect you'll have to read it with lynx, because Netscape 4.77 doesn't render it too badly to be able to read.

I don't have any other browsers on-hand to test it with.

Might as well be running Lynx then. That's even faster *and* more stable than Netscape 4.xx with everything off. Plus, it has handy keyboard shortcuts to make quick browsing easier.

I already use manual smart tags when browsing the web. Using a combination of lynx, gpm, and Surfraw, I can highlight any word or phrase, switch to another virtual console, type in either "webster" (for a dictionary lookup) or "google" (for a google lookup), then paste in the term I'm interested in. I then hit return, and *BAM* I've got my results. I do this a lot. I would jump at the chance of having a one or two click process to do this for me. I might be willing to switch to IE as my Windows GUI browser for this functionality. I would be willing to start trying Mozilla if it added this feature. I would definitely be willing to install a proxy to filter out the META disabling tag, if it seems necessary. Any web authors out there who have pages that already provide Merriam-Webster and Google search links for all possible terms and phrases in the page can feel free to ignore me. The rest should get off this moral high horse of "I don't want them changing my web page."

Has everyone forgotten Teledesic? It's well-funded, affordable, and going into operation in 2005.

If Teledesic keeps its promise, 56KB dial-up will be as obsolete as gopher and Lynx.

Web sites should be preparing for universal broadband access the way software developers rely on faster processors and cheap RAM and disk storage. If the history of software is any indication, there is less risk in betting on the future than in clinging to today's technology.

---=-=-=-=-=-=---

lynx

if only lynx had dhtml/javascript support ...

Sorry. Had to say it.

But seriously... it's old stuff, but many may not be familiar with George Gilder's interesting articles, particularly Into the Fibersphere, on the implications of really, really fast networks. Like the notion that computers may become the bottleneck in the network, and that a packet would be better routed to the other side of the world and back through pure fiber, rather than though the computer next door and back. And how compression becomes passe when it's slower to decompress something than to send the thing uncompressed.

Interesting observation: when computing power was expensive, programmers were paid to conserve it, writing very tight assembly code. Now that it's cheap, programmers are expected to "throw switches at the problem". But bandwidth is expensive, so they write to conserve it. On an all-fiber network, they may be expected to "throw bandwidth at the problem".

Lots of good stuff here, especially considering it was written in 1995. Hope you like it.

* Security in *nix sucks

I'm hoping that you mean Linux security, since this isn't true at all for many other UNIX OSes. For Linux, I think the security is good enough for what it is, when it is used right. The problem is that many applications and servers don't use it right. POSIX.1e-style capabilities (see Linux-privs - POSIX.1e Capabilities for Linux, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/linux-privs/) are probably the answer. A more legitimate qualm with the *nix model is that it is coarse-grained. I think at least a handful of UNIX OS's have responded with support for Access Control Lists, which provide more fine-grained file access (see Extended Attributes and Access Control Lists for Linux, http://acl.bestbits.at).

* X Windows sucks

The X Window System catches a lot of criticism, some of it well-deserved. Most of it, however, is purely inane. It works very well, all things considered. Most of the technological deficiencies (i.e., mainly rendering technology) are resolved with modern extensions. Naturally, there are better ways to do it. We could have a much better architecture. But that's all hindsight. What we're looking at is not a transition that would be based on advantages, but on disadvantages. Until the limitations of the X Window System outstrip the convenience of using what's already there and well-supported, we have X. But Xfree86 is good enough for now. There might be alternatives in the future (Berlin, http://www.berlin-consortium.org/).

* the xterm gui-cli interface sucks

I'm stumped. You determine that you need the CLI for some task while you're in the GUI. What better interface can you get than actually getting the CLI in the GUI? (Which is what Xterm does for you.)

* all the shells suck ...

They seem to have everything I need and want, and more. Filename completion (with cycling through potential matches), redirection (especially with file descriptors, as in bash), good line editing, conditions and looping, scripting, ... Maybe I'm thinking inside the box, but I can't think of anything that I've needed to do that hasn't been made easy (if not trivial) by some shell.

* file system in *nix sucks

Well, it's not as if every UNIX uses the same file system. I don't understand this claim, really. Are you arguing against heirarchical file systems or against the file systems themselves?

