Linux Web Browsers Compared

Rob Valliere writes: "The best Linux Web browsers have dramatically improved in the past few months: they are all stable, standards compliant and loaded with solid feature enhancements and additions. Using Red Hat 7.2 and the KDE desktop, the premier Linux browsers are Galeon 1.0.3, Mozilla 0.9.8 and Opera 6.0 TP3. The best Web downloads and installs were from Opera and Mozilla, which have minimal dependencies. Galeon is a small download but can be difficult to upgrade due to its Mozilla and GNOME dependencies."

Comments

What about Konqueror

[Starving Artist]

It rocks, except for a few JavaScript nasties.

Re:What about Konqueror

[nick255]

And the version in KDE 3 betas is even better. It's the only Linux browser I know of which displays the ticker at the top of the BBC News website correctly. The others don't even try.

Re:What about Konqueror

[RagManX]

Another vote for Konqueror. I can't get any version of Netscape to run stably on a system at work. Version 6 hangs on a few pages I need to access, while Version 4 segfaults on one X display when another instance is started using a different X server to display. We use a browser to view our IDS logs, and multiple users need to have access. Segfaulting on each new unique display instance makes that hard.

Opera runs fine, but the display is not as good as Konqueror. I still use Lynx, but for what I use the browser at work, I have to have graphical. Looks like Konqueror is it for me.

RagManX

Re:What about Konqueror

[cygnus]

And the version in KDE 3 betas is even better. It's the only Linux browser I know of which displays the ticker at the top of the BBC News website [bbc.co.uk] correctly. The others don't even try.

is that the browser's fault, or BBC's? it could easily be BBC's...

Re:What about Konqueror

[Apreche]

Too slow to be usable? What are you tlaking about? Maybe on your machine Mozilla starts up faster than konqueror, but not on mine. Opera is the fastest, but I can't stand the interface either. I think we need some benchmarks here, last I remember mozilla was the slowest browser, um, ever.

Re:What about Konqueror

[ptrourke]

Last you remember was probably before several months of footprint and startup time work.

Konqueror is a damned good piece of work, but side by side, current Mozilla builds are better.

Re:What about Konqueror

[quinto2000]

and it is mentioned heavily in the article. Why don't you people read?

Re:What about Konqueror

[Zathrus]

In a case where X displays on the majority of browsers, but does not display on browser Y the fault lies with Y, not X.

This is how the world works. This is how TCP/IP has worked for 20 years (BSD was the standard - if you interfaced properly with BSD, you met the real world standard, since BSD varied from the "official" TCP standard in certain cases).

For as much whinging as there is about IE, the fact is that it is now the defacto standard for webpage rendering. It's wise to fulfill the official W3C standard. It's smart to then go make sure things work like IE as much as possible (without the random security holes). Where the two contradict each other is the fun part... do you write to the official standard and hope MS fixes things, or do you write to the de facto standard because users don't give a crap about W3C - they just want to see the content.

And, really, that's what it's about - the content. Being standards compliant means jack if you can't view 20% of the websites out there. I used to run Netscape 1.x-4.x, and then Opera 5.x on Windows. I finally gave up in frustration after too many sites either wouldn't display or hosed Opera. And after much bitching and moaning I started using IE. I'm not happy that I have to use it, but know what? I have to admit that surfing is now easier and more reliable than it was under either NS or Opera. And no, IE doesn't crash constantly anymore. It certainly does so less than either of the aforementioned browsers. Maybe the Linux versions are better about all of this - I don't have a spare box available currently to test with.

I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.

Re:What about Konqueror

[spitzak]

I have switched to Konqueror as well and am very happy with it.

I don't know what Galeon does but the cookie management in Konq seems great and does not require use of menus. When a site sends a cookie it pops up a request and you can choose to accept, reject, or ignore the cookie, and you can select to do that for all cookies ever sent again from that site.

It would be nice if the java/javascript did the same thing. The first time any java/javascript is sent you are popped up a box and asked yes/no and remember whether to do it that way from now on from that site.

Also for hackers it would be nice if they displayed a glob name of "what sources to reject" that defaulted to site/* but an advanced user could edit to make a more careful selection of what pages to do that cookie preference on.

Re:What about Konqueror

[Glytch]

Flamebait?! Crackhead moderator. Grow a spine and respond to this valid criticsm of javascript, rather than resorting to moderation abuse.

Re:What about Konqueror

[Ayende Rahien]

Yes, you can do that using Javascript. (Well, JScript, actually, but that is close enough to be nearly meaningless.)
Hell, you can write ILOVEU in REXX, and it would work just as well as the original, if the pharser was installed.

Re:What about Konqueror

[forgoil]

Great point. It all boils down to having to be practical after all.

Just an addition though. How do you "fix" your dilemma of doing it like IE or like the standard? A check box;) Check in for "Simulate IE" or "W3C Standard". At least I would think that would be a great thing, keep it on W3C until something important renders wrong, then send a mail to complain to the webmaster, voila ;)

Re:What about Konqueror

[nathanh]

I fully expect this to get modded down for no good reason. Oh well. It's only karma.

I'm getting fricking sick of this. It seems the only time I ever see "I'm gonna get modded down" or "I don't care what the moderators do to me, this needs to be said" taglines they are attached to a +4 or +5 posts. Why bother putting the damn tagline at the end at all? If you don't care about the karma, then don't make mention of the possibility of losing it. That the post gets moderated up proves that the tagline is false anyway.

Slashdot is being overrun by people who think "slashdot sucks" yet post daily, people who "don't care about karma" and whore it at every opportunity, and (my favourite) the people who proclaim that "slashdot is full of microsoft-bashers" and then proceed to use slashdot as a forum to tell everybody how great microsoft is.

If you have something to say then say it. Don't add meaningless jabs at "Slashdot mindthink" (a mythical nonsense) to otherwise meaningful posts.

Re:What about Konqueror

[nathanh]

In what way?

My question is this -

[G-funk]

What's the best Open Source browser that doesn't have mozilla dependencies? Konqueror? Or something I'm not aware of? I'd like something that can handle most html3 (nothing too crazy mind you) to embed to handle simple display stuff.

Re:My question is this -

[pridefinger]

I was going to suggest Opera, but the fact that you specified Open Source cuts it out of the picture. If you are embedding it for commercial use, Konqueror is probably your best bet as far as licensing. Having worked at an embedded linux company that went with Opera, despite it's proprietary nature, I'm quite biased to it (it's what I use everywhere, everyday, so when I get the funds for a Zaurus, I'll be right at home).

Anyway, Konqueror is next IMHO.

-Pride

Re:My question is this -

[ajs]

Best open source browser with no Mozilla dependencies? Well, Mozilla, of course! You can always install Mozilla, even if you don't have Mozilla installed already.

Seriously, I've used most of the browsers out there, and the smoothest experience I've had continues to be Mozilla. It used to be that there were always one or two "gee, that's annoying" bugs for every release. But, since 0.9.6 or so, I've been a happy camper.

Galeon tries to do a lot cool stuff, but falls down on reliability. I'm hoping their next generation comes on strong, gets stable and takes over my desktop, but for now....

Konqueror is fine if you only run KDE, but loading the KDE and GNOME libraries really hurts, even on a beefy machine. That said, Evolution virtual mailboxes are even better than VM's (an EMACS-based mail reader), so I cannot possibly switch to KDE exclusively.

Netscape 6.x is a nicely packaged installation of Mozilla (the best I've seen), but adds in too much junk and too many promotional tie-ins.

Netscape 4.x was ok in it's day, but the Web is a different world now, and it's just not usable anymore.

Lynx is my fallback, of course. Good, solid browser with just enough features to get me some google results ;-)

Re:My question is this -

[starseeker]

You might take a look at Dillo (http://dillo.sf.net) - it is small, fast, doesn't depend on mozilla, and generally makes a good fast browser. It is under development, but even so for what you describe it should work fine.

Re:My question is this -

[anpe]

If what you're searching is an OS HTML rendering engine, you should have a look at TkHtml. Altough it's written as a Tk widget, it shouldn't be too difficult to port it to another language since its written in C.

Re:My question is this -

[neuroticia]

1- Mozilla has no mozilla dependencies? Odd. I thought you had to have mozilla installed in order to run it. ;)

2- Don't know what your description of a "beefy" machine is, but my Duron 900-off the shelf-Compaq with 300 odd megs of RAM is able to run Konqueror in gnome and Galeon in KDE without any problems or noticeable performance decrease. (This is KDE/Gnome with a theme applied, a .jpg file or four as the background, and multiple other applications running at the time.)

