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Linux Web Browsers Reviewed
juniorboy writes "This is an article reviewing 5 web-browsers that run on Linux.
" Really not a lot of surprises, but its itneresting that the number of reviews of this nature focusing on Linux are increasing.
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On the contrary, I find Netscape a joy to use, although I have been using a lot of w3m recently. As an alternative, if you're not interested in fanciful plug-ins and java then try the built-in browser which comes with KDE. I have friends who swear by it. Some have mentioned that it is much, much faster than Netscape. Internet Explorer on Linux would be a nightmare to use. I've tried it previously on a Solaris machine and it's painfully slow. Microsoft's inexperience at producing an X application is showing, and worst the product introduces bloatware into un*x. Microsoft should stick to writing WinDOS products.
If you want a feature-obsessed culture, you know where you can get it. And you know what problems come along with it. Java is a big deal. Rendering all pages readably is a big deal. Mayby plugins matter, too. But none of this is as important as a browser that doesn't crash and can view the simplest pages in a readable way.
Netscape is legendary, on all platforms but especially on Linux, for crashing, for freezing sometimes just briefly but obnoxiously and others for several minutes, and for displaying text in an unreadable 4pt font that's locked down becuase their font size dialog box is broken. I don't care if I'm reading ACM articles or Slashdot or porn--problems like this make a browser simply unuseable. My technophobic neighbors stop by on occasion and ask to use ``the Internet,'' and literally half the time they end up writing these four-page-long gushing letters to their girlfriend in Hotmail, and Netscape bunges it up, crashes, and loses their email. I find myself using Lynx (and now w3m) not because my machine is too slow, but because it doesn't crash and the text in an xterm is big enough to read. Frankly I think that's exactly why a lot of people use Lynx. This is an absurd situation, and the review all but ignores it.
I'd like to see a review that dealt more with stability than rendering quality in obscure situations.
I love the Web. I hate the Web. I love information, interactivity, communication. I hate banner ads, slow loads, and animated gifs. I've conquered most of these with three tools which work under Linux/xBSD and even legacy OSs:
I feel like my browser is mine again. Or, as the ads say: the Web is once again your friend.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Crossreferencing is far more important to the spread of the web than graphics, IMHO. With crossreferencing, adding something to the web increases the value of all the web, not just your site. Instead of the web being just someplace where you can put content to make it public, the web is a whole system. That, and the web came to be around the time when people started to be able to access it in large numbers.
Graphics aren't unimportant, but they weren't even much of an option when gopher was around, and they weren't very exciting when the web was starting either.
The Solaris and HP/UX versions of IE all suck rocks.
If you want to use IE under Linux, I've managed to run IE 3.0 for 16-bit Windows under Wine (the colors are fixed now, yay!). I can't manage to install IE 4.0 or 5.0 yet--they seem to require a network install.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You should give w3m a shot as well. lynx is nice -- I used it for a while -- but w3m, combined with low available resources, knocked Netscape out of the picture on my computer. It renders tables and frames exactly as they'd appear in a graphical browser (except, of course, that the pictures aren't present), makes it easy to view an inline image, and supports mousing in an xterm. I'm sure it does more that I'm not thinking of :)
The only real problem with w3m is that it's sometimes unstable and/or has odd/inconsistent responses..mainly due to the fact that it's still in development. But most of these are minor annoyances (for example, the context menu is entirely broken) and don't interfere with browsing.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
IHMO, what's most shocking to me is the high demand for Browser Plugins, and the obscurity and difficulty of getting them working with Linux Browsers.
Oh no! Here we go... you can't mention Vi without [X]Emacs. It too can browse the web!
This is the kind of crap that I hate seeing. People say, "The web was only meant for text," and "Graphics suck, they make the web slow." You know, when the first books came out, they had only words in them, no pictures (unless you count the letters as pictures). But then discovered that you could put images in books as well, too, and even though it cost more and took more time to print, the did it. Why did they do it? Because graphically it was more enticing. Sometimes it does absolutely nothing to enhance the story, but sometimes, they're very beneficial.