* netscape in *nix sucks

It performs very well for me, as do Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) and Konqueror (Konqueuror). There's a lot of hype around Opera (Opera), but I've never tried it. There are particular deficiencies in each of these, of course, but most of them perform the task of web browsing well enough. Not to forget, of course, Lynx (Lynx).

Anyway, there are legitimate issues. Standardized package management on Linux would be nice, ACLs/Capabilities would be nice... And I'm always up for a new Window Manager or Desktop Environment. I use Sawfish/GNOME (Sawfish, http://sawmill.sourceforge.net/; GNOME, http://www.gnome.org/). But, eh, keep complaining: anything that gets me new toys to play with can't be too bad.

On the contrary, my personal site (which is built with compliant HTML 4.0 and CSS) looks just fine on a wide variety of devices. This includes Mozilla, iCab, WebTV, Lynx, and AvantGo. Separate content from style and you'll never go wrong.

Lynx here I come...

Move to IE 5.5, even though IE 5.0 is far more stable? Move to Netscape 6, even though 4.7x is far more stable, much faster, and available on more platforms? (Which version of Lynx do they want us to use?)

Seems like these guys want to install a Big Red Switch on the Web, and turn it off for everyone not surfing on the bleeding edge. No thanks.

That www.webstandards.org attempts to convert the whole Internet (good luck) -- but then it itself 100% readable from trusty ole' Lynx

While I may be a rabid anti-Microsoft zealot, the reason hotmail doesn't work for me is that it requires Javascript, which I don't use. Most of my browsing is done with Lynx, which can do https with the right patch, but not Javascript. Otherwise I use Mozilla and IE, in which I keep that nonsense disabled.

Especially the don't want to offend part. Sort of as if I say to my customers:

I swear, but the programmers you employ truely write the most godawful SQL code I've ever seen. Man, you folks must be such idiots. But really sir, no offense, this is just to educate you.

YMMV, but I perceive such an attitude as extremely arrogant. Maybe a lot of people like to function in a whiz-bang, multimedia, MP3infested, 30zillion color, streaming world.

This guy is yelling into my face that I'm an asshole, just because I prefer not to waste my time with megs of downloads of stupid shit, like ActiveX controls that corrupt my system or dancing coffee cups, written in Java, OK?

In my book the guy's a fucking arrogant dweeb.

He has certainly every right in the world to target whoever he wants, but he might consider a message that doesn't blurt to the world that he's full of it.

But then I mostly use Lynx most of the time anyway.

Lynx

You know the choice isn't just between Mozilla and IE. There are other browsers available. You ever tried Opera? How about Lynx?

w3m is a full-featured character-cell web browser. Unlike Lynx, w3m supports tables, making web site layout look more like what the designers intended.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Hmmm... Two free pieces of software I can think of off the top of my head are Lynx and vim. Both are quite Mac friendly. But IIRC, both require you to use MPW to compile...

Vi IMproved: http://www.vim.org
Lynx: http://lynx.browser.org

Any other examples?

--Matt

First, your 8-track analogy fails because Lynx can handle HTML like most browsers. 8-tracks players can't play any media that's currently in production.

Second, most web sites that are non-functional under Lynx are so because of the incompetence of the designer. Using javascript when it is not necessary (e.g. for basic navigation) is a sign of being an idiot, not of being up-to-date. Checking the client and refusing anything other than certain versions of certain browsers is also a sign of mental retardation.

Lynx is still a viable option for browsing, and is my preferred option despite the fact that I have others available. Most of the headaches experienced by Lynx users are purely unnecessary and are the result of unskilled web design.

Of course, I'm sure you already know this. I follow the Slashdot troll scene and am somewhat familiar with the tactics. I suggest that when you troll in the future, you do it from a less blatant account. People might take you more seriously.

Have a nice day.

Is it just me or does anyone else have a really hard time reading that article? I mean, using arial font at such a small text size makes web sites such as these virtually unreadable. (At least to a non-MS web user) Don't these webmasters believe in viewability across browsers? Sorry to complain but I hate having to change my character set from Western ISO 8859-1 to Western ISO 8859-15 and back every time I go to read one of these pages.