3-Agreed on the issue of NS6. It's the only browser that has successfully locked/crashed/hung my computer on multiple occasions no matter the OS I'm running it in.

4- Lynx is fun, but impractical to use too much due to the insanity of contemporary website designers.

-Sara

Re:My question is this -

[Glytch]

Oh my god. I just tried Dillo, and it's beautiful. A shame about the lack of cookies. That's the only thing stopping me from using it regularly.

Let's hope..

[IamTheRealMike]

that now all the major Linux/Cross platform web browsers, and even IE 6 are paying attention to the W3C standards that we will all one day be choosing our browser based on what we like, rather than what web developers like

Re:Let's hope..

[BurritoWarrior]

Except this is exactly the point of Microsoft's .net initiative. To make the internet (or what most people think is the internet - www) not be HTTP based anymore, but to rely on proprietary extensions/applets/applications built around the .net framework.

In their eyes 90% of the web will require IE in order for the "web services" to work. And they will leverage things like MS Office to get the ball rolling. No longer will new features be added directly to office, but will be available on the web - provided the user has Windows and is using IE...

Mod this as flamebait if you want, but that certainly seems to me to be the direction they are heading. Heck, MS execs are even talking about how http's days are coming to an end...

Re:Let's hope..

[Pope Slackman]

proprietary extensions/applets/applications built around the .net framework.

Isn't the .net framework an ECMA standard now?
Isn't someone working on a free implementation of that standard?
Are you calling it proprietary just because it comes from billy boy?

No longer will new features be added directly to office, but will be available on the web - provided the user has Windows and is using IE...

That sounds to me like it would primarily affect office users, not web surfers, and considering office's main platform is windows, so what if they use windows/ie for web-based updates/upgrades?

Heck, MS execs are even talking about how http's days are coming to an end...

You got a link to back that up?

I'm not necessarily defending microsoft[1], just questioning the statements you present as fact.

C-X C-S
[1] Although I don't think they're any more evil than any other money-grubbing corporation.
Media conglomerates and trade groups, now those scare me - they have hundreds of times more governmental influence than billy and friends will ever have.

Re:Let's hope..

[4of12]

I'll second and third that motion.

I switched from Netscape 4.7x on Solaris to Mozilla 0.9.[i>6] on Linux a while back.

I love the superior rendering speed, the nice interface, and the fact that it doesn't crash .

But the RPITA is all the web servers on the corporate internal network that have JavaScript that uses less than latest W3C DOM specification.

I'm hoping that there will be more convergence and less divergence between browsers as time moves forward, that if the many IE6 browsers work, then Mozilla will also work for that web site.

Re:Let's hope..

[BurritoWarrior]

Heck, MS execs are even talking about how http's days are coming to an end...

You got a link to back that up?

Try here

What qualifies as a standard is highly debatable. The cli and description of C# have been passed by ECMA, for whatever that is worth, but that is a far cry from say, TCP/IP which is fully open and can be implemented on any platform.

As for mono, there are other people working on office file formats so that they can be created/read/used on other platforms....that hardly makes them interoperable or cross-platform.

If you think .net is MS's plan to be the good guy and support "open standards" so that developers can develop on whatever platform they want and users can use whatever platform they like...well, I sugges you take a long look at their history. Either that or give me a call so we can negotiate a price for this nice bridge in Brooklyn i have. :-)

Re:Let's hope..

[Boulder Geek]

Isn't the .net framework an ECMA standard now? Isn't someone working on a free implementation [go-mono.org] of that standard? Are you calling it proprietary just because it comes from billy boy?

It is proprietary. The C# language and CLR are indeed both ECMA standards, but so is Javascript, and look how "standard" that is.

More importantly, many of the run-time libraries used by CLR are not ECMA standards, and will not be made available to the development community except as MSFT products. We can safely assume that many web-based products built on .NET will depend on these libraries, and thus be portable to any platform that MSFT wishes to support. Take a guess as to how many platforms that will be.

MSFT doesn't seem to object to the server side of .NET running on platforms other than Windows. After all, even they must realize that Windows doesn't cut it for Enterprise level servers, so they still need to play in that world until such time as they can eliminate Solaris and AIX. But I seriously doubt that they will ever give up control of the client short of the entire management team at MSFT being replaced by Pods.

Re:Let's hope..

[Pope Slackman]

Try here

That title is a bit misleading.
If you read the article, it says that HTTP is not optimal for anything more than relatively simple web services - in other words, complex applications with operations that take more than a few minutes to execute shouldn't use HTTP as their RPC protocol.
Sounds reasonable to me, provided the new protocol is standardized in a way similar to the other net standards, e.g. RFCs, and all that.[1]

The cli and description of C# have been passed by ECMA, for whatever that is worth,

Prolly not much, but more than the (AFAIK) lack of open, published standards for Java, which I see as being .net's direct competitor.

As for mono, there are other people working on office file formats so that they can be created/read/used on other platforms....that hardly makes them interoperable or cross-platform.

I see a huge difference here.[2]
People writing office import/export filters have to reverse engineer the mostly-undocumented format.
There is no detailed, published spec of the office formats.

If you think .net is MS's plan to be the good guy and support "open standards" so that developers can develop on whatever platform they want and users can use whatever platform they like...well, I sugges you take a long look at their history.

Of course they aren't, but you can say that about any company, really.
Everyone is trying to make a buck[3], usually at the expense of someone else.
"Business ethics" is an oxymoron.

C-X C-S
[1] Hell, even the MS guy (not an exec, BTW) said "if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble."
[2] I'd say it's an apples to oranges comparison, but someone recently proved scientifically that apples and oranges were basically the same. :)
[3] Netscape certainly ignored/made up their share of "standards" back in the pre-mozilla days, that's for sure.

The most important choices are missing

[Krapangor]

• lynx
• netcat with less
• vi
• emacs
• ed
• telnet

Graphics is just for banner ads.

Just displaying right is a big plus.

[nesneros]

Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Simon Brooke]

Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.

Yes, but, seriously, how many of those pages were valid, standards conformant code? For a long time Konqueror was the only browser which displayed all the features of my home page (which is valid code) correctly. Now Mozilla has caught up, and I believe (though I haven't checked myself) later IE6's can display it too. But while Konqi has some deficiencies in its ECMAScript, it's HTML/CSS rendering are highly standards-conformant

It's not the Konqi team's fault if 90% of the commercial 'Web designers' out there are blithering incompetents who could not write valid code to save their lives.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Simon Brooke]

It doesn't really matter *whose* fault it is that things do not display properly on web page X with browser Y. What matters is that it doesn't work, but it's fine with browser Z.

I have to disagree with you. It matters critically whose fault it is. For example, Microsoft Front Page generates invalid HTML which IE just happens to be able to render; similarly, Office 2000 generates invalid XML which IE just happens to be able to parse, If the Mozilla or Konqi team alter their browser to cope with Microsoft's deliberate mistakes, Microsoft will just start making different deliberate mistakes. It's really important that we put the blame where it belongs - which is chiefly with unprofessional and incompetent 'Web designers' who don't care about the quality of the code they produce provided it works with their Microsoft browser.

We cannot defeat monopolies if we play their games.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[JoeBuck]

The mantra of the Internet (often explicitly stated by IETF people) has always been to be conservative (that is, strictly standard-conformant) in what you send, and be liberal (that is, try to tolerate deviations and do the right thing) in what you accept. By this principle if a standards-incorrect practice is widespread on the net, a decent, high-quality application has to deal with it (be liberal in what you accept), but professional web designers and tools that produce HTML should produce strictly conformant HTML (be conservative in what you send). The Konqueror team is not doing as good a job as its competition in living up to the first part of this principle, and if it can't catch up people are going to just stop using it. It won't suffice to point out that other people are writing incorrect HTML. After all, Slashdot's HTML is highly non-standard and CmdrTaco doesn't care. IE took off by putting in a lot of work to be bug-compatible with Netscape.

Similarly, would you use a C or C++ compiler that always aborts when seeing the first minor syntax error? Such a compiler would greatly slow you down, because you'd only be able to find one error at a time.

Given this, it is the Konqi team's fault if it can't do a decent job of rendering web pages that deviate from the standard. Cry all you want about incompetent Web designers, but someone who purports to provide a Web browser must deal with the web as it is.