Slashdot readers talk, on one hand, about e-commerce and how it's revolutionizing our lives and how it'll be great when we have this perfect 'Netcentric society. On the other hand, they, they say, "Woe is me, the 'Net's changed so much since I was using back in the day!" Why do companies put graphics on their web page? Because it helps to make the web site more appealing graphically. Most Companies are defined by their corporate image. That's a visual representation. Microsoft in text and Microsoft in logo are two very different things. I would hate to go to a web site of a company that I use and not see their logo, because as a consumer, it's comforting to know that I have the right site, and that image confirms that. I'd hate to go to a friend's web site and read about how great his trip to Spain was and not be able to immediately pull up the images he's talking about. I can do that because of the power of graphics. I miss out on something when I use w3m or similar text-based graphics. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and who knows how many a moving picture can be.
If a Shockwave plugin means I get a presentation explaining a something to me in less bits than a similar animated GIF, great. If an animation shows me what the product looks like more clearly, that's great, too. If someone decides to simply scan their brochue and upload it, then yes, that sucks. But do not look down on Shockwave and GIFs and similar changes in the way that the Web is used. It's revolutionizing the world, and I for one am glad that people are making it at least a little nicer to look at.
Except for this guy. That's just awful, both in terms of images and in terms of text.
What would be great is to have IE's rendering engine ported to Linux in an efficient manner. I suspect that this will all be irrelevant when the new Gecko engine is finalized. Basically, I use my Windows machine to browse the web, and the reason is solely because IE5 has a very speedy rendering engine and pretty solid support for upcoming CSS1/p/2 HTML4.0 standards. Yes, they've added in their own tags and they do support deprecated information, but that's in addition to standards support.
I can do without the extra infringement on my OS and the tendency for it to crash after rebooting from Windows Update.
I use w3m and emacs/w3 everyday at work(e/w3 for at least 5 yrs). I am really impressed with w3m. IMHO, it blows lynx out of the water. While emacs/w3 is slower, I spend most of my time in emacs, so the integration is nice and I have been able to configure it to work with my company's proxy. I've tried to get w3m to work, and for some reason it doesn't.
I also believe that emacs/w3 will display images with XEmacs, but I'm not sure if it does with GNU Emacs. William Perry has done a great job!
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I believe that Opera is going to release a text based web browser for linux. sounds cool nice table and frame layout supposedly. anyone use it yet?
Of course it has! The browser, Links is an amazing text-based piece of work. It supports frames, tables, the mouse through gdm, looks and performs well. It even has pull-down menus that hide when not in use. Helper applications are supported for viewing graphics or even Realaudio. What more could you need?
I'd rather not download either of them.
A site whose only options are a 30K flash or a 100K animated GIF is not a well-designed site.
________________________________
Oddly enough there hasn't arrisen (or at least to my knowledge) any other text-based browser to rival Lynx. While this may seem trivial the very nature of Lynx is often one of it's greatest assets. It can be easily used from public terminals by connecting into your box so you can use your own settings and bookmarks. It runs much faster than any of the graphical broswers. Most importantly it's often an excellent resource when you've gotten your modem or nework card up and running under linux, but still are having trouble getting X going. If a text-based rival to Lynx was to come out the functionality of the text-based browser market could only improve making these tools almost equal to graphical browsers for everyday surfing.
Although, Linux by far is my favorite OS, and KDE is my favorite Window Manager (Of any OS). However, there is no good REAL WORLD graphical browser for Linux. Ya, Lynx is the best in text, and the best of any browser, but many pages will reject text only browsers. Netscape sucks. On my end, the Java is still slow, crash prone, and does not work right half the time. Opera for Win32 is nice. Its fast and does everything the other do, but its not out for Linux yet. IE is good, but it does not work in Linux. Modzilla looks good, but still is beta (Does the Java work?). Everything else does not hold up, not even the KDE built in one (No Java).
What Linux needs is a real browser. Right now it looks likes Modzilla and Opera are the two up and coming browsers. I wish IE would be ported, but that ain't never going to happen.
Linux O Muerte!
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
There should be a stable Mozilla within a few (~2-3) months. There should be a branded Netscape based upon Mozilla within about the same time frame. This is my opinion, judging from the Mozilla chatter on #mozilla and on the news.mozilla.org newsgroups. YMMV.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
I use Netscape 4.7 on Linux with no problems.
The load is faster than Netscape on Windoze. The crashing problems I had were with the glibc version, which appears to be really buggy (perhaps a problem with threads?)
Switching to the libc5 version cleared up a lot.
