Linux Web Browsers Reviewed

scubacuda writes: "A while back, Slashdot posted a Rob Valliere's Linux vs. Windows review. Since then, he has posted a 2002 Linux Web Browser Review." This is a great , straightforward round-up of current web-browsing options, as shipped with distributions. Note though that none of these browsers are static -- Konqueror's CVS version, for instance, now includes tabs and other goodies. So bear your own downloading and installation habits in mind.

Comments

what?! no lynx!!!

[scjelli]

the subject says it all...

Re:what?! no lynx!!!

[Icephreak1]

Lynx sucks anyway. Links is miles better.

Re:what?! no lynx!!!

[Strog]

I've been logging into hotmail with links. Gives the usual warning page about IE and Netscape are the only browsers. Click continue and mess with your hotmail.

Re:what?! no lynx!!!

[Dakkus]

Why would anyone _really_ want to use links when w3m is available?

http://www.w3m.org/

Using w3m is just like using a graphical browser. If it's run in xterm it can also show images. Hope you download and enjoy.

Galeon is awesome

[diparfitt]

I've been using Galeon for months at work doing web development (Java!), and I don't think life would be sane if I had to use Netscape.

It's fast, and does some cool things like disable popups, etc. I also dig the Google search boxes at the top.

This little browser is just AWESOME!

Re:Galeon is awesome

[gfxguy]

Have you tried Opera? Sounds very similar, and Opera is faster.

If you want to advocate OS, Galeon IS awesome, though.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[xWeston]

After reading this i tried out opera again (on windows), after a little bit of configuring im actually thinking about switching to it from IE.

It has way more updates, more features, and overall it is faster for browsing. It does have a few problems dissplaying certain pages though. One thing it always does is underlines links even if the .css says not to, and the "buttons" on pages are never skinned (even delete etc in hotmail).

Re:Galeon is awesome

[diparfitt]

what i meant by little web browser was that it doesn't include an html editor, newsreader, email client, etc....

Re:Galeon is awesome

[Seli]

> I believe the original author was not including dependencies. Without those, Galeon is the smallest.

No. Without dependencies, Konqueror is the smallest (which also shows that not including dependencies doesn't make much sense).

Re:Galeon is awesome

[biostatman]

One thing you can do is to create your own search boxes on top - if you look at the bookmarks.xbel file in the ~/.galeon directory you should be able to easily snoop out how to do it. I have added a search bar for a company directory that I use multiple times per day and it is incredibly useful.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[jomagam]

Are you actually able to use Java with Galeon/Mozilla ? My only gripe with them is java applets causing a core dump every 15 minutes. For java only hotjava works for me.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[stoolpigeon]

I know what it is called and how to spell it.

Trolling the troll - you know - sarcasm and such.

.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[jaavaaguru]

This screenshot shows Opera displaying a web page without underlining the links.

Is "skinning" buttons part of CSS, or is it just a weird MS thing? I've not seen any browser implement it exactly the same way as MS does, although Konqueror comes close, but then I don't really care if a web page author can change the colours of buttons on pages I'm reading. I'd rather he/she didn't in fact.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[xWeston]

You're right, i misspoke... it just seems to underline a lot of them. However on a page that i made my own CSS for, it did not underline them. Pages such as www.hotmail.com and http://www.silver-pixel.net both have underlines when there is no underline in IE

I tried mozilla, but opera feels faster, looks nicer, and has features that i enjoy more. The bar at the bottom that tells me how quickly pages are loading as well as the status of the page is really nice, hopefully more browsers will follow with that.

Mozilla still uses the same buttons from Netscape 2 it seems like! I think i have a "browser aversion" just due to the looks, so i didnt give it as much of a chance.

Tabbed browsing in opera is also very nice.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[Dakkus]

Also my opera 6.0 B2 does the same thing. And mozilla 1 rc1-2 does it, too. In opera I just have to double-click the tab to fix the problem. In mozilla I'll have to copy the URL, open a new window and paste the address there.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[reynolds_john]

Yes, but you probably aren't using the proper java perhaps? I found the 'holy grail' - Install Netscape Navigator 6.x for Linux in /usr/local/netscape6
then go into
/usr/local/netscape6/plugins/
and copy the entire folder into
/usr/local/mozilla/plugins
overwriting if asked. Works great.

Re:Galeon is awesome

[Rick the Red]

for a troll, it's quite imaginative

Oh, I don't know. I think s/he's trying to mimic Profane Motherfucker, who actually posts some good stuff, if you can get past the profanity. OTOH, you could argue PM's not a troll, but a flamer...

What no Dillo?

[Ed Avis]

A shame that the very fast and neat Dillo wasn't mentioned.

Re:What no Dillo?

[cduffy]

You can put it in very tiny places, that's what.

Try embedding Mozilla... yes, it can be done, but what you end up with is a lot bigger than your typical "embedded system". Dillo is small enough and fast enough to be used in places other than the desktop, where storage space (usually flash) and CPU time are genuinely at a premium.

Re:What no Dillo?

[Ed Avis]

No Javascript is on balance a good feature. That is, I normally turn Javascript off in Mozilla because its main uses are for things like popups which annoy me. This would depend on what sites you visit, of course. For some sites Javascript is essential. Personally I have not found a Javascript-requring site that does not suck anyway, but YMMV.

'Crippleware' normally means deliberately crippled, as in 'pay us extra for the Professional version and we'll enable this feature'. Dillo is not crippleware by that definition.

The lack of i18n is a valid criticism. There are some patches available for Japanese, and I think it already handles Western European languages, but there are certainly several languages and scripts which cannot be displayed. Internationalizing the application itself should not be too hard - but I see that you can read English anyway so it shouldn't be a big concern that the app itself is in English.

'What can you do with Dillo' - well read Slashdot, Freshmeat, Google, and most pages linked from them. The latest release has cookies (although you may have to edit ~/.dillo/cookiesrc to enable them) so it works really well for Slashdot.

Re:What no Dillo?

[teslatug]

Yeah, what's the dillio?

Re:What no Dillo?

[Jonny Ringo]

Maybe becuase when people first glance at it they think it says "Dildo" like I did.

There's a new one for the porn industry. A dildo Web Browser.

Re:What no Dillo?

[damiam]

Dillo's great for browsing on a 386. But really, it doesn't support cookies, PNG's, bookmarks, frames, CSS, proper text wrapping around images, and it barely supports tables. It's not a serious option for most people.

Re:What no Dillo?

[0x0d0a]

It's not crippleware. Crippleware is where you have deliberately feature-impeded software, usually to force someone to buy a full copy.

It's true that dillo has almost no i18n support...it needs to use the gtk2 font rendering system (pango) to do so, and doing so would involve a reasonable amount of work. Pango may not be powerful enough alone -- it's actually a very complex problem to do layout with international characters.

And as for "what can you do with dillo", you can browse the web. I'm typing this in dillo right now. Frankly, the number of times I've seen Javascript correctly and usefully used can be counted on one hand.

Dillo is fast, secure, and free. It uses an absolutely minimal amount of screen space (you can even double-click in a page to hide the toolbar and status bar, and if you have the status bar size set to tiny...)

I love dillo, but YMMV...if you don't feel comfortable away from MSIE, then so be it.

Re:What no Dillo?

[Ian Bicking]

Wow... Dillo lacks some serious features (cookies?)... but it sure is fast. I don't know what people are talking about with Mozilla or Galeon being fast. I mean, they are complete, but they sure aren't fast.

Hmmm...

[Yoda2]

And it looks like even if you remove these web browsers, Linux will still work.

Re:Hmmm...

[PeterClark]

But if you remove either KDE or GNOME, you will be unable to access your files. :)

My two cents: I'm using Galeon with KDE (or, in the words of a fellow LUG member at an InstallFest, "You're doing what?) The reason being, of course, is that I love Galeon's tabs. I mourned the lack of tabs in Konq, but will most definitely go try it out once KDE 3.1 is out.

:Peter

Re:Hmmm...