Consider that Slashdot itself does not follow the standards (try to validate a Slashdot page). Would you use a broswer that can't

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[truesaer]

Well, just a note here....if a web browser doesn't display 90% of the web pages out there, I'm unlikely to use it. Just FYI.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Mike Greaves]

> Similarly, would you use a C or C++ compiler that
> always aborts when seeing the first minor syntax
> error? Such a compiler would greatly slow you
> down, because you'd only be able to find one
> error at a time.

This is a terrible example. I expect C/C++ compilers to be highly intolerant of incorrect or non-standard-compliant code; and generate verbose warnings and errors on encountering it. I somewhat agree with you, when it comes to something like a web browser; but a compiler should *always* be conservative; otherwise poor software reliability will be right around the corner...

(reading and posting from Konqueror, the world's niftiest web browser. ;-)

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Simon Brooke]

Maybe that's because you're coding your web page using features that Konqueror supports well?

In a sense, clearly I am; but I didn't set out to. I'm not a member of the Konqi team, and I use many different browsers (currently have twelve on this machine, and use Konqi, Mozilla, Dillo, Opera and Lynx regularly). The point I was making is just that the Konqi team have been ahead of everyone else in their CSS2 implementation.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[Simon Brooke]

I dont understand the fuss over Konq at all; it may be more conformant than Netscape 4 but considerably less conformant than Mozilla or MSIE. This is not my opinion. Konqueror has less support for the gamut of css1, css2

For heaven's sake, haven't you been reading? Konqi has been ahead of both Mozilla and IE on it's CSS2 rendering for about 18 months; Mozilla and IE are only now catching up. Don't believe me? Look at my home page. Note where the navigation panel is. Note what happens when you scroll. Konqi's got it right since version 2.0. Opera got it right in version 6, a year later. Mozilla got it right in 0.9.6, eighteen months later. Microsoft IE has got it right in the last six months - early versions of IE 6 get it wrong. That's simple, demonstrable fact.

Re:Just displaying right is a big plus.

[asa]

Konqi has been ahead of both Mozilla and IE on it's CSS2 rendering for about 18 months;

I don't know where you get your information but it's clearly wrong. Feel free to state that Konqueror gets you're particular subset of CSS on one particular page you set up but that's a darned small sample from which you make such sweeping statements about CSS support.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Epy8ieh/cgi/listresults. pl ?ID=ETS seems to suggest otherwise and looks to be a little more thorough than your homepage.

--Asa

Opera ads became intrusive

[GSV NegotiableEthics]

Opera used to be my favorite browser, but I switched from that to Mozilla at around Christmas, simply because of one ad campaign that involved an animated gif of human head that waggled from left to right. It was so intrusive that I took to covering the ad area with a gnome-terminal, and looked around for another browser. I told the Opera people about my problems.

Using X on a small laptop via a fairly powerful firewall machine, I eventually realised that I could run Mozilla on the firewall and put the display on the laptop. Although Mozilla is a rather bigger browser than Opera, it actually runs better in that mode than when I ran Opera on the laptop.

Re:Opera ads became intrusive

[nafmo]

Thank you for helping to put me out of my job (I'm an Opera Software employee). If you have a problem with the ads, 39 USD will get rid of them (15 if you are a student). If you can't live with ads, and can't afford to pay, I'd recommend you use one of the open source browsers instead.

If you find any intrusive ads, please contact the Opera staff directly (contact details on website) or post in the opera.pr-marketing group (available on news.opera.no, as well as several other servers).

galeon difficult to install?

[303]

apt-get install galeon :)

Re:galeon difficult to install?

[blakestah]

apt-get install galeon :)

Debian rules for installing a new package.

He additionally missed
"Mouse cursor on image. Right click. Block all images from ad.soubleclick.net ?"

Galeon's ability to customize completely acceptance of cookies and images from IP addresses is incredibly useful. With mozilla you cannot get there by right-clicking on the image (yet, I suspect). With konqueror you cannot either. You have to conditionally block images, and allow the ones you want. With galeon, any image site can be blocked with a single right click.

You can also config so that pop-up windows automatically go to new tabs in the background.

What an improvement in browsing !

Re:galeon difficult to install?

[mbrubeck]

Galeon's ability to customize completely acceptance of cookies and images from IP addresses is incredibly useful. With mozilla you cannot get there by right-clicking on the image (yet, I suspect).

That's not true. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.8 right now, and I've been using this feature via the "Block images from this server" context-menu item since 0.9.6, I believe. Anyway, I do agree with the parent post that this is a great feature in both Mozilla and Galeon.

No problems with Galeon

[igiveup]

You do have to have Gnome and Mozilla installed, but I have not had any extra problems installing Galeon once those two are installed. I would like to see the Gecko rendering engine avaible as an individual library (if it already is, then forgive my ignorance).

Using mozilla

[mansoft]

It's curious to see how netscape 4.x isn't even included in that group. Some years ago it was the only browser we could use to decently surf the web.

I've been using mozilla since the M1x releases, and it has certainly improved its capabilities and stability. However I still find the interface too heavy. Perhaps galeon does it better, though.

What I still miss in mozilla (now using 0.9.8) is acceptable support for java and flash. When both plugins are installed they give me so many problems that I end up by uninstalling them.

Re:Using mozilla

[Spankophile]

It's curious to see how netscape 4.x isn't even included [...]

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

it's SUPPOSED to be intrusive

[Anonymous Coward]

They want you to buy it, after all.
They have to make money somehow!
You cheap bastard.

I'll go with Opera

[Uttles]

I'm using it on both a Windoze and Linux platform and I have to say that it is extremely fast, just like the slogan says. The program just feels lightweight the way it pops right up and "loads" all your pages instantly (ok so they're not always refreshed, but hey). Anyway, be sure to install the java lib with it under windows or you may have some problems there (at least I do sometimes) but under linux it doesn't seem to matter.

Re:I'll go with Opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Be prepared for Opera to just disappear (crash) sometimes.

Also, sometimes when downloading, it will lock up.

It is fast though. Fast to load and fast to use. I hate that tab completion doesn't work in the URL line though. That alone is enough to not make me use it (although the crashing for no reason doesn't help).

The somewhat portly Mozilla seems to be the best at this point.

Re:I'll go with Opera

[DrSpin]

I am using Opera 6.0 on FreeBSD and its very good. Shame the mail facility doesnt work though - I could get most of the family to switch to *BSD from Windows if it did!

I like "open in background" and the "mouse gestures".

I'd register if it was Native FreeBSD, but its actually the Linux one in compatibilty mode.

Re:I'll go with Opera

[aardvarkjoe]

I often consider buying opera, but then it crashes (sometimes even on a simple static page) or mishandles javascript and I have to wonder why anyone would buy it.

I agree with this. As soon as opera becomes relatively crash-proof (IOW not crashing a couple times per hour) -- they'll have my money. As it is, though, it's definately worth using ... when it crashes, with its legendary speed it only takes 5 seconds or so to start again. Annoying, but no big deal.

Galeon and Opera being my favs

[xtremex]

I'm using Mozilla now, but I love the sheer speed of both Opera and Galeon. I'm using Mdk 8.1 on this machine, and upgrading galeon is something I fear. Last time it took me about an hour to fix png.h errors. I had to go BACK certain lib versions and go back a libpng version. I have my system set up PERFECTLY. So I dont want to upgrade Galeon. I'm afraid If I upgrade Mozilla, it'll break galeon too!

Re:Galeon and Opera being my favs

[xtremex]

Alas, I know the joys of Debian...I have a debian box, but my Mandrake box is the more powerful box and is the box I use on a daily basis :(

KDE

[asv108]

So basically this guy had a grudge against Konqueror because he had trouble upgrading KDE. I wouldn't call this a very objective or informative review. The other weakness he cites with Konqueror is lack of features, but most people don't even use the latest "bells and whistles" offered with a new browser build. Usually those "Features" turn out to be annoyances like sidebars.

Re:KDE

[sultanoslack]

He's a Redhat user and that's all that really needs to be said. He's very correct that upgrading KDE is difficult on Redhat . Redhat (except for Bero) really doesn't care about KDE at all and tends to have horrible, horrible packages available. Redhat 7.2 came with KDE 2.2.1 and a half!!! It wasn't a released version! They took the code from CVS and packaged it without labeling it as "non-stable". Then when the stable versions do finally come out, Redhat doesn't get around to packaging them (again, not Bero's fault since that's not his job) until they've been out for a month. And even then they often aren't released for the last stable release of Redhat. When RH 7.1 was their latest release (I had to use Redhat at work.) they only released KDE updates for 7.2 beta! That's crazy!