Ok... and for the moderators... I'm seriously looking forward to this movie. I've been a Batman fan as far back as I could open a comic book and look at the pictures. :-) Just hope they do it right this time.

No cookie.

To access this site your browser must be accepting cookies.

This even after I specifically told Lynx to accept their cookie. Looks like someone needs to learn how to properly construct a web site.

Here's a good idea just run a web browser like say lynx. Then they get access to the net and all you have to deal with is the written smut and the like ( I personally am very font of written smut but that's a discussion for another day).
Another good idea. Would be to do a content grabbing method like spidering or crawling the web.
Want to know a really good secret. Operate a proxy server that you route the stuff through and keep your cached documents on that you grabbed. Lynx basically can already do this and has for some time. Only problem is when applied to slashdot you get crap when you want the comments. My solution to this is actually to get the lynx2-7 code and compile it. However it does need one little change there is a conflict in the interpretation of basic error logging in one file in the WWW library when building that conflicts with stdio.h. It's their fault and you just change the applicted file with the correct line in stdio.h. That being said it allows for crawling via slashdot and keeps nested mode (which relies on nested tables) working and you can keep your login via the login string in your Preferences that slashdot allows.

Now that being said I really do think that allowing access to the net is almost a necessity for some things. I also believe that people should have all the access they can handle. Someone mentioned smartcards for access to your computer system. I submit that a person should get graduated access to various portions of the web based on some loosely defined age criterion. At first access could be granted via simple under 18 over 18 type of thing. Make people who want to access the over 18 classification in a seperate bank of machines that are kept secluded and away from youngsters.
Perhaps a finer tuning for the junior high could be imposed. Just have an initial fee to cover media costs for the smart card media and allow for logging of all sites that are not agreed on via the smart card and then change the parameters.

People who act unreasonably may be the victors of the day but it comes at a very high price. You personally reviewing the materials that people need on a case by case basis might be the only option unless you have the desire to write the first AI bot for web filtering in perl.
Whoever picked an area near a junior high should be beaned on the head. I suspect that whatever you choose these kids are going to fully stress test this system.

Lynx never impressed me. A Lynx clone, known as Links, can render tables. w3m, a HTML pager, can also render tables (and frames). Slashdot in text never looked so good.

Lynx never impressed me. A Lynx clone, known as Links, can render tables. w3m, a HTML pager, can also render tables (and frames). Slashdot in text never looked so good.

Moderators, please forgive me for veering offtopic, but this lad needs to be enlightened.

There are several alternative browsers on the market. They're all maturing slowly and some have even got features that Exploder doesn't already, despite Micro$oft's corporate feature bloating.

Konquerer, part of the KDE Project, is another good example of an underdog browser that's starting to take hold in the market. It's support for standards which make a viable browser are almost unmatched at the moment (in the alternative browser market).

Xemacs has a Browser called W3. It supports the majority of standards that make a viable Browser, and is written in Elisp, thus compatible with the Xemacs editor.

Of course, we can't forget Mozilla. It's the open-source version of Netscape 5. Probably the best browser out at the moment aside from Exploder/Win32, it runs on many platforms and is the most likely browser to take over the Exploder market share. It already enjoys a large market share in the UNIX world, just under that of Netscape 4.x. This thing supports nearly everything, including Alpha channels. Watch out for it.

Go read the Slackware devel forums and post if you want new packages

From the standpoint of a business you are a poor potential customer choice.

I agree with you on this point. Sheeple that will accept whatever crap a business peddles make far better customers than those who aren't willing to be fucked around and will demand the quality that they deserve. Just ask Micros~1.

IME customers go both ways - perhaps yours want whizz-bang graphics that explode off the page at them. When I was teaching a course on browsing the web with Netscape, most of the newbie-students I was teaching were overwhelmed by how loud many of the pages were. ("It's so busy" were one's exact words.)

As for hardware, running Netscape 4.0 on a P120/16MB is a painful experience. Netscape 6 is miserable. Opera is bearable but costs money. None of them are open source, and if it was my decision my Win95 install would be on the losing end of a HD reformat. I am far happier with lynx and w3m.