[Tourettes Troll]

My two cents: I'm using Galeon with KDE Something I've always liked about Unix - you can mix and match applications to create your own ideal working environment. Shells, window managers, mail client, web browsers, file managers - it's all good. Just a pity there isn't one common-looking widget set, as can get a bit ARSE chaotic at times!

Re:Hmmm...

[Salsaman]

That's impossible, everyone knows that the browser is an integral part of the OS...

Re:Hmmm...

[zsmooth]

It was a joke.

Re:Hmmm...

[tarogue]

> But if you remove either KDE or GNOME, you will be unable to access your files. :)

Really? Amazing that I have 3 systems without X even installed and I can still access my files...

Another one has fvwm (not fvwm2) and i can still access my files.

I must be special.

Re:Hmmm...

[Corporate Drone]

> And it looks like even if you remove these web browsers, Linux will still work.

Yes, but of course, if you remove the browser, you will still continue to not work with Windows...

Re:Hmmm...

[PeterClark]

Quoth tarogue (the special):

Really? Amazing that I have 3 systems without X even installed and I can still access my files...

Another one has fvwm (not fvwm2) and i can still access my files.

I must be special.

Nay, you must be BRILLIANT! You mean you don't need KDE or GNOME? Holy mother of Linus Torvalds, why didn't someone mention this before! Tell me, did you have to hack your system? Are you one of those l334 d00ds that I must f34r? Can mere mortals like me ever hope to achieve such a stunning technological feat?

:)

:Peter

Re:Hmmm...

[infiniti99]

Using a CVS build is not a very good recommendation. I'm sure the original poster knew the functionality was in CVS, otherwise no one would be discussing about Konqueror and tabs (an entry in the KDE todo list would not be enough).

Anyhow, I say wait for 3.1. I tend to stay away from CVS builds myself, since they sometimes don't work. It's always humorous to see someone post to the kde-devel mailinglist complaining about some moment's CVS not compiling, as if it is some shocking news.

Re:Hmmm...

[eugene ts wong]

Yeah, Linux does work without the web browser. I installed emacs the other day, and I was able to remove Netscape, the kernel, bash, all my non-emacs libraries, etc. Emacs is great! It's so good that you don't even need an OS!

;^)

Re:Hmmm...

[spinwards]

3.0.5 (cvs 20020327) is very stable, but right now the tabs suck, as there is _no_ widget to close them, you have to go through the window menu. I hope they decide to put the close widget on the ta itself (ala galleon) and not somewhere wierd (ala mozilla).

Re:Hmmm...

[horza]

I'm using KDE with Galeon for the same reasons, but it is certainly where the lack of cut and paste between KDE and Gnome hurts the most. Sending people urls is one of the most common things to do.

Phillip.

Old software

[JanneM]

That's the problem with these kind of reviews; Mozilla is at RC1 and Galeon is at 1.2 - I assume the other browsers are similarily updated. A review of such software needs to be done almost literally within a week or two, or it will be obsolete and/or wrong by the time it reaches its readership. Reviewers really should take note of that, and maybe include a small section on what is happening to each product in developer-land.

/Janne

Re:Old software

[lamont116]

Konqueror is at 3.0, and he tested 2.2.1. Sheesh. I expect that when 3.1 comes out, he'll test 2.2.2.

Somewhat off-topic, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way I've been able to convince Windows IE users to use Mozilla is by introducing them to the pop-up blocking feature. Once they see that, they're in awe, and once you show them things like tabs, they're sold. Try it with your favorite IE user and see what happens!

(And yes, there are extra programs to provide this functionality, but the people I've done this with were happy to dump them.)

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[Hector73]

The only way I've been able to convince Windows IE users to use Mozilla is by introducing them to the pop-up blocking feature. Once they see that, they're in awe, and once you show them things like tabs, they're sold. Try it with your favorite IE user and see what happens!

Amen, Brother Beavis.

The single most importance feature IMHO for Mozilla was the pop-up blocking without the need for one of those ad-blocking software "http proxies" running all the time. That's what made me switch (plus the improved stability of RC1).

I loath the tabs, but thankfully, Mozilla is very configurable so I don't use them. I'm sold without the tabs.

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[Tha_Zanthrax]

I do my web-browser mostly in Windows, but on Opera, I didn't like mozilla that much. The pop-up killing is a bit to drastic IMHO. Opera has an option to have them pop-up in the background without recieving focus.

Opera beats Mozilla speed-wize too...
But for real speed, nothing beats Lynx :)

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

the Pornzilla enhancements, coupled with the general greatness of RC1, have convinced several of my male friends to make the switch...

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[kson34]

What I find interesting is the most compelling feature of Mozilla (at least the feature that I find most usefull) is the tabbed browsing, which is (sort of) an ancient Win16 feature MDI (Multi Document Interface) properly implimented. MDI was supposed to go away with the arrival of Windows 95 (at least SDI was the preferred look and feel that M$ wanted), however I wish that most applications (Word Processors, Spradsheets, Telnet SSH clients, etc) would impliment them. Also a standardized way to shift between tabs would be nice (I always find myself hitting Alt-Tab and find myself in the wrong app...).

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[jchristopher]

Absolutely! The simple popup blocking is the NUMBER ONE feature that convinces folks to switch.

I've convinced several folks on Windows to switch to Mozilla just by showing them this feature as well.

Another feature I'd like to see would be the interstitial ad blocking. For example, on salon.com if you click a link to a story, they bounce you to an ad, you sit there for 5 seconds or so, then they bounce you to the story. I'd like to see a Mozilla feature that would ignore the supplied "wait" value and just redirect you immediately. Wouldn't be hard to implement, just need a checkbox for "ignore META redirects of longer than x seconds".

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[jakobgrimstveit]

Just mentioning that this can be achieved by downloading and installing the Opera Browser, developed by a great team of hackers in Norway.

And by the way, it's on version 6.01 on Win32 and 6 beta 2 on linux - a total of about five versions better than Mozilla!

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[skt]

I agree that the tabbed interfaces we are seeing now should replace MDI. IIRC, Word 2000 uses separate windows for multiple documents, but Word97 was still using MDI. I haven't used Office 2002 yet, but those kinds of applications need to implement tabbed interfaces IMHO.

Re:Somewhat off-topic, but...

[homer_ca]

Mozilla's been great through the 0.9.x releases, but I noticed a few more bugs in the Win32 RC1. All browser windows hang when one window is waiting to load. The mouse cursor sometimes gets stuck on the resize cursor instead of the pointer and I can't click anything anymore. I hope RC2 is better.

256 MB? No way!

[oever]

While all of the browsers run surprisingly fast on slower CPUs, you need 256MB of RAM for Red Hat 7.2 with the KDE desktop.

This is nonsense.
198 MB is enough to work comforably.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Fast Ben]

RedHat 7.2 with KDE ran just fine on my AMD 333 laptop with 64MB of RAM, albeit a tad slow at times. I just upgraded it to RedHat 7.3 with KDE3, and it's actually faster now. Konqueror is quite a bit faster.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[pmz]

This can go even further...I have KDE on a system with only 128MB. Running Konquerer, Netscape 4.7X (don't have Mozilla, yet), or the other KDE office programs still results in no swapping. Looking at `top` output, however, would lead me to suggest no less RAM than 128MB, since larger apps like Mozilla would definitely be too much.

For those of you who like to run Mozilla, Open Office, Emacs, etc. all a the same time...go for 512MB. You won't regret it.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[MeNeXT]

something must be wrong with my system or with RH7.2 cause i'm running KDE, Netscape (4.79), SO5.1, Mozzila and Gnome apps (Evolution) at the same time on 128meg RAM.

I do not see a big diff between a PIII 400, 128meg and a PIII 800, 256meg

I have to try it on a PI 166 with 64 to see how bad it gets. But I conssider the 400 an old system. I think any system with 128 meg or more should be fine for a home or work evironment.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Bake]

Hell I'm running KDE 2.2 from a Suse 7,3 live CD at home (kinda hard to run it from the hard drive when the hard drive is dead) and I'm barely using more than 1/3 of my 256 megs o'ram

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Slashdotter_nl]

No dude, 640 kilobytes is enough for anyone!