So, I finally switched from Redhat to SuSE about a year and a half ago and haven't looked back. Upgrading in SuSE involves running YaST2 and choosing to upgrade KDE. Or alternatively downloading a handful of RPMs and installing them in 10 minutes.

And I also think this guy didn't give Konq a fair trial. He used the most up to date, including betas of everything else, but used Konq from a few months ago even though there is a later stable release and two new beta versions. Why is this a story? Are we supposed to give him points for trying to write a good review?

Re:KDE

[Arandir]

He was trying to use KDE and Konqueror on Redhat. That should be explanation enough for his difficulties. Redhat doesn't like KDE, never did, and probably never will.

I can update KDE with complete ease under FreeBSD. I'm sure my Debian friends will attest to its ease on their system as well. Even when I used package-manager-less Slackware, upgrading KDE was a simple as grabbing the new packages and installing them all.

Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[tomRakewell]

Since Mozilla 0.9.8 seems to keep crashing (0.9.6 seemed to me to be the peak of stability for the browser), I've been using Konqueror a lot more.

It does make me miss good Mozilla things, like tabbed browsing. I've also run into a number of pages that Konqueror does not handle all that well, but I'm not sure if its due to standards violations in those pages or in Konqueror.

I might be missing it, but I also can't find a way to do a text zoom in Konqueror!

Konqueror seems to be as fast as Opera at rendering pages (but no in-gui ads!). And, for the paranoid, it handles cookie requests as well as... Lynx!

And Konqueror doesn't have a ton of dependencies like Galeon or skipstone... (it just depends on the whole of KDE!)

Best of all, Konqueror is *just* a web browser, which is something all the other browser projects should come to terms with. I am never going to use Mozilla's mail client, their news reader, or their HTML editor. In fact, the inclusion of these items tends to slow me down when I accidentally invoke them.

Wouldn't these massive browser projects benefit greatly by focusing on only *one thing*, like making a nice, fast, stable, standards-compliant browser? Isn't that hard enough?

Lately, when I build Mozilla, I choose not to build those components, which speeds up the build process nicely!

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[fferreres]

Ok, i use Galeon, so i will just comment my personal view...

Since Mozilla 0.9.8 seems to keep crashing

It's not crashing here (not once), i am using 0.9.7 though (0.9.6 had a bug with javascript and couldn't play yahoo chess :))

I've also run into a number of pages that Konqueror does not handle all that well...

That's the single most important problem with Konqueror imho. If i develop with Konqueror i will not know if it looks fine under Windows, so they wouldn't let me use Linux...(at work at least)

...but I'm not sure if its due to standards violations in those pages or in Konqueror.

If things show well on IE, they will not fix the problem. That's a problem. The broser should try it's best to display non conforming HTML as other browers do (not Konquerors fault, but...).

It does make me miss good Mozilla things, like tabbed browsing.

Galeon has tabbed browsing before Mozilla (and i find it better than Mozillas built-in). Opera first implemented t.b. though.

I might be missing it, but I also can't find a way to do a text zoom in Konqueror! Galeon has it...

Konqueror, for the paranoid, it handles cookie requests as well as... Lynx!

Cookies management in Galeon is the best i've seen so far. It really has and advanced and flexible cookies database.

Best of all, Konqueror is *just* a web browser

Same here :)

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[Peaker]

it's quite a bit more than a web browser

Which of those features would you not qualify as 'browsing'?
A web browser does not typically mean its useful only for web, but also for local files, that with KIOSlaves may be actual directories, HTTP files, or many other file sources.

that's exactly what galeon strives for. it only uses the rendering engine of mozilla, and is "nice, fast, stable, [and] standards-compliant"

Galeon may only be a web browser, but so is Konqueror, except due to the powerful KDE technology Konqueror is based on, Konqueror is more powerful.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[swillden]

And, for the paranoid, it handles cookie requests as well as... Lynx!

Actually, I think Konqueror is the best browser available for cookie handling. One major feature it has that all of the others (I've seen) lack is the ability to look at the cookie before deciding to accept/reject it. In particular I like to look at the expiration date, because cookies that don't last long don't bother me much.

Looking at those expiration dates inspired me to hack my copy of Konqueror so that I can configure it to automatically accept any cookies of short duration (i.e. expiration not specified or specified to be within one day) on a per-site basis.

The other thing I want to change but haven't gotten round to, is to give myself the option of rejecting cookies based on the origin server instead of the stated cookie domain.

You might this this is a lot of bother, but I find that with a few such options in place I can both minimize the number of cookies that are tracking me and avoid having to deal with a lot of "Accept this cookie?" dialog boxes popping up all the time. The "accept short cookies" option was a huge win in achieving a nice balance.

Oh, and yes I'm going to submit my patches, but they're pretty rough right now -- not something that any maintainer would accept.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[GauteL]

If you do not want mozilla-mail or editors, just don't install them. It is that easy. All distributions AFAIK split them up into several packages.
Besides. Konqueror is a file-manager as well as a browser, so it is certainly not "just a web browser".
Personally I don't mind the integration, but facts are always nice.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[killmenow]

Konqueror seems to be as fast as Opera at rendering pages (but no in-gui ads!)

Well, I use Opera and I don't have any in-gui ads. I actually *gasp* paid for it. It's worth it.

Best of all, Konqueror is *just* a web browser, which is something all the other browser projects should come to terms with.

Well, when WWW browsers started out, they were intended to be a universal client to access http, ftp, gopher, and wais servers. Some even included pop and smtp clients as well as nntp clients.

While some (you presumably included) may consider a browser hanging onto the client ability for these protocols a burden, I consider it a useful feature. I like that my browser can still access gopher especially.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[scrytch]

Best of all, Konqueror is *just* a web browser

Then why am I able to use it to copy, rename, move, and delete files on my local system? Konquerer knows damn little about web browsing -- that's KHTML's job, which is simply embedded as a component in konquerer. Konquerer is a component-based generic browser, not just a web browser. It's what MS tried to do with its explorer integration, and actually didn't pull off -- the problem with IE on windows is that it's not integrated enough. If it were seamlessly integrated, it wouldn't rearrange menus ("hey, View:Folder Options just got moved to Tools:Internet Options!"), it would let me drag and drop multiple files from ftp onto the desktop, and developers would be able to write shell extensions that worked on URL's instead of targeting a completely different API. Now that XP has the Win2k kernel, and thus reparse points, maybe this will start to happen... Doubt it, they're still foisting drive letters on us even though they've outlived their usefulness.

Back to the point, if you think konquerer is "just a web browser" when you're using it as such, then it's accomplished its goal of fooling you into believing that ;)

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[mr3038]

o that I can configure it to automatically accept any cookies of short duration (i.e. expiration not specified or specified to be within one day) on a per-site basis.

I personally prefer more Mozilla's way of doing it. You can limit maximum duration of cookie to whatever you want. My current setting for maximum cookie life is 14 days. There's no reason to block cookies just because the happen to define overly long life. In addition to that you could totally block cookies from some ad hosts.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[AntiTuX]

do this
Edit::Preferences::Privacy & Security::Cookies::Warn Me Before Storing A Cookie

It'll set paranoia on, just like Lynx.

Re:Konqueror is not a MUA/newsreader/HTML editor!

[Shiny Metal S.]

It does make me miss good Mozilla things, like tabbed browsing. I've also run into a number of pages that Konqueror does not handle all that well, but I'm not sure if its due to standards violations in those pages or in Konqueror.

In situation like this, use the W3C HTML Validation Service. You can use this URI:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=URI

where URI is the URI of the page to validate. (well, duh..)

I usually get tons of errors while validating most of pages, except for my own sites because I always use my web design rules so they have 0 errors and 0 warnings. But validate /. and you'll see that they haven't heard about my rules. ;)

I sometimes send emails to webmasters with link to their website validation results, asking they to fix their errors when I can't use their websites. If you view any website which your Konqueror can't render, check out what HTML Validator says about it, and when you find any errors, send the link http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=URI to webmaster of this website, telling them that you can't access their broken website. That way they won't answer you that your browser is bad, because they website is broken in the first place. You can suggest them to use HTML TIDY to clean up the web pages.

There's also a W3C CSS Validation Service, but errors in styles are usually less anoying than errors in HTML itself.

Complaining to incompetent webmasters usually doesn't work, but it can help a lot when many people do that. It's the only way to change the current situation.

Push them to the limit!