Lynx requires a 386 and several MB of RAM -- if old, cheap hardware is its target, why don't they support DOS on a 286 with 1MB of RAM?

I would imagine because lynx is 32-bit code. There is a browser called Bobcat, based on Lynx, that has a subset of its functionality and runs on 16-bit machines."

Don't whine to me about the situation you have chosen to put yourself in.

If you think I'm whining, that's your problem. I wouldn't be using lynx if I didn't think that I was further ahead in doing so. When I come across a page that looks a mess and fire up Netscape to view it, I seldom find that I'm rewarded with a page proportionate to the effort required. More often, the site is remarkably content-free.

• Edit > Preferences > Advanced > [ ] Automatically load images
• JunkBuster
• Lynx or its ports at fdisk.com

Where are these ads again?

I have decided to thoroughly support adblocking. I believe (but I can't prove) that if you can't support your site without ads, you have lower quality stuff. Take PBS... no matter how people complain about their fundraising campaigns, it's still here. And it's the only radio station on the dial (monopoly alert) that plays classical music. (WNED FM, 94.5 MHz, Buffalo NY) So I say that a non-commercial web can exist, it will just be sans news... like a library.

Actually, Google does have ads but says no to 468x60 pixel animated GIF advertising; instead, Google inserts clean-looking text ads; the simple "surf with w3m or lynx and don't get ads" trick no longer works because Google is designed to look as good in character-cell browsers as in graphical browsers.

And no, I don't work for Google :-)

Anyway always, when I see png-file, which I can't seen directly with browser

What are you using? The Lynx browser or some other character-cell browser? :-) The latest releases of stable Netscape (4.72) and IE (5.0x) support basic PNG images. Mozilla supported them last time I tried (M14). If you don't have a busy background, you can use non-transparent PNG files the same color as your background. You can test your browser's PNG capabilities at my web page; all the images (except the animated banners which are NOT served from my site) are PNG or JPEG.

Maybe you could convince one of those responsible for that page to help ?

As for separating design/content, I'd use CSS. It downloads quickly, doesn't require much server recources, and in my expirience it renders much faster than table-formating (./ is hopless here ...) It also degrades gracefully.

Now with mozilla/Netscape 6 soon to be released, css will be pretty much uniformely supported, including layers++. It works with lynx(degrades gracefully), emacs, iexplorer and soon netscape (already works for simply formatting pages, but the fancy stuff is a nightmare in current netscape... and you thought microsoft didn't adhere to standards...)

I'd write a "try-out" page, for making the design, looking something like:

inclue your style-sheet(s) in the header
<h1 class="banner">Welcome to bar-page</h1>
<p class="normal">
One little paragraph right here...
</p>
(...)

And then use a "wysiwyg"-stylesheet editor for formatting it, and the go back, and replace the content through php, or something similar (I guess the choice of a true database vs. just text-files depends on size of the web-site, and who/how it will be updated). I have used dreamveawer(from macromedia - win/mac only) a bit - it is very good, and at least the previous version pretty much preserved whatever type of indenting/formating you used on you stylesheets/html-source, and that is something few wysiwyg tools do, in my not-so-far-reaching experience.

And just to repeat the important stuff: CSS rul3z!
You really have to try the speed-thing to see it for yourself: Make one page with table-formatting and a ton of font-tags, and one that just embeds a style-sheet. Download-size drops, and rendering go relative (as in approaching speed-o-light :). And it's cutting-edge too! AND your page will be much easier to genereate/manipulate with scripts/php/whatever, once you do that. Better searching/easier to implement searching, easier to maintain, cooler, faster, improves your sex-life, saves disk-space, ... oh I'm rambeling, sorry...

Slashdot light is great, I remember when I first found out how to make /. come up in the fast mode. But if you really want to enjoy the /. experience the best possible way, get yourself a free copy of Lynx. It loads up fast even on a slow machine, and in terms of downloading pages, it's so fast it makes your eyes pop. If you're running Linux your distro probably has Lynx already, or if you're on a Win9x or NT box, you can even get a version for Win32, and it's really great. I mean, it's not ideal for every web page; it isn't what I'd use to browse Playboy.com, but for a text-based site like this one, you just can't beat Lynx.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Hmmmm... Did they ever force anyone to buy Microsoft products? No. Did they harm consumers by forcing them to buy Microsoft? No. Consumers have always had alternatives like Unix, MacOS, WordPerfect, NetWare, etc. etc. By their own fairly clear definition, Microsoft is not, and has never been, a violator of the unConstitutional anti-trust laws.

