Slashdot Mirror

• 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).

OK, Mozilla is big and bloated and Opera fits on one floppy (still?), but I was kinda hoping that Mnemonic would get closer to being stable... at least to the point of being able to use it for reading Slashdot ;-)

However, now www.mnemonic.org seems to have turned into something else entirely... I've been away for a week, but I can't find this mentioned on any news sites... :-(

Doesn't anyone care about Mnemonic anymore? Has it been dropped because of this? Is everyone flocking to Mozilla instead?

pastie

Would it help you if you saw it as naked capitalism: 'May the best product win'?

This has nothing to do with capitalism. For examples see Microsoft.

Capitalism is about everyone trying to make the most money. And most of the people losing. Forget about the American dream. It's has not worked for ages. (If it ever worked at all)

Back ontopic.

The Konqueror seems like a nice browser judging from the screenshots. One thing I don't understand is the idea that in endorses the Everything is a browser-ideology. I don't understand why anyone would want that kind of UI.

I agree however with the original posters idea that we don't need another browser that is competing with all the others. check Mnemonic for a good example. GPL'd and extensible. Designed to be toolkit independent.

Code reuse should be one of Open Source/Free Software's greatest gains.

I dismissed the "Windows only" small text on the side of the box, and bought the HP 710 Color deskjet.
It uses PPA also, and Ghostscript can't handle it. There's a working black and white driver at this address (for HP 7x0, 820 and 1000 series) and I've just found that the same people are currently working on a color driver (see sourceforge. Since HP won't release specs, they are forced to hack on the windows drivers to find the printer protocol.
It's been a while since I'm using the b/w driver, and I'm too cheap to spend color ink testing alpha drivers... But I'll give this new drivers a spin.
Anyway, I think that every manufacturer that wants to approach the open source world should first release specs for all their products (HP: does that ring a bell?)

go Mnemonic!!!

Mozilla promises to fix some of these problems, but nevertheless still seems to be trying to be an all-things-to-all-men browser. This is one of the attributes which makes Internet Exploder a security nightmare.

KFM makes a reasonable sort of browser and is quite light-weight (about 4MB plus libraries offhand) but still muffs tables badly on occasion, often responds to a redirect by closing (OTOH it displays PNGs better than Netscape), and isn't too savvy about HTTPS protocol.

Konqueror, I gather, fits the still-rather-broad niche between these, as Mnemonic fits the showing-equations-right lightweight browser niche.

As with any project (including KDE's browser and Mozilla), Mnemonic has gone through several design stages and we have thrown away the entire codebase several times now. It's not very strange that only very few people know about it, since none of those times did we ever reach a point were the program did anything remotely useful.

At the moment, things are, however, progressing very rapidly. Apart from a very small core library (some 230 Kb), everything from network protocols to rendering engines is in separate modules. There is a rather decent generic XML parser, a completely GUI-toolkit independent rendering engine, network protocol modules (with SSL being added at this very moment) and a GTK based layer on top of that.

Just as the Konqueror team kept things relatively quiet, we have decided to work out the basics without giving too much publicity (although of course the code has always been available for anyone to look at). But as soon as the table layout algorithms have been debugged, we will start to release binaries (as that is probably the first time that the browser is really useful).

For more discussion, please join the mailing list; more info and status updates can be found at http://www.mnemonic.org.

You forgot to mention Mnemonic. More details at
http://www.mnemonic.org/.

You forgot to mention Mnemonic. More details at http://www.mnemonic.org/.

I know you said "effectively killed" in your post, which isn't the same as "absolutely killed". For those concerned, Mnemonic is still alive and living here: http://www.mnemonic.org/
One interesting thing they are doing is focusing on rendering mathematical equations.

See the Mnemonic Web Site; this is, admittedly, pretty vaporwarish...

Try www.mnemonic.org

It's code is marvellously clear, (not like Mozilla's spaghetti mess) since it was conceived as an open-source GPL project from the ground up.
(although their C++ formatting rules make more sense than the GNU official ones...)

They're also keen to get MathML up and running early on - so it's likely to be popular with scientists and engineers.

http://www.mnemonic.org/

--

> I haven't seen anybody post here that DCOM is more popular than CORBA.

you haven't looked very hard then. The comment was rebutted very quickly, but it is here

It's fairly standard Astroturfing.

The design of Netscape is also commonly regarded as bad. Mozilla isn't much better - check out www.mnemonic.org for a well thought-out browser design.

How about mnemonic ? There are several alternatives for Linux platform.

Mnemonic is a Free (ie. GPL) browser that's looking quite promising. It is, like mozilla, totally modular. However, unlike mozilla, it's been a ground-up open source project, and is not under the NPL (which I don't like, particularly)

www.mnemonic.org

Hey. You might want to check out
http://www.mnemonic.org

The thing I like about mnemonic over mozilla is that it is highly modular, even more so than mozilla, but the source code is clear and readable C++ ( yeah, I know some people don't like C++, but I like it, when it's done right, like mnemonic), as opposed to mozilla's convoluted and obscure C++

I haven't contributed in any way to mnemonic (yet), but it does seem to me to be a clearer open source browser, and is a ground-up Open Source project.


but hey - there's always GRAIL. That is incredibly easy to hack, but also entirely in Python...with all the disadvantages ( and advantages) of an interpreted OOP language. And it's Yet Another Licence, whereas Mnemonic is GPL
!!!

+++flamebait
Yippee-- a GPL browser !!! No more Nutscrape Pubic Licentiousness !!!
---flamebait

There are other open source browsers in development, although as far as I can tell none are as far along as mozilla. Mnemonic seems to be the one that is moving the quickest. Their site also has a page listing some other alternatives, both available and developing.

Arguably it would be better to concentrate all efforts on a single best candidate, and no doubt JWZ was hoping Mozilla would be that candidate. It seems another key incredient of an OSS project's success is a single, concentrated development effort.

There are other open source browsers in development, although as far as I can tell none are as far along as mozilla. Mnemonic seems to be the one that is moving the quickest. Their site also has a page listing some other alternatives, both available and developing.

Arguably it would be better to concentrate all efforts on a single best candidate, and no doubt JWZ was hoping Mozilla would be that candidate. It seems another key incredient of an OSS project's success is a single, concentrated development effort.