[ihatelisp]

Come on, the test only briefly mentioned about testing with graphics, CSS, and Javascript. Any modern browser can handle that so easily, it's not even worth testing.

When car magzines do a car review, they floor the gas pedal to get the fastest 0-60mph time. They cut corners much faster than street driving speed to test the suspension and handling characteristics of the car. What I don't understand is, why does this browser review treat these browsers like babies? Throw in some DOM2/3, CSS2/3, bidi text, DHTML, and XHTML! Let the best engineered browser shine, instead of fixating on those performance numbers!

Re:Push them to the limit!

[iangoldby]

Edge.

That sorts the men from the boys - CSS-wise anyway.

Re:Push them to the limit!

[pointwood]

That is not something you just do - that takes a lot of work I believe. However, here is a pretty good overview of the browsers support for the W3C recommendations: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/js/index.html?/~ppk/js/b rowsers.html.

Re:Push them to the limit!

[Otter]

When car magzines do a car review, they floor the gas pedal to get the fastest 0-60mph time. They cut corners much faster than street driving speed to test the suspension and handling characteristics of the car. What I don't understand is, why does this browser review treat these browsers like babies?

Well, car enthusiast magazines do that, but when I read reviews I'm more interested in issues that relate to my real-world driving: comfort, reliability, performance under normal conditions.

Same thing for browsers -- I'm always reading how this or that browser doesn't work on half the sites the complainer visits. For the sites I read, Konqueror, Galeon and Mac IE all render fine. I'm more interested in how well browsers support the use that I actually make of them, not whether I can use them on some crazy-ass JavaScript site. Online banking is the hardest task I give my browser.

Both types of review have their place.

Re:Push them to the limit!

[Glytch]

Interesting site. Everything on it works fine in Galeon, btw. :)

png/alpha full support

[Dante'sPrayer]

I found the hability of displaying images with a transparent background and smooth borders a big plus. Right now, the only browsers I know of fully supporting the alpha channel on .png images are Mozilla and Opera 6; Konqueror trims the borders of the image. I don't know if Galeon support png/alpha channel, but given that it uses the Mozilla renderer (Gecko) it maybe does.

That is the biggest grip that I have about Konqueror; some effects on my home page display somewhat broken.

Internationalization, anyone?

[ThinkingGuy]

I surf a lot of pages in Japanese. While I've found Netscape sufficient for viewing Japanese (and other double-byte character set) language pages, I've often had trouble getting things like web forms to work (this is on the Linux version).
One of my biggest disappointments with Opera (which I last tried out about a year ago) was its lack of support for far eastern languages. I hear this has been resolved in newer versions.
BeOS's NetPositive actually worked the best for me as far as displaying and inputting Japanese.

Anyway, it would be nice if more of these "browser comparison" articles included internationalization (i18n) along with "speed," "standards compliance," "ease of installation", etc. as one of the features tested.

Table rendering performance

[Admiral Llama]

One area where IE simply trashes Netscape and Mozilla is rendering huge tables. I'm talking about the 1 meg of text variety. Has anyone tried putting the various browers through the paces on this kind of test?

Re:Table rendering performance

[Simon Brooke]

One area where IE simply trashes Netscape and Mozilla is rendering huge tables. I'm talking about the 1 meg of text variety. Has anyone tried putting the various browers through the paces on this kind of test?

If you've got 1 meg of text in a table, you've solved the wrong problem. That's more than a full-length novel.

Dependencies

[tempest303]

If one uses Ximian Gnome, keeping up with all those "horrible" dependencies is a snap. I understand why it can seem like a pain, but what does the reviewer want? STATIC builds of everything? Screw that. I'll just pop open Red Carpet and grab it all at once, thanks...

Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[gosand]

I recently switched from Netscape to Opera on my Windows platform, and I LOVE it. The tabbed windows, the ability to block pop-up windows, and the mouse gestures ROCK. So naturally I downloaded it for my Linux machine (Redhat 7.2). Snooze. I had to switch back to Mozilla in 5 minutes. The features just aren't there. I switched from Netscape 4.7.2, so I am used to not having a robust browser, but Opera on Linux just didn't do it for me. I do most of my browsing on Windows, because Opera on that platform is awesome. They really need to have the same features available in the Linux version.

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[belbo]

What features are you referring to? All the features you mentioned are in Opera 6 for Linux (and others are even exclusive to the Linux version).

I'm using my web browser 10 h a day (work & play), and for me there's simply *nothing* which even remotely compares to the usability and robustness of Opera (yes, I do have the whole bunch installed).
It's the only program on Linux I ever bought a license for, and looking at the current selection, it likely will hold that position.

Let's go through them:

Konqueror: No tabbed browsing. Nuff said. I usually have about ten browser windows open ...

Mozilla, Netscape & Galeon: I'm an editor in a webboard and that f*cking textarea input bug makes it hardly bearable to use it for that.
It just shouldn't be that a browser in this day and age inserts text where *it* wants and not where *I* want.
Cut and paste ... Need I say more? I *have* to use C-c and C-v? Even when cut & pasting from one tab to another? No thanks.

And no browser I know compares to Opera when it comes to bookmark management, especially with the new search function in 6.0.
My 2c

b.

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Peaker]

Why do people like tabbed Windows?

Is your window manager not managing Windows well enough?

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Yosho]

Well, I don't believe it's a case of the window manager not working well enough, but it just not being the right tool for the job -- in Opera, I always have at least eight different pages open, sometimes upwards of a dozen. If these were all shown in the taskbar, the rest of my programs would be crowded into obscurity.

Not to mention that Opera's one instance in the taskbar function kinda like a control for all of the tabs -- if I suddenly decide I want Opera minimized so I can do something on the desktop, I just click the minimize button. If I have eight pages open in a non-tabbed browser, though, that's eight times I have to click minimize.

It also makes it very easy to close everything at once -- when I want to shut down a non-tabbed browser, I've got to close every window individually, while I can do it all at once in Opera.

There's also one other thing I love about Opera that Mozilla can't do yet -- start up with multiple pages. Typically whenever I sit down at the computer, the first thing I'm going to do is quickly check those eight pages. As soon as Opera opens, it begins loading all of them, and I can switch through the tabs at my leisure. In every other browser I'm aware of, though, I have to load them one at a time. (While this is only a small saving grace on a high-bandwidth connection, think about how long you'd have to wait for each individual page to load on a modem...)

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Peaker]

That's what I mean by a window manager not functioning well enough.

I place my browser windows in a single desktop and then my taskbar functions as your tab.

I really don't see why you want window-management facility from your applications

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Peaker]

Well, I don't believe it's a case of the window manager not working well enough, but it just not being the right tool for the job -- in Opera, I always have at least eight different pages open, sometimes upwards of a dozen. If these were all shown in the taskbar, the rest of my programs would be crowded into obscurity.

This means your window manager/taskbar is not doing its job properly.
I just place my browsing windows in one desktop, and my taskbar in that desktop is equivalent to your browser tab. In other desktops, those windows are not visible.

Not to mention that Opera's one instance in the taskbar function kinda like a control for all of the tabs -- if I suddenly decide I want Opera minimized so I can do something on the desktop, I just click the minimize button. If I have eight pages open in a non-tabbed browser, though, that's eight times I have to click minimize.

Why don't you just switch desktops? Its at least as easy..

It also makes it very easy to close everything at once -- when I want to shut down a non-tabbed browser, I've got to close every window individually, while I can do it all at once in Opera.

This is an interesting function for window managers: Close all of current desktop's windows.
This is a lack of functionality in all window managers, more than it is a good feature of a specific application.

There's also one other thing I love about Opera that Mozilla can't do yet -- start up with multiple pages. Typically whenever I sit down at the computer, the first thing I'm going to do is quickly check those eight pages. As soon as Opera opens, it begins loading all of them, and I can switch through the tabs at my leisure. In every other browser I'm aware of, though, I have to load them one at a time. (While this is only a small saving grace on a high-bandwidth connection, think about how long you'd have to wait for each individual page to load on a modem...)

Having a persistent environment of documents is an interesting feature, but its not really associated with tabbed browsing.

I'm not sure, but wouldn't "Saving the session" in KDE re-load all the Konqueror windows in the same pages they were?

What I mean to say here is, tabbed-windows is just an attempt to implement some features that really belong in your window manager, where all apps can enjoy them.

In the Window manager, you can also associate documents/windows of any type and function together, rather than of one specific application.

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[gosand]

OK, looks like I need to make sure I have the latest version of Opera for Linux.