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Surak]

Note you said blackbox, not KDE. He said KDE.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[meringuoid]

Personally I get along in RH 7.2 KDE with 80MB (K6/2 400, upgrade from P90!), no problem at all...

Re:256 MB? No way!

[dirvish]

Red Hat 7.2 with KDE is running pretty damn good on my pc with only 128 MB. Of course the 1.6 GHz processor probably helps.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Cyno]

For some reason top doesn't always give me an acurate readout of how much ram my system is using. I prefer to use gtop or gkrellm. Gkrellm says I use about 128MB of RAM running GNOME with a KDE app or two running, galeon, open office, starcraft/winex, and maybe an extra X session with alpha centauri. I have yet to max out the 256MB of RAM or use a significant amount of swap. Short of creating a 12800x10240 image in the gimp (while running all that other shit) nothing touches swap. 256MB is all I'll ever need. :)

Re:256 MB? No way!

[pmz]

For some reason top doesn't always give me an acurate readout of how much ram my system is using.

This is generally due to whether top is reporting memory used by shared libraries and other shared memory in addition to the regular text and data parts of a program. Also, the file system cache can make the total memory use look unusually high, depending on the version of your OS.

Under Solaris 8, there is a program, pmap, which outputs a dissection of a process and its libraries. I'm sure there is something similar for Linux that could help determine exactly what top is displaying.

Re:256 MB? No way!

[Cro Magnon]

KDE3 is faster? Kewl! I haven't tried it yet, but my main gripe with KDE2 is speed (with 64MB RAM).

Re:I'm happy with IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm happy with IE6 on YOUR Win2000 and XP boxes also....

Re:I swore I've seen this before

[DeadSea]

Yes.

This is a duplicate story from a couple months ago.

Here is the original.

That's a dupe

[iamr00t]

March 1 story
It's not new now also, he's using mozilla 0.9.8 ... duh.

galeon

[layyze]

The review was great and all, but did it really say that Galeon was a 20.0mb download? Even with downloading all of the necessary library dependencies shouldn't 20 megs seems a little high. This review stinks of Redhat/Ximian bloat. Although I am happy to see a more update review, even if the test machine may be slightly outdated to what many of us use these days.
-lt

Re:galeon

[Salsaman]

I think that the figure quoted was including Mozilla, which is needed to run Galeon.

What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[PunchMonkey]

For a full browser suite, the latest Mozilla was the most impressive and like Netscape, has the best looking interface, is available on multiple platforms and includes a good help system. But unlike Netscape, Mozilla is rapidly developing, is easy to upgrade, is better than Internet Explorer/Outlook Express and includes some great features: it can use Tabs by default and saves complete Web pages perfectly.


Not to be a troll, but it irks me when I hear someone saying "this" is better than "that" cause I said so. It causes me to lose some respect for the reviewer.

As a happy user of IE and OE, I'd love to hear what the reviewer find better in Mozilla over IE/OE. My experience in the past with *nix web browsers hasn't been all that great. I think the IE interface is quite nice, easy to upgrade, and can save complete web pages perfectly as well (.mht).

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Drachemorder]

I can't speak for the reviewer, but even on Windows I prefer Mozilla for two reasons: Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. I can't live without either of those features any more.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[dylan_-]

These are exactly the same reasons I use Mozilla on Windows. Or, in other words, "Me too!"

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[PunchMonkey]

I rarely have the need to block pop-ups... the sites I go to just don't have any. I get maybe 2-3 per day. If you do visit sites with popups I can see why you'd like that.

What's tabbed browsing? I have no idea what that means.... is that like what Opera has?

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

I prefer the fact, that when Mozilla crashes, my entire OS doesn't die. It gives me time to exit all of my other apps normally, and reboot correctly. I love Konq, and except for the fact that it crashes when I try to view [www.wilwheaton.net], it is plenty enough of a browser for me. =)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[__past__]

I'd love to hear what the reviewer find better in Mozilla over IE/OE.

Tabs and that it saves complete Web pages perfectly, perhaps? IE does very funny things if you tell it to save a page, like converting valid XHTML to a pile of crap.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[lkaos]

1) Tabbed browsing - it's worth all the hype it receives. Mozilla can be configured such that almost any action will just generate a new tab. I middle click on a link, new tab. If a link has a _TOP target, new tag. Tabs are much easier to navigate especially if your like me and tend to have 15 web pages open at once.

2) Scripting security customization. Almost all the annoying aspects of JavaScript can be individually blocked with Mozilla. This includes disabling pop-up ads or pop-under ads or those stupid things that resize your window. The nice thing is that Mozilla is smart enough to differentiate between an action that occurs onLoad or something verses one where you actually click a link.

3) Sidebar. The mozilla sidebar is pretty neat for two reasons. On the one hand, it provides easy access to things like bookmarks, history, and searching. On the other hand though, the sidebar is built on Mozillas XUL technology such that any webpage can install a new sidebar (well, you have to allow the page to install the sidebar). Freshmeat, CNN, and a few other sites have great sidebars that provide headlines and search facilities (in a compact, easy to use manner).

4) Integrated everything. Mozilla has a built in mail client, WYSIWYG editor, and address book. The WYSIWYG editor doesn't get the attention it deserves. Its really evolved from the horrible Composer of Netscape fame into something that rivals any editor that I've ever used. The mail client is really nice too with all sorts of searching and filtering capabilities that I am not aware of in Outlook (although I only use Outlook at work).

A lot of these things are just showing up in the newer releases (in a usable state at least). When the 1.0 milestone is released, I would really recommend checking it out. The release candidates so far definitely have changed the way I use the internet.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[AngryAndDrunk]

For some people (myself included), even 2-3 per day is too many.

I generally detest any software that attempts to do something that I haven't asked it to, such as popup windows, steal input focus, etc (in fact, that is my all time computing pet hate, and one of the things that pushed me to start playing with Linux).

That's my only real reason for using Galeon - I still allow popups, but they open in new tabs, so they aren't anywhere near as "in your face" as normal ones. I'd use Mozilla, but I find it to be too slow under Linux (especially on my aging work PC).

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[galaga79]

From personal use of Mozilla I prefer it over Internet Explorer for many reasons but mostly because of the all the features for power users. As has already been mentioned by the reviewer it has tabbed browsing that is great but aside from that it has a plethora of other great features I will list in point form.

• Complete control over Javascript, you can disable it all together, or just popups, the resizing of windows etc
• Powerful search tools, you can choose the search engine of your preference while as far I know in it only uses MSN for searching in the URL bar. On top of that you can also select a bunch of text in a webpage and then bring up a context menu and do 'Websearch for "xxxx"' very handly for looking up things from articles.
• The blocking of images from servers of your choose, get for getting rid of ads
• The blocking off cookies from sites, again great for stopping those Doubleclick and Cnet cookies etc

That's atleast I handful of things that I know Mozilla RC1 has that Internet Explorer version 5 doesn't have. But hey at the end of the day it doesn't come down to features, just personal preference.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[zsmooth]

You haven't used Windows since Windows 98, have you? I don't have many good things to say about Linux browsers from 1998 either...

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[morris57]

Don't forget text zooming with the mouse wheel!!

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[PunchMonkey]

I prefer the fact, that when Mozilla crashes, my entire OS doesn't die. It gives me time to exit all of my other apps normally, and reboot correctly. I love Konq, and except for the fact that it crashes when I try to view [www.wilwheaton.net], it is plenty enough of a browser for me. =)

IE hasn't crashed my entire OS in years either, so this doesn't explain "better" either. When IE does crash or freeze (maybe once a week) and I have to kill it, it either kills all my IE sessions, or just the one frozen window and the windows that spawned from it (From doing CTRL+N's).

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[PunchMonkey]

Tabs and that it saves complete Web pages perfectly, perhaps? IE does very funny things if you tell it to save a page, like converting valid XHTML to a pile of crap.