Clearly, you and I have different definitions of the word "force," as I would answer those first two questions with an unqualified yes. No, BillG never put a gun to anybody's head. But Microsoft did quite clearly threaten to bankrupt OEMs who did not toe the Microsoft line on how the sales channel should operate. The original 1995 antitrust complaint (PC manufactures being required to pay MSFT for Windows licenses for every PC shipped, regardless of the actual OS installed) is about as cut and dried a case of forcing consumers to buy your product that I can think of, short of the few de jure monopolies that we've had in this country.

I am quite clear on the point that Microsoft, "by their own fairly clear definition," do not consider themselves a monopoly. However, I (and more importantly, Judge Jackson) do not accept Microsoft's self-serving definition of "monopoly" any more than than I feel compelled to accept President Clinton's self-serving definitions of "sex" and "is."

As for your repeated assertions that antitrust laws are unconstitutional, feel free to point out to me an analysis of exactly which Article or Amendment the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or any other antitrust legislation violates.

So far as I know, nobody has ever been forced to use IE to browse a single website.

Try browsing Microsoft's pages sometime with Netscape, or better yet, Lynx. Now, imagine having a job that depends on getting technical information from Microsoft. Or doesn't that count as "force," since the threat is only to my livelihood, and not directly to my person?

What's so bad about enriching all of Microsoft's stockholders? What's so bad about making many Microsoft employees instant millionaires? What's so bad about making products that are at least usable enough so that plenty of people buy them and increase their personal and corporate productivity? What's so terrible about having Bill concentrate his wealth?

Nothing, if he can do it ethically and legally.

The point is, he didn't.

If BillG and MSFT had achieved and maintained their dominance simply through superior product value, saavy marketing, and innovating new goods as claimed, there would be no problem. When they use their dominance in the OS to destroy rivals in applications, when they dictate to PC manufactures what OS may be installed and what icons shall appear on the desktop, and when they can rely on their superior cash reserves to buy out or destroy potentially competetive products, they are no longer competing by offering value, but simply attempting to manipulate a market to their advantage. This is unethical, and it is illegal, rightfully so.

And speaking of "private" vs. "public" concentrations of wealth, how about having at least one person in this country whose own wits, sacrifice and hard work have made him worth as much as 1/1000th of the yearly budget of the Federal Government of These United States, not to mention 1/10000th of the National Debt.

It would be neat if such a person existed, but William Gates III is not that person.

I suspect this is just pointless -- I concede that Bill Gates never took a handgun, walked through the electronic stores of the nation, and threatened people with their lives if they didn't walk up to the register and buy Windows and Office. Anything less than this, it appears that you won't recognize as unethical and illegal behavior. So be it.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.-- B. Franklin

I can quote Franklin too. I agree with Ben's sentiment -- which is why I'm glad the government is doing its job, and dealing with a dangerous monopolist before liberty is further eroded ...

It may be very difficult for modern people to imagine a world in which men are not generally admired for coveteousness and crushing their neighbors; but I assure them that such strange patches of an earthly paradise do really remain on earth.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Outline of Sanity"

The survey is missing my choice - a browser that works, don't much care whose.

Over the few years on NetBSD, I've tried Chimera (surprisingly good), Arena (you call that a GUI?), Lynx, Netscape (remotely), possibly Amaya, Plume, w3/xemacs, probably others I don't remember... oh, yeah, kfm of course (It was wonderful until it quit showing GIFs and PNGs for a reason I've never figured out). I've been on pins and needles for Opera to come out; it came to be the only reason to use Winduhs and if it ultimately is only for Linux I may switch from NetBSD.

I finally got so desperate for a browser that I implemented one in TCL around TkHTML. I don't need Java or plugins or cookies or frames or all that junk - even CSS can go, I just need HTML/3.2, GIF (if permitted), PNG, JFIF, and a few standard protocols!! It's a pretty pass when what I can cobble together in a week is better for me than the other stuff... (PS: Hmmp. My forms usually work, but /. won't take 'em... I'll have to use Lynx.)