Another thing I like about the mouse gestures in combination with tabbed windows is being able to open a link in another window in the background. (right click on link, move mouse down, up, release button). For reading /., this is great, as I can open up the stories I want to read in their own windows as I am browsing, then go back and read them.

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Kwil]

I just place my browsing windows in one desktop, and my taskbar in that desktop is equivalent to your browser tab. In other desktops, those windows are not visible.


Linux using elitist. :-)

Some of us don't have the luxury of multiple desktops - in which case Opera's ability to have multi-tabbed windows is a mind saver.

Re:Opera needs a full-featured set for Linux

[Peaker]

Switching desktops is inherently superior because it works for all apps while switching inside the apps only works for apps that support it, and works inconsistently across apps.

one of my favorites is 'links' (not 'lynx')

[keithmoore]

it's pure text-based, but it supports tables and a mouse (in xterm, anyway). and it's *fast*.

no java, javascript, cookies, or any of that crap. so it's not good for everything, but when you just want fast access to stuff that is mostly text, or if you're trying to read a site that is too busy (maybe because it's slashdotted), it's a winner.

http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/

Re:one of my favorites is 'links' (not 'lynx')

[orabidoo]

i actually like lynx better than links (and use it for most of my article reading, including /.), because it *doesn't* support tables.

when you're reading a text article in a terminal window, you (well, at least *I*) don't want navigation bars at the left or right. i want a full screen of text. lynx, by turning <tr> into linebreaks and <td> into space, lets you browse like this: skip the first few pages of nav junk with a few spacebar hits, and then read the article without anything else cluttering the window.

Re:one of my favorites is 'links' (not 'lynx')

[WWWWolf]

One of the things that bug me in Links is the mouse support. I liked Lynx before it make the disabling of xterm mouse support Painful!

(I don't want any of this silly mouse clickin' action, especially if it interferes with xterm cut-and-paste!)

For textual browsing, I prefer w3m.

Mozilla all the way ..

[TheViffer]

may not be the best, but with there latest security options, it makes live nice.

Go into

Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Scripts & Windows

and uncheck "open unrequested windows"

The pop-up nightmare has ended!

Not saying other browsers cant do this, but if they can't, they will be real soon.

Now I am just waiting for the "block these sites" style of entry which can be seeded by a downloaded file to block ad servers.

Re:Mozilla all the way ..

[Wolfier]

Is it propaganda or what.

Why are some options always get labelled as "Advanced"? To scare them off so they don't use it?

I'd suggest renaming them as "More".

Re:Mozilla all the way ..

[llamalicious]

I'll redundantly post that Opera supports turning off this feature (but only globally, there's no option to specify disabling of the feature only on load/unload of a page. I still like to popup windows from an anchor tag, thankyouverymuch)

The other privacy feature of Opera I like is the ability to disable referrer logging.

Konqueror failure - how does Redhat package it?

[Snowfox]

The author stated that attempting to install Konqueror required that he install all of the KDE environment, and that it damaged his machine.

Does Redhat not package the KDE environment in pieces? If not - why not?

With other distributions, it's been possible to install Konqueror and just the base KDE libraries for quite a long time. You should be able to fit all that you need on a handful of floppies - not a tens-of-megs RPM as the author claims.

Re:Konqueror failure - how does Redhat package it?

[bero-rh]

Does Redhat not package the KDE environment in pieces? If not - why not?

We do. kdelibs+kdebase is enough to run Konqueror.
We aren't splitting things up even more (like, maybe, splitting kcontrol off kdebase) mostly to keep a "ls *.rpm" tree you can bear to look at, and also to save translation cost for package descriptions.

New Opera

[srichman]

the premier Linux browsers are Galeon 1.0.3, Mozilla 0.9.8 and Opera 6.0 TP3

FYI, Technology Preview 3 is no longer the current version of Opera for Linux. They recently released 6.0 Beta 1.

missing pieces

[futuresheep]

What about 128-bit support for online transactions? Ease of installing plugins?

VIEW SOURCE is a necessity - mozilla loses

[mgkimsal2]

There was a linuxjournal article last month comparing many browsers and their ability to handle ssl, printing, etc. I don't think this is the same article (can anyone verify that?).

Anyway, on to my flamebait of a title. Most geeks are developers of some sort, and need to see 'under the hood'. Yeah, you've got source code, but if you're a webmonkey, you need to see the source of the page you're one. That's usually not possible in Mozilla or Netscape if you've POSTed stuff. As much as I'd like to use Mozilla for everything all the time (once it speeds up just a bit more!) I can't - I have to use something else (IE, Konqueror, depending on platform). Why the heck isn't this fixed YET? I see we can get MathML builds, but something as basic as this STILL isn't addressed.

"Go code it yourself" is an answer I feel coming on from someone, but you and I both know it's not a realistic solution. :)

Re:VIEW SOURCE is a necessity - mozilla loses

[Christianfreak]

I agree whole heartedly. The problem seems to be that when you do view source that Moz reloads the page without the posted material... I can't understand why it doesn't just show what it just parsed like NS 4 does.

Thats the sad thing. I still keep NS4 around, even though it renders like crap it can show me the full output of my CGI scripts, syntax highlighted and detection of some HTML errors.

Re:VIEW SOURCE is a necessity - mozilla loses

[mr3038]

In case you think your copy of Mozilla supports view source correctly you might want to try this. Just click Go! and select view source. Does the source look like it belongs to page you're viewing? Please don't go to bug #55583 unless you really have to. We don't want bugzilla to be slashdotted again.

Well the fastest is probably...

[Sits]

Dilo if you don't mind imperfect rendering (doesn't do frames yet).

If you don't mind having a text only interface, Lynx and Links are both good and surprisingly functional.

Of course fast does not necessarily imply best but it's a welcome addition.

Huh?

[cjpez]

I've been using Mozilla since M18, and I've never had any problems viewing page source . . . Back then it wasn't colorized, but it worked. So what's broken?

shacknews comment rendering?

[MoNsTeR]

I have but one question...

Will ANY of these browsers render the Shacknews comments system (in threaded mode) correctly? There's no way I can use anything but IE so long as that's the only browser that Shacks correctly...

Yes I realize it's as much a problem with the 'shack as it is with these browsers, but that makes no practical difference.

Mozilla? Doubt it...

[pongo000]

I've yet to be able to make a complete build of Mozilla, and the binaries don't seem to like my glibc versions. I suppose if one has the latest/greatest version of RH, Mozilla is fantastic. But shouldn't I be able to build Mozilla on any Linux platform (such as my heavily-modified SuSE box), given the prerequisite libs are present?

There still seem to be serious issues with the Mozilla build tree for some of us. I realize for every one of me, there will be a you who sez "Hey, luser, Mozilla builds just fine for me." Thing here is that Mozilla should build fine for everyone.

Konqueror is not a renderer.

[secondsun]

Yes Konqueror is used as a webbrowser, but the renderer is called khtml. Konqueror is the pane that the different kparts embed into. It is possible, has been done, and isn't a bad idea to use mozilla inside of konqueror to render webpages (now there are some benchmarks I would like to see.)

Phooey...

[pongo000]

The best damn browser is still Lynx, hands down! Why not live in the fast lane?

Konquerer should get a lot better soon

[pointwood]

As can be read in the KDE3 beta2 announcement, Konqueror in KDE3 should be a lot better than the KDE2 version. Here is the quote:

"One of the major improvements brought by KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2 is the Javascript/DHTML support in Konqueror," stated David Faure, a Konqueror and KOffice developer. "The DOM 2 model, used to render an HTML page, is now mostly implemented, and changes to the DOM tree are handled much better. The Javascript bindings and support is almost complete, faster and more stable than in KDE 2. These changes result in a much-improved rendering of dynamic websites and is something users will immediately appreciate."

IIRC, the tabbed browsing feature is planned for KDE 3.1.

Re:Huh?

[mgkimsal2]

When it's showing the result of many scripts that have been POSTed to, the source from 'view source' does not match up with what you're seeing on the screen.
It's a known issue and has been for going on 2 years I think.

Konqueror and tabbed browsing

[Brian Knotts]

Tabbed browsing is planned for 3.1.

Yeah...

[Greyfox]

I recently wiped RedHat off my system and installed Debian at home. Upgrading the system is easy and I don't have to worry about hunting a big batch of RPMs to resolve dependencies when I want to install something new. And I can use alien to put .RPM and binary .tar distributions into the package management system.