What's this tabs thing? Multiple browser sessions in one window like Opera?

When I save a page in IE it saves as an .MHT file. Which, if you open it up and look at it, is an Email file, which I expect could open up in any regular email client (though I've never tried except for Outlook Express). When you reopen the file it opens up exactly as the original. All the images have been MIME encoded into the one file.

How does Konq, Opera, and Mozilla handle saving files? I'd expect it's in a similar way...

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[dasunt]

You forgot that it also allows you more non-work time while you wait for the damned thing to load and it increases computer memory sales, helping other geeks out there.

Seriously, Moz is a great browser, but its *bloated*. Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load. In fact, I'm guessing if I decouple IE from Explorer, IE would still load faster.

Sure, I'm patient enough to wait for Moz to load, but OTOH, I don't expect bloat from any of my web browsers.

And no, I don't want to use the quick launch. I like to conserve my memory.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Pike65]

As a web developer I can't do without IE. I spend a lot of time browsing graphic design sites and they are all built for IE. The reason? IE does the best job at making complicated sites look good.

The feature set may not be 3WC compliant, but as my friend pointed out, his web page is 100% standard compliant and won't render properly in anything.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Lawrence Ho]

Have you tried IE6?

I don't know why everyone here thinks blocking cookies is a great feature of Mozilla. I have yet to find a way to block all cookies by default but accept those I want it to accept in Mozilla. IE does that just fine. Mozilla only offers 3 options, deny all/allow all or prompt for every damn cookie if it is from a site which is not in the list configured.

IE's cookie mangement is far superior and easier to use than that of Mozilla, IMHO. Please enlighten me if I have overlooked some settings in Mozilla.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[habig]

> Mozilla can be configured such that almost any
> action will just generate a new tab. I middle
> click on a link, new tab.

One that I haven't figured out but would like to - middle clicking on a bookmark link in sidebar, menu, or "manage bookmarks" tool does not generate a new tab.

Bug, or feature to be worked around? (how?)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[flez]

Interestingly, disabling pop-ups also disables the ability to read your MS outlook web e-mail.
So I have to leave pop-ups on.

I find, though, that I only run into one or two a day anyway, so it's not really a problem.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[npietraniec]

IE does the best job at making complicated sites look good.

Try "Lazy web developers do a good job writing non-standard code and not testing it in any browser but IE." As a web developer myself I can tell you that the code I write works properly in Mozilla and then I have to go back, test it in IE, and make adjustments so that it looks right in that browser.

Also, you mention a friends site which is *100%* compliant but doesn't render right in *any* browser. Please post a link. I'd be intersted in seeing it... And if you're right I'll promptly file a bug in bugzilla.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Christianfreak]

You can save entire webpages with mozilla as well. Creates a nice little directory with the images.

Moz also has themes with which you can change the look and its one of the easiest packages on *ix to install IMHO

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[spencerogden]

You should be able to disabl only onLoad() popups so that when you click on a link that generates a popup it works.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

Yes, I have, and I don't know if it's karma, or what, because they still take the OS down for me. I am very fond of unix browsers from 1998, lynx. =)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[claar]

If a link has a _TOP target, new tag.

Middle click I've done.. how do you make it do a new tab with _TOP targets? I'm using RC1.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Pike65]

Lazy web developers do a good job writing non-standard code and not testing it in any browser but IE.

Show me a non-lazy (un-lazy?) web developer and I'll promptly file a bug at Surfstation.

Mate's site - To be honest it's pretty butt-ugly anyway, and I'm not sure what he means when he says it isn't rendering right, but here the link. If you Slashdot him I'll pay.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[zsmooth]

Right, I had forgotten about lynx... Okay, there's one linux browser from 1998 I liked. :)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

How to enable tabbed browsing in Mozilla

Edit>Preferences>Navigator>Tabbed Browsing

I prefer to enable "Load links in Background", and disable "Hide the tab bar when one tab is open.". Also I check all three options under "Open tabs instead of windows for:".

Anybody know why this killer feature is disabled by default?

Fuzzy

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[jchristopher]

No, there is a preference that allows you to ALLOW popups generated by your clicking, while DISABLING those that occur when the page loads/unloads. Check it out.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[sehryan]

Let's work backwards

4) Integrated everything

Yeah, IE has this for a while, OE and FrontPage Express can be downloaded with IE, or they can be skipped. OE is my mail client of choice, with very nice searching and filtering capabilities, and any serious webdev is not going to use something that came with their broswer to create sites.

3) Sidebar

Yeah, and IE has customizeable sidebars as well, including sites like Google (actually a top bar) MSNBC. And I don't want to hear about MS pushing their own news in their own browser, since both Netscape and CNN are owned by AOL Time Warner. I guess its just coincidence that CNN only has a Netscape compatible version of the sidebar.

2) Scripting security customization

This is actually a cool feature that I hope IE will impliment soon. However, third party solutions are available for IE that do the same thing.

1) Tabbed browsing

Now this is about the only thing I wish IE had. XP groups multiple windows, but it sucks. I hope MS adds this soon.

Overall, only two of your items are features that IE can't do, only one of those can't be done at all, and none of them are good enough reasons for me to switch, or recommend anyone else to do the same.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[stevey]

Tabbed browsing - it's worth all the hype it receives.

I use Mozilla on Windows and Linux - and I love tabbed browsing, it is the killer feature for me as I don't tend to visit sites with popups.

However I find one thing lacking in Mozilla's tab browsing - it isn't possible to switch tabs via the keyboard. To switch to a new tab you have to use the mouse. I've downloaded the source to see how hard it would be to add this, but I've not got round to unpacking it yet.

It's all very well to open new tabs with the mouse, or Ctrl+T but until I can cycle through them with Ctrl+Tab, or similar, I'm gonna be a little grumpy ;)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Jason_Knx]

I agree with IE doing the best at rendering pages the way the was meant to look.

I design pages and test view them in IE for til I get the layout the way it should look. Then I do check to make sure W3C compliant. Then I test view it in Netscape, IE4, and Opera on Windows. Then I test it in Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux.

Until Netscape 6.2 I've always had to make a lot changes or sacrifices in to display properly in Netscape. I've given up on trying it to display with the exact same layout in everything else. I just make sure it's still readable and understandable. In the end I do a final W3C check to make sure it's compliant.

What I'd like to see more than anymore features being added is full CSS, Javascript, and HTML support to the W3C standards. For instance, overflow, clipping, and height settings working correctly in more than just IE.

I'd like to see a review that really covers standards support between browsers.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[omidk]

press ctrl-pageup or ctrl-pagedown....you will be happy.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[pacman on prozac]

IE can do this, they just don't document it. Hold control and spin the mouse wheel.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[F.O.Dobbs]

Why is this modded down? It works for Mozilla and it answered his question. Thanks omidk.

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[elemental23]

Try CTRL+Page Up and CTRL+Page Down. I think you'll be happy.

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[elemental23]

Edit | Preferences | Navigator | Tabbed Browsing. Under 'Open tabs instead of windows for' check 'Windows opened by the web page'.

I think that'll do it, but I don't know a page offhand to try it out on.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[npietraniec]

Surfstation works fine in Moz 1.0RC1 and Konqueror 3.0 in fact, every site I'm trying seems to be working fine, granted I am trying all the major ones... Praystation works fine, designiskinky works fine

/me tries some of the old Dreamless crew's sites... Limmy has a few bugs... Milt's site seems to work fine tho. Wish I could remember some sites with heavy DHTML...

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Fjord]

I switched to Mozilla because of the loading time. IE takes 10 seconds from clicking the icon to having my homepage (my.yahoo.com) rendered. Mozilla took 3. Considering startup time is what switched me to IE in the first place, switching to Mozilla was natural. Since then I've become addicted to the tabbed browsing.

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[psocccer]

I think it's also worth noting that CTRL-w will close the current tab, so you don't have to click the little X either.

More great shortcuts like this can be found at this link. I believe mozilla.org had a similar page aat one time.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[jesser]

And no, I don't want to use the quick launch. I like to conserve my memory.