(I have Caldera 2.2, which uses glibc 2.1)
Incidentally I'm posting from Mozilla M12. Its come a long way, but still has a long way to go. Perhaps there will be a stable version by the end of the year (guessing, don't really know)
My journal has hot
Well, I'm trying /. in Lynx now and it seems OK. It's a little less intuitive than the graphical version, but still fine.
I've several blind friends who prefer IE over any other web browser, including Lynx. A speech program like "Jaws" works quite well with IE. Besides images, the hardest things are frames and forms. Navigating frames is quite difficult in Lynx, but much less in IE. And while forms remain difficult, they suck less in IE then on another browser.
-- Abigail
Me: Leave your hand on the mouse
/me notes that I reached to the mouse to post this...
:)
You: How do you type that way? That's gotta be slower.
Sure. But you see, most of my browsing isn't typing. I'm in input mode, sucking up information from the web. For the occasional keystroke during browsing, one-handed typing is just fine.
Sure. But that isn't browsing. That's entering a comment. When I switch tasks from browsing to typing, I put both hands back on the keyboard. Isn't that hard. The occasional task switch from mouse to keyboard and back again isn't significant, compared to the benefits you get from browsing with the mouse.
Of course, I really would prefer to have three arms, but until cyberbioengineering gets a lot more advanced, I'll have to live with it this way.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I do the exact same thing at present, and I find it to be an unacceptable solution to the parallel browsing problem, because it's so resource hungry and such a pain to manage all those windows (not to mention that probably 1 out of 5 times I close one of my open windows in netscape, it closes ALL my open windows. THIS DRIVES ME NUTS!).
/etc/X11/fs/config should include all of the following:
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
Here are a few tips I have for Linux+Netscape users who have these problems:
* Download Netscape Navigator only -- not Communicator. The extra functions of Composer and Messenger appear to significantly decrease stability. I'm not saying I never have a crash, but it happens pretty infrequently. The Navigator-only version also has a smaller memory footprint.
* Close windows with the "File -> Close" menu command or the [ALT]+[W] keystroke combination. For some reason, using the standard window frame decoration "Close" icon seems to be more likely to cause a crash.
* If you are using Red Hat, make sure your fonts are sane. Your font catalogue in
Make sure you have the appropriate RPM packages installed, that your font server is running, and that your XFree FontPath is pointed at your font server. This smoothes out some things, especially Java.
* Consider disabling the Java Virtual Machine (not JavaScript (well, you can disable it if you want to, but you don't have to)). Netscape's JVM still has trouble.
I agree that you shouldn't have to do this, but doing so has significantly improved stability for me. As the subject line suggests, it functions as a stopgap measure until a better Linux browser is available.
(BTW: I read your white paper. I've seen pre-caching software available for MS Windows. It isn't as smart as your system, but it is there. You might be able to coax something like a caching proxy server into doing what you want. Run HTTP through your proxy. Write a small program to accept a Netscape link via DND, and tell the proxy to fetch it ahead of time. Klunky, but it might work.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I am sorry. I know how much our community is depending on Mozilla succeeding but can anyone verify that Mozilla is using 30+ megabytes of debugging code?
The more I hear this the more shallow it seems. I mean what use is debugging code when the debugging code is that intrusive in the program? Alpha or not, most software starts small then increases as features are added. Or is my impression wrong and software is bloated shortly after development begins and then gets trimmed of 20% by beta?
I would really like someone to verify that Mozilla is as bloated as it has been because of the debugging code. I would also ask why would that much debugging code be needed?
**Or is Mozilla very large and resource hungary without debugging code as well.**
I am sorry but I have many doubts. I really hope I am wrong. But I fear there is less substance in the "debugging code" scapegoat than a hopeful myth.
Please someone put me in the know.
That's right, mixing up layout and structure has caused quite a mess.
;-)) start rethinking their appoach. There is a chance with WAP and all kinds of hand-held devices that we will see content providers storing their stuff as XML and creating several versions from it - HTML with fancy graphics, text-only HTML, WML for your cell phone, etc. Not necessarily because it is the _right_ approach (from a W3C point of view), but because it is the easiest solution for them in the long run.