The upshot of all that is I don't have to worry about dependencies or the difficulty of downloading and installing an app and I don't have to worry about keeping it current. That's a pretty big win in my book (I think RedHat has some auto-updater stuff available but I've never been able to locate any documentation about it.)

Give credit where it's due !

[kigrwik]

Konqueror is *not* a web browser.

kHTML is.

Konqueror is a mostly empty shell that wraps around components that use the KPart architecture to display context-dependent widgets/menuitems, or kio_slaves that provide a filesystem-like display of stuffs.
Konqueror technically has the ability of embedding mozilla through the kMozilla component.

But then, you can also view DivX, PS, PDF (through KParts), browse an audio CD (and rip in .ogg or .wav with a simple drag n' drop (including freedb.org querying)), your POP3 account (possibly still in development) in Konqueror, and lots of other things (through KIO).

Actually, Konqueror is what looks most like the good old Unix philosophy of small tools:
"cat slashdot.org | kHTML | Konqueror"

Besides, with anti-aliased fonts, it's truly gorgeous !

Opera has 2 nice features that sets it apart.

[AirP]

Opera has a few features that I think that sets it apart from the other browsers(I may be wrong though...). Mouse Gestures... I sometimes get tired of having to go hit the back button, the forward button and so on and so on... I can hold the Right Mouse Button and then hit the Left Button and I go back, I do the opposite to go forward. I can go over a link, right click and pull downward and it opens the link in a new window. The Bookmark Shortcuts... You can give a bookmark a shortcut name so now, instead of going into bookmarks, you could just put your shortcut name for the url. These are 2 features I'm amazed that no one else has done yet and something that I think sets Opera apart from the rest.

Re:Opera has 2 nice features that sets it apart.

[Mike Shaver]

It would be more amazing if only Opera did that, I think. =)

Mozilla's had bookmark keywords for ages and ages (including parameterization, see http://www.google.ca/mozilla/google-search.html), and Galeon has that need parameterized-toolbar studd.

The mozgest guys have some great gesture bits available for installation, too: http://optimoz.mozdev.org/gestures/.

But hasn't he even a small point there?

[Pac]

I am not much of a GNOME user, for some reason or another I always find that I can make KDE run faster and I know exactly how to configure it to match my taste.

But a week or two ago I decided to upgrade the GNOME in my machine to give it another try. So I launched Red Carpet, subscribed to the Ximian channel, checked every checkbox and let it run. After a couple of unattended hours I had Gnome upgraded. KDE, on the other hand, requires a lot more work.I think that at this point, a piece of software of KDE's importance should really have a very visible and easy to use upgrade utility (as a sidenote, I am still using KDE. GNOME Ximian is good and pretty, but KDE is still better for me).

As for the features, you may be right about some (like the sidebars, the first thing I make disappear every time I install Mozilla), but I feel that you should not generalize, either we would all be still using Lynx... Tabbed browsing, for instance, is something I can barely live without at this point. When I have to use IE I find it very annoying having to open a new window every time I need to see a new page.

My two last complains about Mozilla are its loading time (an eternity under Linux compared to the same version in the same machine under Windows 2000) and the fact that I can't save a whole bunch of tabbed URLs under the same bookmark name. Once these are there, I would probably have found my browser forever.

Re:But hasn't he even a small point there?

[isorox]

But a week or two ago I decided to upgrade the GNOME in my machine to give it another try. So I launched Red Carpet, subscribed to the Ximian channel, checked every checkbox and let it run. After a couple of unattended hours I had Gnome upgraded. KDE, on the other hand, requires a lot more work.I think that at this point, a piece of software of KDE's importance should really have a very visible and easy to use upgrade utility

A problem with the upgrade tools you have installed.

I upgraded kde at christmas when I went home and used my parents cable modem. Took about an hour to pgrade my entire system (including KDE), to 2.2 something (IIRC).

How you ask?
"apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -y"

But none of this malarky effects the browser. In most distributions (I believe redhat/suse etc have caught debian up), Installing software is up to the distro.

Re:Huh?

[cjpez]

Hm, interesting. I suppose I've just been lucky then. Ah, well. I still love you, Mozilla!

Text Zooming

[brunes69]

See the little magnifying glass on your toolbar with the (+)? The one with the "Increase Font Sizes" tooltip? Click that.

Then you are voting for Mozilla

[Pac]

I understand Mozilla has had this feature for a long time. It is not a menu/GUI driven option, though.

You can edit the file user.js using the instructions in Custumizing Mozilla

Not exactly user friendly, but fairly easy anyway.

Re:Galeon is hard to install/upgrade?

[swillden]

You really ought to consider giving Debian a try. I like to build stuff myself on a regular basis, too, but there's also an awful lot of stuff I just want to get installed with minimum hassle.

The galeon example here wasn't a great one, either, because I (apparently) already had all of the prerequisites installed. What's really cool is bringing up a really basic box that has practically nothing installed on it, and typing "apt-get install kde" (or whatever other large, complex system) and watching it get and install all of X, KDE, etc.

It's even nice when you want to configure/build yourself. Just "apt-get source galeon" instead and it'll download and unpack the source tree. You then have the option of configure-make-make install or you can look in the debian directory, tweak all of the config params and use "dpkg-buildpackage" to build your own customized installable package that meshes seamlessly with the system. And if there's no debian package available for an app, it's pretty trivial to add your own debian directory to the source tree and build and install a package so that, again, it fits into the system.

Oh, and don't let all of the "but Debian stable is *ancient*" naysayers discourage you. Just run "testing" or "unstable" and you'll have all of the latest. And don't let the description fool you, "unstable" is very solid. I run "stable" on servers (actually, I'm running "testing" on my servers right now; they're not mission-critical and 3.0 is really close) and "unstable" on my desktops, although when 3.0 is released, I may switch to "testing" on the desktops (i.e. stick with Sid).

Re:Huh?

[jmccay]

Oe of the Linux Magazines you can buy in the stores (March 2002) issue has an article that compares the web browsers, and it does include Konqueror. I think it is in the March 2002 Linux Journal--it's got a lot of green on the cover.

Re:Mozilla 0.98?

[Christianfreak]

I have trouble with it too. It doesn't crash but it does strange things. It keeps shifting pieces of the page over about 2 pixels.

Chatzilla crashes.... very strange. I love .97. I guess here's hoping .99 will be better.

Hrm

[Etriaph]

Ok, I don't want to get upset and this guy did do a decent comparison, but I have to argue with his evaluation of Konqueror. He talked about some problems/bugs in Konqueror under the RedHat 7.2 install. I totally agree with him, RedHat packaged it wrong. The KDE 2.2.1 RPMs for RedHat 7.2 (and even the updated 2.2.2 RPMs for 7.2) had problems. KHTML would just crash now and again (well, kio_http) for whatever reason. So I went and compiled KDE 2.2.2 on my system, and it's fine. Konqueror is perfectly normal. I have run tests on my own PIII 800EB w/256MB of RAM and have noticed something significant: Galeon does not run *faster* than Konqueror. I'm not sure how other people are getting this result.

Granted, Galeon is light years ahead of Mozilla in speed (Mozilla is after all based on the Netscape browser that everyone loves to hate) but it's not faster than Konqueror. I don't even want to think about how fast Konq/KHTML will be under 3.0 which is due in a couple of weeks. Another thing that bugs me is he went to all the trouble to download a copy of everything else but didn't even think to get a recent version of Konqueror. I'm not sure if his comparison was very objective.

Advantages

[__aawsxp7741]

I find it really hard to decide on which browser to use, most having a feature that I don't really want to live without:

• Konqueror: I really love the "web shortcuts". For instance, entering imdb:brazil in the location bar will directly search imdb for brazil for me.
• Opera: Speed. And, of course, mouse gestures. Very nice. And speed.
• Galeon: Tabbed browsing. And it has a very fast, reduced feel to it.

Mozilla is missing here, although it really shouldn't be. After all, no Galeon without Mozilla. So what's it killer feature?

And if anybody can tell me how to do the "web shortcuts" with galeon, I'd be very grateful.

KDE needs a porn browser...Kunnilingus?

[Ukab the Great]

Despite what people say about Konqueror, you haven't really made it in the open source browser world until you have a fork like Pornzilla that's truly devoted to surfing the forgotten 20% of the traffic on the internet.

Mandrake

[Pac]

Mandrake 8.1 have not installed apt-get. I do not know if they don't carry it or just do not install it by default.

And I was not really talking about the browser, but about KDE in general.