Conserve memory? Mozilla gets paged out if other apps need the RAM even in quick launch mode, just like Internet Explorer.

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[__past__]

BTW: Is it possible to configure those key bindings? I tries to look it up in the Mozilla docs, but, well, there are no useful ones...

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[stevey]

Wow! I am indeed very happy - and much in your debt.

How did you discover this; it's not listed as a shortcut in the release notes .. nor is it in the preferences anywhere. (Or in the menu).

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[stevey]

Thanks for the link

I already knew about the Ctrl+W shortcut, which works nicely in both Mozilla + IE if I have to use that.

(Shift + Left click opens a new window with a link in IE; if that's useful to anybody...)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Pike65]

&lt An evil smile spreads across Pike65's monitor tanned face &gt

DHTML, eh? Ah! The ultimate challenge! k10k!

. . . . Goddammit!

OK if it can take k10k it can take anything. Guess it's just my DHTML that sucks. Maybe I should get a book and learn how to do it properly. This reverse engineering shit doesn't work as well for the Net as it does for C. That's what happens when you try to make a fault tolerant mark-up language, I suppose . . .

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[elemental23]

I don't remember exactly how I found out about that. I probably read it in a comment here, actually.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[lkaos]

Yeah, IE has this for a while, OE and FrontPage Express can be downloaded with IE, or they can be skipped. OE is my mail client of choice, with very nice searching and filtering capabilities, and any serious webdev is not going to use something that came with their broswer to create sites.

FrontPage is not free though. I don't care about serious web development. There are many circumstances where it is necessary for a real programmer (note: web page designer are not programmers) to generate HTML for various reasons or another. It's nice to have a WYSIWYG editor that is low bloat, and that allows for complete extension via source modification.

Yeah, and IE has customizeable sidebars as well, including sites like Google (actually a top bar) MSNBC.

These things require programming extensions though. That is insecure and generally not cool. The Mozilla sidebar is based on XUL (which is an HTML-like language) so its pretty safe to install sidebars from any site.

I only reason most folks use IE is because its already there. You would be making the same argument if IE had better features than Mozilla but Mozilla was already installed. Simply put, it's laziness. I don't care if you use it or not, but don't knock it and give people a false impression of it's quality.

If you felt a need to reply, you should of simply said, "I use IE because I'm too lazy to download Mozilla. Mozilla does have better features, but I'm just lazy."

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[skt]

many people have already pointed out the answer to the switching tabs via the keyboard option, but what I do not understand is why they chose CTRL+PAGEUP/DOWN instead of something like CTRL+TAB. The usability problem with pageup/pagedown (at least on my keyboard) is that the right hand must leave the home keys to advance to the next or previous tab. So basically, even though you can switch tabs via the keyboard, I don't do it because I might as well reach for the mouse with the right hand. At least using the mouse, I could pick a tab towards the middle of the list :P

Re: What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[0x0d0a]

If you're using galeon, you can use the trick that always works in gtk+/gnome programs -- move the mouse to the menu item you want to bind a key to and hit the key combination. Voila! New binding.

GNOME apps generally save these, but most GTK apps just drop them at the end of the instance.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[nrosier]

Just this week, I discovered the "site navigation bar". This is a great feature and works on /. With next/previous you can easily browse through the different articles. This is a great feature. To activate it, go to "View->Show/Hide/Site Navigation Bar". To me, this can also be added to the list of "What's Mozilla got that IE doesn't have".

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[Explo]

Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load.

Why should I care about the loading time of Mozilla; it's been running since 2nd day of this month, around 7 days now, so the few seconds that starting it are quite much lost in the around 86400*7 seconds that have been passed since ;)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[brucet]

1) Tabbed browsing

Now this is about the only thing I wish IE had. XP groups multiple windows, but it sucks. I hope MS adds this soon.

Try out NetCaptor. It uses the IE rendering engine and adds tabs and a few other goodies. It's commercial unfortunately (trial download available), but I got hooked and paid for it.

-Bruce

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[brucet]

Freshmeat, CNN, and a few other sites have great sidebars that provide headlines and search facilities (in a compact, easy to use manner).

How does this work? Do you have to download something or does it just show up? I loaded up RC1, turned on the sidebar, went to cnn.com, but didn't get anything different. Am I missing something?

-Bruce

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[brucet]

Agreed! Ctrl-Tab/Ctrl-Shift-Tab is a much better choice.

Is this configurable?

-Bruce

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[donovansmith]

I don't use Mozilla Mail (I prefer PocoMail), so I can't say what it has over OE except less bugs and less security holes...but Mozilla trumps IE in every respect but plugin availability. In my experience in Windows 2000 Mozilla is able to load and render large pages much faster than IE (5.0, 5.5, and 6.0), especially on fast net connections, and is generally more stable. The tabbed browsing feature is immensely valuable. Haven't tried the popup blocker, since sites that have a lot of popups won't get return visits from me anyway. I highly recommend you try out Mozilla 1.0 RC1 in Windows. You'll probably find you like it quite a bit.

This post is from Mozilla 1.0 RC1 build 2002050701 in Gentoo Linux 1.1a. Mozilla rocks, and so does Gentoo ;-)

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[stevey]

Yeah it does seem like a strange shortcut to have chosen.

It doesn't appear to be configurable, unless it's one of those things which can only be set in the preferences file; for which there is no UI.

Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE?

[sehryan]

1. FrontPage is not free, but FrontPage Express is. Just like Outlook isn't free, but Outlook Express is.

2. I didn't say anything about web page designers. I said web page developers. You know, people who use php and the like to create dynamic web pages. People who PROGRAM. And besides, everyone thinks its easy to create html pages, and it is. The difficulty is in creating QUALITY web pages.

3.I wasn't knocking Mozilla's quality, I was knocking the attempts to put down IE by glorifying all these features which IE can do as well (minus tabbed browsing). Do you know why I use IE? Because it is the best browser in my opinion. Not because I am too lazy to install Mozilla. I have Mozilla on this machine, along with Netscape 4.x and 6, and Opera. I have that so I can make sure that the pages I develop work across the board. However, I choose to use IE for personal browsing because I feel that it is still the supieror browser. Mozilla is making headway, but it isn't there for me yet.

Next time, don't assume you know my reasons for why I use IE, because you will be wrong.

His tests are crippled

[dcstimm]

I just read his review. He said Konqueror is faster than mozilla loading, this is because he is running it within KDE! I here use windowmaker and find mozilla to be alot faster (1.0 rc1). Also he is running these browsers on a slow slow machine. (Even slower than the average on the current slashdot poll). Konqueror is a great browser if your IN KDE! Also there is alot of changes since Mozilla 0.9.8 and 1.0 rc1. I find 1.0 rc1 to be about 30% faster then 0.9.9. I really hope next time that they use the lastest browsers.

How far these browsers have come

[Anonymous Coward]

since February, huh?

I can't wait to get the new Redhat 7.1. Anyone have a review?

Re:I'm happy with IE

[GombuMstr]

I was playing with IE6 on XP last night and if it wasn't for the fact that it was MS. I would be using it right now. But here I am safely behind my BSD box browsing with Mozilla 2002050708. Worrying about my own insecurities.

Acrobat plugin with Mozilla/Galeon

[Ender Ryan]

To get the adobe acrobat plugin working with Mozilla/Galeon, simply copy the netscape4.x plugin file, nppdf.so, into $HOME/.mozilla/plugins.

note: I guess if you didn't read the review you will not understand this post...

Re:Acrobat plugin with Mozilla/Galeon

[d3xt3r]

Or copy it into your MOZILLA_HOME/plugins (mine's /usr/local/mozilla/plugins) directory so all users can benefit. :)

Also, if you want to use java from Mozilla (aka applets), just link your JAVA_HOME/jre/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji1 40.so into the Mozilla plugins dir too.

Re:Acrobat plugin with Mozilla/Galeon

[reaper20]

Or, goto Plugindoc on mozdev and you can fix all your plugin problems in one shot.