I hope website designers (at least of those sites that I care about
lynx has this big advantage, also, that it can make something sensible out of Unicode. Netscape is just fscking worthless in this respect: it doesn't even understand — (the em-dash character). Unfortunately, I use — regularly in my web documents (no bugware!), so they're about unreadable with Netscape. Same for “ (the English-style open quotes) and so on (though I tend to compromise and use `` instead of “ or possibly the French double quotes ).
lynx run in an xterm with wide chars enabled and a fixed-width Unicode font is so far the best solution I've found to viewing Unicode characters correctly.
(Note: Unicode is not just useful in foreign languages. Some punctuation signs like the ellipsis, or, as I mentioned above, the em-dash and the quotes, are to be found in Unicode. As a matter of fact, Unicode is more useful for English than for French, because nearly all the French characters are in ISO-8859-1, and the French-style quotes are there, whereas the English-style quotes are far away in Unicode tables.)
lynx has its irritating features, though. It can't render tables, and that's a pain. w3m at least does that correctly. Also, lynx displays <i> as underline: that's stupid, <i> is italics, not emphasis (emphasis is <em>), and if it can't do italics, it should do nothing and ignore the tag. And it doesn't understand <dfn> (now that should probably be underlined).
And lynx completely ignores CSS. Agreed, in text mode, there isn't much you can get from CSS, but at least the margin definitions wouldn't be too hard to implement, and that would be useful.
There is lynx, sure, but there is w3m, and there is..ther is..elvis! Yes, elvis, the hyper-improved-and-two-million-features-added-vers ion-of-vi browses html files instead of editing them! And you can always pipe your graphics through with zgv if you have SVGALib (which some people seem to dislike *shrug*)...and oh i almost for got... :)
/
:); }return(0);}
don't you use telnet to browse the web?
$ telnet some.host.com 80
GET
HTTP 1.1 [you know the rest]
...
$
And heck! The telnet-way of browsing is the easiest of all to install! its in netbase!
#include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Does this mean we have to revise the old aphorism
"Every program written at MIT expands until it can read email"
to
"Every program written at MIT expands until it can browse the Web"
???
s/MIT/GNU/g if you like.
--
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 and Emacspeak the Web was closed to her. While it is true that the blind are a niche market, there is an environment out there that does give them access to the Internet, and it is only available because of free software!
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
That's your experience versus my experience. I've found quite bit of Director based content in my time. For example, Adam Sandler released a Director based movie called "The Peeper", which I qute enjoyed. There were quite a few amusing little Director games on mediadome when it was still around.
The whole thing is a matter of YYMV, though. My original point wasn't that these things are necessary for everyone, but the lack of plugins does make surfing under linux not as good as under Win32. In an age where more and more applications are being moved onto web servers, a factor in OS domination will be the Web browsing experience.
As an aside, this is why reviews like this one are important to linux. It tells people that linux has decent browsers. After a win32 person reads such a review, they may say to themselves "Hey, all I really do is web surf on my computer, maybe I should try out linux as my OS".
As for not being part of the standard, the HTML 4 loose DTD has object as part of the standard. Thus embedding objects is part of the standard. Shunning a site because they embed a Director movie is like shunning a site because they link to a PDF.
-no broken link
Last i checked alot of plugins speed up web browsing. Would you rather load a 100K animated GIF or a 30K Flash object? Sure the first time download is alot for the flash plugin, however it does let you save _alot_ of bandwidth in the long run if sites use it right.
Shit. Moderated down, because I posted something unpopular. *sigh*
"Linux will never be the most popular desktop OS until it has the best browser."
I personally don't think Linux stands much more than a snowball's chance in hell at becoming the most popular desktop OS (in anything resembling its present form), but your point is well taken. Browsing The Web has been the biggest source of computer sales ever, and Linux is without a decent browser. All I was suggesting is that (a) IE is worse than Netscape (which it definitely is, in my experience), (b) MS isn't likely to port it, and (c) in the time it would take to do so, Mozilla and Opera will both be available.
So yeah, the browser situation for linux sucks, but porting IE isn't going to help anything.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, since you asked, the least I can do is answer.
1) On any computer I've used IE on (usually NT-based, I'll admit) the browser has frozen up for 10 seconds to two minutes at a time. Worse, it locks up the ENTIRE COMPUTER! Netscape has never done that to me.
2) Netscape crashes far less for me than IE. This seems to be a case of, 'your mileage may vary.'
3) Fonts? I don't have any problems with fonts. They look the same in both browsers.