I agree it should be up to the distro to upgrade the packages, and Mandrake has its own update tools, but I was really pointing to the fact that Red Carpet is the easiest tool I saw to date (it is rpm based, everything is automated and nicely GUIed).

Re:Mandrake

[isorox]

apt-get is for debian and debian based systems, but its similar to red carpet.

The point it none of it has anything to do with kde, and therefore shouldnt effect a review of a part of kde.

Re: drive letters

[King_TJ]

Actually, just as sort of a side note to this whole discussion, drive letters haven't quite "outlived their usefulness" yet. They're still needed, as long as people want to use DOS batch files without breaking anything.

If it wasn't for the need for "backwards compatibility", then you wouldn't see drive letters in Windows by now. Unfortunately, MS never really spent time replacing the DOS batch file language with an updated/more powerful replacement and gave people a clear set of instructions for editing existing batch files to work under the new system.

Re:Huh?

[M-G]

Yup. March 2002. The comparison is online here.

What about IE?

[LadyLucky]

Really... does the Unix version work on Linux?

And does it even work at all? what happens if I go to a page with a ActiveX component in it?

*ZZzzap*, I think I just lost some karma points.

Re: drive letters

[spitzak]

They don't have to make drive letters not work. All they have to do is make it so a drive letter is not required to name a file on the system.

This can easily be done by making a file system with mount points (and some non-Unix easy way to control it, such as having all devices that exist automatically create the mount points called / and mount themselves unless configured otherwise).

They can continue to have ":" be a reserved character and recognize any attempt to open : and remap that to //. This will retain back compatability. Also reserving the colon will allow service names much like the KDE file naming convention, though I think in the future service names will disappear just like drive letters as there is no need for the end user to know them.

But in fact back-compatability is easily maintained. I believe the reason MicroSoft does not fix this (and does not provide real symbolic links that can be used with their libc without a program having to understand them) is because that would allow easy Unix compatability by rearranging the MSDOS filesystem to look like a Unix one.

Re: drive letters

[spitzak]

Sorry, slashdot ate all my angle brackets.

Devices would create a mount point called /<device> and <letter>: would be turned into /<device>/<current dir for disk>

Re:Huh?

[Annnoying Coward]

To be more specific, the problem is that Mozilla does not cache the result of a posted query. When you view the source, it posts the query again. Now if the server has somekind of unique id to a query or timestamp has gone stale, the result does not match the original.

This really lessens Mozillas usefulness as a test tool for a web project as you are not guaranteed to see the original source. I haven't checked the situatiopn for a while, but I believe the fix is going to be post 1.0.

Is there a Linux Web browser works on FlipDog.com?

[antdude]

I tried Konqueror (whatever from KDE v2.2.1, Opera 6, Mozilla (v0.98)/Galeon, and Netscape Communicator v4.79 (it works in Windows, but not Linux!) on FlipDog.com, but they all failed.

Basically, I cannot get a list of cities in after selecting a state in the U.S. map. I hate going to Windows just to use this awesome job site.

Any advices? Thank you in advance. :)

Re:obviously you have gnome installed

[swillden]

Not with apt-get. If I hadn't already had the necessary components of gnome installed, apt-get would have downloaded and installed them.

Re:Galeon is hard to install/upgrade?

[swillden]

You edit the configuration file that tells dpkg where to install things, then use the command "dpkg-buildpackage" to construct your own .deb package file. Then you install that. It sounds more complicated than it is.

Konqueror has something called "smart popup policy

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

This will only allow popups, that are activated either by mouse clicks or key operations.

I have almost forgotten what popups ARE, by now.

Check out the KDE-3.0 release candidate next week, it is quites stable as a desktop and Konqueror is approaching IE-6.0 in comfort. In fact it is better in most things and standardss compliance.

I couldn't live without Opera

[anti11es]

I've been using Opera since the 3.x days, back when it was only offered on Windows. Now it is my main browser for linux, and it works for 95% of the sites that I visit. Opera is one of the very few programs I'm willing to pay money for, in fact I am grateful that they actually made the effort to port their browser to so many different platforms.

Three are a few things I just can't live without in a browser now:
1. Mouse gesters. Once you learn them you will *NEVER* go back. In fact, whenever I'm using one of those other browsers I end up trying the mouse gesters (which of course does nothing).
2. Tabbed windows (I know most of the browsers offer this now, but Opera has always had it).
3. All those cool search boxes/quick links you can customize and put into your personal bar.
4. The main search box (deafaul google of course but it can be anything you want).

I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch. My only gripe is that Opera sometimes crashes, although the newest version 6.0 B1 hasn't crashed on me once yet (although it has only been released a few days ago).

Raise or lower windows

[jesser]

Raise or lower windows; What is this? I really can't imagine that it is what it says, 'cause I don't see any purpose. Anyway - as with the previous point - I appreciate your effort in helping me, but I would rather do this myself. This time and forever.

It corresponds to the javascript function window.focus(). On Windows 98, that brings a window to the front, makes its titlebar blue, and directs keyboard commands to that window.

Window.focus() used almost exclusively in two situations:
1. Immediately after opening a window, focus the old window (only pop-under ads).
2. Immediately after opening a window, focus the new window (pop-up ads and useful windows). I don't know why sites do this, since it seems unnecessary, but many do.

If you've disabled "open unrequested windows", I recommend that you enable "raise and lower windows" so sites using #2 legitimately don't encounter a javascript error when they try to focus the window they just opened.

Once bug 117707 is fixed, window.focus() will do nothing instead of halting javascript execution when you have it disabled.

Re:Not the limit, but only the fonts...

[sydb]

Interesting poll, wouldn't let me vote though.

I would have gone for browser 2, Konqueror on BSD with anti-aliasing. The output is beautiful. I don't understand why there were votes for any other browsers, outside of a proportion of people being blind. Do you have any insights?

What the hell do dependencies have to do with it?

[Nailer]

The best Web downloads and installs were from Opera and Mozilla, which have minimal dependencies. Galeon is a small download but can be difficult to upgrade due to its Mozilla and GNOME dependencies."

What does dependencies have to do with the quality of software you're using? It seems like the reviewer is complaining more about the simpler mechanisms for installing software he has avaliable than the quality of the web browsers. This guy's running Red Hat 7.2

• Apt-get, which can install Galeon RPMs from the Red Hat Gnomehide mirror at apt.nixia.no, and Konqueror packages from the Red Hat updates mirror at tuxfamily.net. apt-get install kdebase galeon
  
• Ximian Red Carpet, which can also handle these things automatically (and has crypto signed archives as well)
  
• Grab, which fetches RPMs from any mirror, including vanilla http download sites
  

Fucking hell, the Galeon and Konqueror people put in a lot of work. Judging them because they actually go to the effort of acting like a normal app in their respective user interfaces unlike Mozilla and Opera, seems ridiculous.

Re:Huh?

[asa]

This really lessens Mozillas usefulness as a test tool for a web project as you are not guaranteed to see the original source.

And the fact that it's got a JS debugger _with_ JS profiling (ever wonder where your DHTML was spending it's time? Now you can see), it's got a meaningful JS console, it's got the most fully featured DOM inspector (with live DOM analysis) of any free application, it's got the best support for CSS and the DOM of any browser on the planet... None of this matters because you can't conveniently get at original source for some percentage of pages? OK. --Asa

Re: drive letters

[scrytch]

That's precisely how it is now. \Device\HardDisk0\Partition0, (yes, backslashes, the path parser can do either forward or backslashes, though the object manager uses backslashes canonically). Colon is a reserved character in filenames, but it's used to separate the filename from the fork name in NTFS. Ironically, the only system I know of that can use forked files from the shell is cygwin -- again, because of a braindead parser in the cmd.exe and explorer shells that rejects them.

Symbolic links don't exist per se in windows, but something more powerful does, and that's reparse points. reparse points are understood in the kernel and do not require application support, and they act exactly like translators in hurd. Unlike hurd, reparse points are stackable, whereas hurd translators are not. Reparse points are also used to implement mount points as well.

Re: drive letters

[spitzak]

Try those names under fopen() or open() and you will see that they don't work.

Stop posting the fact that they "do it" when it is not true. Unless the actual calls that the vast majority of programs use actually work with these names and links, they are NOT implemented.

Opera DOES have a full set for Linux

[gosand]

Sorry to reply to my own message, I know nobody really cares. :-)

I downloaded the latest version for Linux, and it rocks hard. I had an older version. It is interesting to see how much better versions get in each release. Not like SOME browsers out there that spend all their time releasing security patches instead of valuable and innovative software. :-)