This site is great for pointing to Mozilla newbies.

the state of the web under Linux

[tps12]

As a Linux user, I'm very excited about how things are developing in the web browser arena. Galeon works great, and it appears that Konqueror has its share of fans as well.

I was reminded of this while attempting to find a good Gandalf "wallpaper" for my Gnome setup. I notice that Galeon has a "use as background" item under the right-click menu for images, but it does not appear to function (on my setup anyway). Does anyone know how they expect to implement this? Setting the background image is pretty WM-dependent, IIRC.

In conclusion, if anyone has a good Gandalf wallpaper, plz email me or post a response. I'm looking for close-up, where he looks stoned, pipe is a bonus but not a must. A hi-res cap from the scene where he's muttering "riddles in the dark" would be ideal, but I'll try anything. TIA.

Intl Support

[drivel]

I am using Mozilla and it seems that it is the only browser with decent intl (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) display support. But it RC1 still has problem with CJK printing.

Re:Intl Support

[nagora]

I'm using Opera 6 Beta 2 and it certainly seems to render the pictographic languages well (with anti-aliasing). Since I can't actually read them I don't know just how good it is, but it certainly isn't just a screen-full of empty boxes.

TWW

Re:Intl Support

[Lawrence Ho]

Unfortunately, the display is far from good. The underline for hyperlinks run over the bottom of Chinese characters. Also, it cannot render Chinese chars in Chinese font and English chars in Latin-based font respectively. There are a few other minor issues as well...

I have tried to report bugs, but i18n related bugs seem did not get much attention.

I'm sorry Mozilla, but that really sucks. Its i18n support is far from decent. That's why I did not switch from IE.

Missing

[4of12]

My browser is missing!

Even though the rendering engine could use some work, they didn't bother to review

telnet sitename 80

Re:Missing

[hendridm]

LOL, that's even more hard core than running Lynx (or IE 3 for that matter). Props to parent!

Re:Missing

[ajs]

You've got to be kidding! This browser sucks. It doesn't have tabbed-browsing, themability, popup ads, cookies, branding or even a pull-down for reporting bugs! Clearly this browser is for those losers who wish to see that *shudder* "content" stuff.

Go back in your hole you accademic hack! ;-)

PS: It doesn't render CNN.com correctly. Crap, just like I said.

Re:Missing

[Frater 219]

telnet sitename 80

There's an awful lot of overhead in that one for a protocol you're not even using when you connect it to an HTTP server! Here's a lighter-weight alternative:

nc sitename 80

(What's nc?)

Re:Missing

[archen]

I sort of laughed until I realized that's how I check my e-mail at work (as someone pointed out on slashdot the other day). Check your mail anywhere - no browser, mail client, or window enviornment needed.

Re:Missing

[nrosier]

While it works very well on normal web-sites, it's very slow on SSL. I've got a hell of a time decyphering it...

Re:Missing

[gorilla]

On the other hand, telnet is (almost always) installed, while nc is rarely installed.

Re:Missing

[vadim_t]

OpenSSL comes with a program that will help. I think it's 'openssl s_client'

Re:Missing

[Waffle Iron]

I sort of laughed until I realized that's how I check my e-mail at work (as someone pointed out on slashdot the other day). Check your mail anywhere - no browser, mail client, or window enviornment needed.

That's highly inconvenient when you get a VBScript virus. You have to pull out your paper address book manually step through the code to figure out who to forward it to. Then you have to tediously type in the multiple commands to propagate the message. Correctly handling the binary attachment payloads is a bitch, as well.

Computers were invented to automate things and make things easier. Your life would be much easier if you got some modern software!

Re:Missing

[Frater 219]

On the other hand, telnet is (almost always) installed, while nc is rarely installed.

Surely that is a problem with your distribution, not with the software itself! Certainly the fact that the telnet Web browser is over five times the size of nc should suffice to prove it bloated and inefficient by comparison. The fact that your distribution ships a huge bloatware browser (97kB, compared to 17kB) is just proof that you should use a less overweight and Microsoftian distribution!!

Lurkers -- This is called "parody", not "trolling".

Slow down, reliability

[Raedwald]

Sayeth the poster:

A review of such software needs to be done almost literally within a week or two, or it will be obsolete

Those of us with dialup connections don't have the time to download the 25 Mb of a new browser every week. I don't want to upgrade my browser more than once a year. Business users can be even more conservative, because 'upgrading' can mean installation on hundreds or thousands of computers distributed over several offices or countries. My current employer, an international logistics company, has offices in most countries in the world. We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.

Unfortuntely, the review did not really address these non functional concerns. It didn't even mention the significance of the Mozilla version number being less than 1.0. So, how do the browers compare in terms of reliability, performance, etc?

Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM (no sniggerring at he back, we're not that uncommon) is barely able to cope with Netscape 6.

Re:Slow down, reliability

[Rick_T]

> Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor
> 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM [...] is barely
> able to cope with Netscape 6.

You might want to try a more lightweight browser with the same rendering engine - say, Galeon.

My main workstation is an IBM Thinkpad model 760XD. That's a P166MMX / 80M RAM / 3G HD. Right now I'm running Gnome (minus nautilus), Galeon (to respond to this post), Star Office (to do my actual work), and several smaller apps. I may update to 104M, but my system's quite usable now.

One thing I do is to use Dillo (http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/) for quick browsing. It's very light, depends only on GTK, and loads in a second or so - even with the apps I'm already running.

Re:Slow down, reliability

[spyderbyte23]

My poor 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM (no sniggerring at he back, we're not that uncommon [slashdot.org]) is barely able to cope with Netscape 6.

Perhaphs you should peruse the minimum system requirements for one reason that might be the case.

Re:Slow down, reliability

[Darren Winsper]

You show me a CSS and DOM2 compliant browser that works quickly on a P166 and you might have a point.

Re:Slow down, reliability

[0x0d0a]

Show me a GUI browser that's better than dillo on the 386 to high PII range. Dillo is *fast*.

Re:Slow down, reliability

[Explo]

We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.

I think that the MTBF for Mozilla exceeded that of NS4.x last year (that was mentioned in mozillazine or something), so on average it should actually be more realiable...

Re:Slow down, reliability

[Darren Winsper]

It's also got one of the worst rendering engines I have ever seen.

Re:IE6 the standard by which all browsers are judg

[dcstimm]

what are you talking about? Windows is alot worse, for example, if you loose the password for Content Adviser in IE you have to reinstall windows or go hacking your registry. VERY USER FRIENDLY! trust me I work in at a ISP and we get that call almost everyday.

I'd use Konqueror ...

[vrai]

... but since I upgraded to KDE3.0 its stopped rendering GIFs, only JPGs and PNGs. I supposes it has something to do with copyright reasons but it still sucks. Hence its Opera for me - I might even pay for it eventually.

Re:I'd use Konqueror ...

[AngryAndDrunk]

Well, the konqueror that came with the KDE3.0 install on my machine displays .gifs just fine, so I suspect that it may just be an installation/compilation issue.

Did you download a set of binaries, or compile from source?

Re:I'd use Konqueror ...

[vadim_t]

If you compiled Qt from source that means you forgot to enable gif support. It's not enabled by default. Try 'configure --help'.

If you got a package that means it was compiled without gif support, maybe by mistake, so get an updated package, or compile Qt yourself.

Re:I'd use Konqueror ...

[dorix]

Note that you also have to edit src/kernel/qgif.h and change the 0 near the end of the file to a 1.

Re:File Browsing in Tabs?

[Soulfader]

Is it that freaking hard to click on the article?

Gv (was Re:Acrobat plugin with Mozilla/Galeon)

[LinuxGeek8]

Or you can just install gv.
Galeon will embed the pdf into its window. Well, that used to work for me, but currently it doesnot, and I haven't looked into it.
If you use Konqueror, install kghostview, and it will embed it too into a Konqueror window.

add to that...

[Ender Ryan]

performance, stability, trustiworthiness.

My fiancee, even after switching to win2000, found IE to be too unstable, and performed very poorly on her celery 300. I installed Mozilla on her machine and told her to try it out, and she has been using it ever since.