4) IE5 may have finally started following some standards. IE4, in its day, was the single worst browser available for the W3C and CSS standards. Regardless, the latest version of both are pretty weak. MS was, last time I checked, trying harder than Netscape to push its own non-standard HTML extensions as well.
But it's all splitting hairs. Both are poor, bloated, slow browsers. Opera and Mozilla can't come fast enough for me.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Given the success of Linux over the last 12 months why does /. still seem amazed whenever it appears in the mainstream press? Is success that difficult to cope with? :)
Psike.
They all suck.
Ok, now let's work on making a real browser. Maybe we could outsource the IE team, I heard they are worried about their stock these days.
Browses the web fine, and a whole lot (maybe too much) more. Free, with support from a large, quality focused vendor. Duh.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I think Konqueror will be amongst the good choices possible once KDE2 is released. With java and javascript support it will hopefully be a mature browser. For current CSS support progress, take a look at http://www.mosfet.org. Those CSS-test-links certainly shows netscape's flaws!
As, on average, the text content to graphic content on a webpage is 1:30, and considering that most of what slashdot is about is text, and that most of us use Linux or some form of Unix or other, and given that Lynx is freely available to be used on such systems, and because Lynx is a text-only browser, I believe that, if all of us used Lynx in our day-to-day slashdotting, we could minimise the slashdot effect.
I agree that it is bad to "integrate" the browser to the OS in the way that MS has done. But lets not forget that the browser is the most important and heavily used application. Few people will give a low-performance browser "a fair chance" just because it works a on a cool OS. Also, shouldn't Netscape be able to exploit a total understanding of the linux OS to make their browser faster and better? Some of the browsers for linux mentioned in the article are a total joke. NO ONE would ever use Amaya to browse the web. Lynx is only for emergency situations or for people who have no choice. Netscape cannot compare to IE. Yes, it is "unfair" to compare the two browsers on different platforms, so what? The computer industry is based on unfairness. The only way microsoft will be buried is if people are given *better* alternatives. This has nothing to do with fairness. In my opinion, the article was mushy and never got to what should be the prime point: All general purpose browsers for linux suck, and MUST be replaced something better. That said, mozilla seems very promising. I hope that it can develop into a stable browser soon.
As far as I can tell, the point of Open Source and Free Software, and ultimately the linux mentality is on of collaboration.
Well, then, collaborate. If you can't/wont contribute (code) to the solution, quit bitching. If you don't like a particular browser, write yourself a new one or contribute to a project like Mozilla.
I personally found the article interesting. Was it perfect? Nope. Was the guy wrong about some things? Maybe. Some things said were opinions *gasp*.
-FP
The power of the web is its ubiquity -- access from anywhere, anytime, without a requirement for proprietary solutions -- hardware or software -- at either the sending or receiving end of the channel. While high-speed access is going to build its way into the fixed-site (and even some limited-range wireless) nodes, universal access from anywhere has to deal with the limited bandwidth and channel space of wireless.
Smart design is simple design.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Does that help?
In the last part of the second half of the review, he states:
Mozilla is looking particularly exciting, although it has a foot-print that may be simply too large for some users.
Is this true? I haven't tried Mozilla in some time (although I will once it's in official beta), but I thought the point to Mozilla is that it was going to have a *smaller* footprint than, say, Netscape.
-Nathan Whitehead
The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse...
...
:)
:)
:) Which, for me, is unaccaptable. I middle-click as often as I left-click, sometimes. I usually have no less then four browser windows open at once. More then ten is not uncommon. (And, no, running multiple instances of Lynx in an xterm is not the same thing.)
:) Keep your other hand over the keyboard. Ta-da!
Oh, come on. That old argument again? One might as well say that a screw driver in inherently faster then a hammer.
Go to a page with dozens of links on it, pick a link at random, and compare the navigation between Lynx and Navigator:
Navigator
1. Point with a minor wrist movement.
2. Click once.
Lynx
1. Down arrow.
2. Down arrow.
3. Down arrow.
... [edited for brevity]
31. Down arrow.
32. Down arrow.
33. Press [ENTER].
Even if you turn on the link numbers, I find a simple point-and-click is just as fast as entering in a two or three digit number and pressing [ENTER]. Not to mention a lot easier. To say nothing of those interfaces which cannot easily be accomplished in text mode.
Since I'm here, let me also say...
1. download - hit d, Enter.
Click.
2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter
[ALT]+[S]. Two in Navigator compared to three for Lynx.