Why don't I work on Mozilla or kfm or Konqueror? I don't much feel like playing with DLing ±30 MB (you're lucky to have 28800 kb/s here) of C++ (I could never grok C++) and then try to fight to have my changes taken back.)

The survey is missing my choice - a browser that works, don't much care whose.

Over the few years on NetBSD, I've tried Chimera (surprisingly good), Arena (you call that a GUI?), Lynx, Netscape (remotely), possibly Amaya, Plume, w3/xemacs, probably others I don't remember... oh, yeah, kfm of course (It was wonderful until it quit showing GIFs and PNGs for a reason I've never figured out). I've been on pins and needles for Opera to come out; it came to be the only reason to use Winduhs and if it ultimately is only for Linux I may switch from NetBSD.

I finally got so desperate for a browser that I implemented one in TCL around TkHTML. I don't need Java or plugins or cookies or frames or all that junk - even CSS can go, I just need HTML/3.2, GIF (if permitted), PNG, JFIF, and a few standard protocols!! It's a pretty pass when what I can cobble together in a week is better for me than the other stuff... (PS: Hmmp. My forms usually work, but /. won't take 'em... I'll have to use Lynx.)

Why don't I work on Mozilla or kfm or Konqueror? I don't much feel like playing with DLing ±30 MB (you're lucky to have 28800 kb/s here) of C++ (I could never grok C++) and then try to fight to have my changes taken back.)

Is this really a viable solution? I disagree with the moderator's opinion that the parent posting is "insightful".

Is someone going to create a trusted root CA that distributes server certificates free for the asking and that the major browsers are going to recognize as a valid signer by default? Or maybe Verisign will change their business strategy and just give away certs for asking nicely =)

And what about accessibility? Not everyone has an SSL-enabled web browser, let alone a 128 bit browser (I mean, it seems silly to get everyone to use http over SSL if we're not going to push for everyone to use 128 bit, eh?). My mom can use a web browser without much difficulty, but she probably isn't going to visit fortify.net to upgrade her browser to 128 bit. People who use speech readers with text-only browsers like Lynx may not be so keen to have to compile in SSL support themselves to be able to access the web. I don't think I have SSL support on my Palm either. Does WebTV have SSL support? blah blah blah etc etc etc....

There's the whole SSL performance issue too I suppose for those of us still trying to make cheap web servers out of leftover 486s (although if you were really hot and bothered by performance perhaps you wouldn't be using a 486 =)).

And this particular discussion is wasting its energies by focusing on what we as information providers or end-users can do to make up for government efforts to build tap-ability into our networks.

1. wp: Start the word processor
   
2. www: Start the web browser
   
3. help: Show this list of commands and change back to the home c:\ directory.

The last time I checked NPL gave way too much control over to Netscape/AOL to be a seriously considered as a non-profit, volunteer based effort (and I sure wouldn't contribute to any other kind,) now I see that they have an MPL in response to the criticism they received.

Yes, the NPL is indeed another one of those sneaky bastard "open source" licenses.. However, it was finalized sometime in 1998, and I don't believe AOL bought Netscape until 1999, IIRC (I don't know, do I? =P). I'm not too excited about the MPL either, however, although it is better than the NPL.. Being somewhat of a die-hard GPL'er, I'm annoyed with the MPL's incompatibility with it..

Could anyone more proficient in legalese comment on MPL, and the differences between it and L/GPL?

You may want to read On the Netscape Public License by Richard Stallman. It covers the differences between the NPL, MPL, and GPL. The GNU Project Web site is also an excellent source of information with regards to free software in general, the GNU philosophy, and the history of the movement. ;) Ok, so, enough shameless plugs..

And whatever the answer, could someone just please start a GPL browser project? Or is that being worked on already?

There are a couple well-known ones.. And a few others that I can't think of right now.. The first, and most obvious, would be Lynx, but I rather doubt that is what you are looking for.. On the other hand, there is Emacs/W3, which you may find to be of a little more interest.