She particularly likes the tabbed browsing, stability, and blocking popups.

That would be DOS?

[j_w_d]

The Galeon interface has nothing to do with the OS, defaults or otherwise. The GUI in linux is independent of the OS.

Pop-ups will return

[mblase]

I use Mozilla to disable auto-popups, and I love it. But it occurs to me that if/when IE integrates this feature, it won't be long before it's worked around.

The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.

Well, I've written a couple of sites where a user clicks on a link, and JS triggers a popup as well as opening up the desired page. This is done intentionally and for functional reasons; but it's only a matter of time before someone at Geocities or Angelfire figures out how to rewrite a user's page so that every single link triggers a popup in addition to opening the desired hyperlink.

It would only take a few lines of server-side scripting; a Perl regexp could do it in a second. And then we'll all have to contend with unwanted popups again, opening on the second page of a site instead of the first; only this time we'll have to disable the good popups as well as the bad ones.

Towards that end, I dearly hope that MS never, ever decides to add pop-up blocking to their browser. As long as they have over 50% usage 'net-wide and lack this feature, no one will see the need to do any of the above. See, unjust monopolies can be a Good Thing....

Re:Pop-ups will return

[Drachemorder]

I doubt Microsoft will implement pop-up blocking. I don't think they believe users should have that much control over what they see on a website. Microsoft [i]wants[/i] to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.

Re:Pop-ups will return

[mblase]

Microsoft wants to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.

I see no reason to argue that. Microsoft is interested in what's good for Microsoft, not for Angelfire or DoubleClick or porn peddlers. Their own website doesn't use unwanted popups, and never has.

On the other hand, their software is almost universally designed for ease-of-use and large numbers of features, while also lacking security in implementing those features. So I predict that someday, IE will allow blocking of auto-popups, but they will never advertise it or turn it on by default--or make it difficult to work around.

Re:Pop-ups will return

[Surak]

I guess it depends on how much Angelfire or DoubleClick pay Microsoft to leave it out. :)

Re:Pop-ups will return

[TheRevenant]

The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.

That is why the Galeon (optional) feature of causing pop-ups to appear in new tabs is great. It 'allows' pop-ups to occur, in case they're important, but keeps them under control all in the one window...

Re:I'm happy with IE

[money_shot]

I've used all the reviewed browsers quite a bit. In the end, they all work farily well, but not as well as IE 6. I've also been playing with Mozilla on Windows as well.

One of the biggest reasons that I still don't take Linux seriously is the font drawing. I'm a graphics heavy user and use a hi-res flatscreen. Even before, with good 19in CRT, the fonts in Linux were pretty jaggy. Now they are horrible. This is a problem that shows up especially bad in the browser windows (all of them, but to different degrees.) The new Konqorer/KDE is much better, but still bad.

I want Linux to be usable on the desk top, I really do. But until the little things are taken care of, I'll stick with XP.

BTW, his last article (comparing 2K to Linux for an office upgrade) doesn't take into account retraining the staff or lost hours due to the staff learning how to do things in a different way. For example: using Gimp may allow you to get by on linux for graphics, but you certainly won't go from Photoshop to the Gimp in one day and be productive (maybe not for several days.) And if you're a power user, you will never achieve the productivity on the Gimp that you have with Photoshop. As someone who does budgets for small development teams, I know that the equipment is the cheap part of production. Manhours is the real issue (this applies to browsers as well, but to a much less extent.)

Thanks,
James

Finally, my first post!

[scubacuda]

2001-06-12 01:28:16 Nanotechnology Becomes Profitable (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-06-13 21:26:15 Gigabit Becoming Standard (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-06-16 20:15:13 Date My Sister Website (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-06-20 00:21:43 Hard Drive Encryption (askslashdot,privacy) (rejected)
2001-06-20 02:16:33 More Phantom Edit News (articles,starwars) (rejected)
2001-06-29 18:46:28 New 20x CDWR (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-06-30 01:23:05 Cisco IOS HTTP Server Authentication Vulnerability (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-01 22:17:26 Optical Router Rivals (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-01 22:35:33 PKware Site Hacked (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-01 22:50:09 Web Firms Scramble to Obey Privacy (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-01 23:38:17 A Japanese Robotic Pinnocchio? (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-01 23:48:56 Itemized Costs for a Fictional Clone (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-06 23:07:41 Whiz Kid or Napster Killer? (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-18 00:31:45 Russian crypto expert arrested at Def Con (articles,news) (rejected)
2001-07-18 00:39:48 NetZero Founders Resign (articles,news) (rejected)
2002-01-11 23:44:27 dot-bomb unions (articles,news) (rejected)
2002-01-12 00:26:26 Web hoster takes security to extremes (articles,news) (rejected)
2002-01-12 06:48:50 Long Distance CS Degree? (askslashdot,ed) (rejected)
2002-01-14 00:00:21 Popular Network Resource Names (askslashdot,news) (rejected)
2002-01-22 09:09:57 Favorite www ad-killer? (askslashdot,ie) (rejected)
2002-01-22 09:24:41 MP3.com sues over bad legal advice (articles,news) (rejected)
2002-01-22 09:36:59 Alleged Gov Purchases of Personal E-data (articles,privacy) (rejected)
2002-03-17 21:22:47 Certification Necessary for High-Tech Legal Specia (askslashdot,news) (rejected)
2002-03-17 21:29:25 Defining Ruling Issued in Hyperlink Patent Case (askslashdot,news) (rejected)
2002-03-23 15:58:50 Apr 1 Practical Jokes (articles,news) (rejected)
2002-05-07 09:57:26 Linux Web Browsers Reviewed (articles,news) (accepted)
2002-05-08 09:13:31 Linux saves money (articles,news) (rejected)

Re:Finally, my first post!

[scubacuda]

Date My Sister.

This is a HILARIOUS site!

Re:Finally, my first post!

[scubacuda]

Sorry about that. I didn't see the other one, so I submitted it.

C'mon though...didn't I have some bitchin' other suggestions? Phantom Edit news, Date My Sister, etc...

Oh well...can't win them all!

Integration with the outside world

[march]

It seems that Galeon (mozilla), the old netscape, Opera, etc. all have problems interfacing with "the outside world", i.e. the monitor and the printer.

It took me forever to configure my RH7.2 box to display fonts in Galeon so I could read them. Opera still doesn't work right.

And printing is another headache - either it's cutting stuff off or setting the wrong zoom level, etc.

What needs to be done here is a better way to interface with the windowing system and the printer subsystem (isn't postscript pretty well understood these days?).

We're so close to having these things kick butt on IE...

Re:Integration with the outside world

[GC]

To significantly improve your netscape browsing experience under linux try the following lines in your .Xdefaults:

Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 20
Netscape*documentFonts.xResolution*iso-8859-1: 100
Netscape*documentFonts.yResolution*iso-8859-1 : 100

This helped the font situation out for me no end.

There are other things you can do, such as importing some of the Microsoft TTF fonts as many pages now specify those fonts in their HTML.

Re:Integration with the outside world

[march]

Yes, this is true, BUT...

Why should I have to? And this is the quintessential problem with most OSS development going on these days:

Yes, OSS rules the world and will defeat Microsoft!!! Oh, but you have to add this and that to your .xyz file...

We ain't gonna "win" that way...

Re:Integration with the outside world

[GC]

Yes, you make a good point... it infuriates me too...

Re:first post!

[Slashdotter_nl]

You go girl!

RTFM?

[Beliskner]

I hope I don't get an RTFM, but anyway is there a linux browser with the Quick Search feature (Web accessories) that IE has had since v4.0 where I set the registry key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g
(Default) = http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&sa=Google+Search
Where %s is automatically substituted with the search keywords you enter.

Using this I just type in the address bar:

g mcdonalds big mac rat found inside

... or whatever, and the search results with Google appear immediately? Can any linux browsers do this or do I need to use a tcsh script with lynx?

Re:RTFM?