3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter
[ALT]+[K]. Again, Navigator wins.
4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter
Press. Point. Release.
show source - \
[ALT]+[U]. Lynx wins by a mere keypress here.
6. Next page - space
Ditto.
revious page - b
[PGUP]
first page ctrl-A
last page ctrl-E
Here you score a few points. These two work flawlessly with [CTRL]+[HOME] and [CTRL]+[END] under Windoze. For some reason known only to Netscape, Navigator on Linux ignores those keystrokes. Grrrrr.
reload is ctrl-R
[ALT]+[R] here, close enough.
redraw is ctrl-L
Not applicable.
quit is Q
[ALT]+[Q] to quit Navigator. I usually have it open all the time, so I don't do it much.
What's the keystroke to open a new window in Lynx? Oh yes, I forgot -- Lynx limits you to one window at a time.
I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slow down to reach for a mouse every now and then.
Well, here's a tip -- stop using that screw driver to hammer in nails. Put one hand on the mouse, and keep it there.
Lynx is a fine browser, and has a lot of things going for it, but let's not by silly, here.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The thing that keeps me using IE is the fact that can go to a page that has a Flash object on it and IE will say "You don't have Flash, do you want it installed?" and it automagically does so if I say yes.
This is, in no way, shape, or form, a browser issue. This is an issue with ISV (Independent Software Vendor) support. ISVs are not supporting Linux, so you don't get your plugin.
Don't complain about the browser -- go gripe to those ISVs. You like their plugins so much, but when you ask them to support your platform of choice, they say, "F**k off". Personally, any company that does that to me, doesn't get my business. Maybe you like being told that, but I don't.
Blaming this on the browser is like blaming your car maker that the local gas station's service sucks.
(For the less-informed: Netscape on Linux supports that sort of "You don't have XYZ, but you need it, get it?" dialog, and has for quite some time.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Linux will never be the most popular desktop OS until it has the best browser. You cannot underestimate the importance of a good browser. People _buy_ computers so that they can surf the web. Right now the browser situation for linux is deplorable. Did anyone ever stop to wonder how many people bought redhat, and then were turned off to *LINUX* because the ugly fonts and sluggish behavior and constant crashing of Netscape? YES, that DOES happen. If one more geek talks about the merits of lynx as though it is a viable alternative to a graphical browser, I will scream.
Netscape in a Windows environment is easier to use, although I still prefer IE. I know I would boot into Linux much more often if it had a reasonable browser. (end rant)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Author is quick to dismiss lynx as a browser for text-only terminals. I think he's just plain wrong. Quite a few people assume that lynx is for old 386's that can't handle X + Netscape. Not so. I have p200 64mb ram running X and stand-alone Netscape is perfectly fast and almost never crashes, and yet I choose to use lynx in 99% of cases. The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse. Secondly, you can use hjkl vim-style keys to respectively go back/down one link/up one link/follow link. This means you can surf while having your hands on home-row, which is the most reachable and convenient place when it comes to interfacing with the computer. Things that you use all the time while surfing are equally easy:
1. download - hit d, Enter.
2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter
3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter
4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter
5. show source - \
6. Next page - space, previous page - b, first page ctrl-A, last page ctrl-E.
7. You can set option to display a number in front of every link - so that when you want to jump to a certain link in the middle of the page, you simply type in that number and hit enter. Works faster than mouse, to be sure.
few misc things - reload is ctrl-R, redraw is ctrl-L, quit is Q.
w3m doesn't display page while loading, and misses some other things like vi style navigation (which can be easily hacked in the code), but can display tables/frames. Note that both have ssl (in lynx you have to apply a patch, that'll take ~5 mins).
How important is all this? Well, now that I use lynx daily, I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slowdown to reach for a mouse every now and then.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
The thing that keeps me using IE is the fact that can go to a page that has a Flash object on it and IE will say "You don't have Flash, do you want it installed?" and it automagically does so if I say yes. And while Linux has Flash, there's no Shockwave for linux (according to macromedia). While plug-ins are the main force behind web surfin, a lack of plug-ins still makes web surfing on linux second rate.
-no broken link
I used to use Lynx for text-based browsing, but now I use w3m - it renders frames in one window, which I don't think Lynx can do, and other neat stuff. Check it out!
Check out Greg's Bridge Page!