[rmgrotkierii]

In Kouqueror, you just type gg: in the address bar, and there are many more "Enhanced Browsing" options as well, like ex: for excite, seek: for GO.com, hb: for HotBot, etc. Go to Settings/Configure Konqueror/Enchanced Browsing to see them or set your own :)

Re:RTFM?

[Knobby]

It's not a Linux browser, but OmniWeb for Mac OS X does this..

Re:RTFM?

[gooberguy]

I just copied "g mcdonalds big mac rat found inside" into my address bar in Opera 6.0 for linux and got the google results immediately. It looks like the default behavior in Opera is to do a google search if it can't do a DNS lookup. I like using Opera, but I wish it were open source. Since I have a 56k modem, Opera is definitely the best browser for me, since I only have to download a 2 meg dynamicly linked binary instead of tens of megs rpms.

D/\ Gooberguy

Re:RTFM?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, at least konqueror can. In settings->enhanced browsing you can see a list of sites you can search with keywords, and can add your own. Hell of alot easier that having to hack the registry!

For example you can just type gg:linux +kde to search google for "linux +kde"
or, if you prefer msdn:"why linux rules" to search the microsoft developers network
also, it provides a fallback search engine in case the hostname cant be matched, so if you prefer you can just leave off the gg: for most web searches. just type in the name of what you want to find.

combine this with its builtin tools like web archiving, bablefish translating, browser identification changing, and html validating and you've got yourself a pretty powerful browser

Re:RTFM?

[sconest]

There are the keywords in Mozilla and the Smart bookmark in Galeon.

And in Mozilla the url bar provides a quick way to access you favorite search engine.

Re:RTFM?

[frank_adrian314159]

Konquerer 2.2.2 (and probably up) has this. Look in the Enhanced Browsing section of the settings for a list of the 25+ additional shortcuts (e.g., "gg:browser features" in the address bar will search Google, change gg to ly and you search in Lycos, etc.).

Re:RTFM?

[aspeer]

Konqueror has had keywords since at least KDE 2.2.2. They are an excellent shortcut which I use all them time. For example:

gg:slashdot = search Google for "slashdot"
dj:perl segfault = search DejaNews (now Google Groups) for those keywords

They are customisable reasonably easily from the preferences menu, so making your own shortcuts (eg to lookup names in your local on-line phonebook etc) is quite easy.

As another poster has pointed out, Mozilla also has this feature available. When the Mozilla keywords feature is enabled (off by default), you can also do things like type: "goto nike", or "quote msft" in the location bar and Mozilla will "do" those things.

So yes - there are at least a couple of Linux compatible browsers that have the feature you want, and with the bonus of not having to edit arcane regististry entries (Q: Is it "Preferences", or "Preferances" as a registry key ? A: It depends. Thanks MS )

Re:RTFM?

[spencerogden]

Konq has this. Mozilla has a feature where if you type in something, there is a drop down that lets you search google ( or whatever you pick ). Best part is that you don't need to edit registry keys.

Re:RTFM?

[oasisbob]

There are the keywords in Mozilla...

This keywords feature under Mozilla is one of the most understated features I've ever seen. IMHO, it is just as good as tabbed browsing in terms of usefulness. For example, take the word banana. Look at what I can do by using keywords, Mozilla, and just typing in the URL bar:

g banana -- Search Google for the word banana
gg banana -- Search Google Groups for the word banana
d banana -- Look up a definition for the word banana
t banana -- Look up banana in Roget's Thesaurus
ef banana -- Translate the word banana into French
fe banane -- Translate the French word "banane" into English, "banana"

The keywords feature is totally customizable and expandable for just about any site that uses forms. (Although I'm sure that there are some sites out there that use dynamic hidden fields to prevent this type of action.) Check it out.

Re:RTFM?

[sconest]

The keywords feature is totally customizable and expandable for just about any site that uses forms.

Any site that use GETs will work. The sites with POST actions won't work

And I agree, it is reallu useful once you're used to them

Re:RTFM?

[Beliskner]

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g (Default) = http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&sa=Google+Search

Where %s is automatically substituted with the search keywords you enter.

Ahh... of course! How intuitive! Man, Windows is so much easier than this Lunix crap!

Now let's see, what's the name of that conf file? Errrr uhhhhh, oh man. Will I have to learn how to use emacs? What's that again tar -zxvf ? What the heck is the f for? Even after reading the manual I don't get why that's necessary. Why doesn't the tar man pages say AT THE TOP, "Usual usage for extracting a compressed file: .tar file tar -xvf ; .tar.gz file tar -zxvf"
What if I accidentally extract it after a cd / ?

I prefer "double-click the ZIP file and drag-n-drop"

BTW several more registry keys are necessary because in HTTP GET requests a space character must be substituted by %20 and multiple keywords seperated by "+", etc.

Lunix needs a centralised conf file abstraction mechanism, so that we can access every conf file on the system in the aggregate via a registry-type interface. Imagine the power to replace every conf file on your system simultaneously. Hmmmmm

Pointless illustration award

[j_w_d]

The "review" provides a remarkably useless screen image of the "preferences" or setup screens for the three browsers of choice.

Regarding Opera, he reviews the "static" build which has a download about twice as large as the "shared." I registered Opera years ago. It has always been superior to IE with multiple pages displayed, speed, and price, since the "adware" ads are pretty much indistinguishable from the eye clutter on the standard web page these days any way. However, for less than $40 you can still let MS know there is web software that is really worth the price. It is worth noting that many of us who use Opera register it. The company has survived in a market where ALL the competition is free, which I believe really speaks to the browser's quality.

The biggest Opera handicap is programmers of secure webpages that test for browser versions rather than available security services and send you messages to "upgrade" to something more secure - like IE.

Regarding IE, there was an article on CNET a couple of months ago where the writer, Robert Vamosi, asserted that IE had an increasingly dated interface due to the appearance of tabbed browing (which was pioneered by Opera.)

Not a lot of people know this...

[FyRE666]

From the article:

MS IE inserts the following line in all saved pages , so you can always find out where the page came from.

IE also uses that line in its "security" (yeah, it's unusual to see IE and security in one sentence without the word "flaw" in there I know) settings. If you have a frameset for example with two pages with different saved from lines, any attempt by one to access the other (usually via javascript) will result in a security violation error. Removing the line stops this behaviour. This is actually a good thing, now if only they could fix the other 6,000,000 or so problems...

Re:guestures

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

Actually, Galeon has supported gestures natively for a while (since 1.2). Yes, they rock substantially. Also, Galeon has some gestures that I have yet to see elsewhere, like going to a site's homepage (up-right-up) from anywhere in the site, and following next and previous links (right-down and left down, respectively, on sites like /. that have the elements in their html). Give them a try and I think you'll start to appreciate them.

These are all X browsers - what about fb?

[00_NOP]

It has always struck me that what Linux really needs is a good framebuffer based browser that handles graphics.

Linux users like to boast of the OS's ability to revive old and low resource hardware, but try running X/GNOME on a 586 with 32MB and you won't get very far.

Sad to say WinNT handles that a lot better.

So, is there a good framebuffer based browser out there?

Re:These are all X browsers - what about fb?

[Geek Boy]

Konqueror has a version called konq-e which works with the qt-embedded system.

Re:These are all X browsers - what about fb?

[00_NOP]

Re: Konq-e - you are quite right. But I can't get it to compile for SH4, which is what I really want (bad toolchain I think)

Re:These are all X browsers - what about fb?

[donovansmith]

AFAIK, Arachne will work with SVGALib. It is a full graphical browser but doesn't do secure sites or JavaScript. at last check. It is quite fast, and it even works on an EGA screen on a 286 in DOS reasonably well.

Hear hear!

[mccrew]

Galeon is a great example of the Unix philosophy. Find one thing, web browsing in this case, and do it well. There is no mail client, no instant messenger, or extra stuff to complicate things. Though it does depend on Mozilla libraries, it has a refreshing lightweight "feel" that Mozilla and even old Netscape lack.

Though not the first to implement the feature, Galeon sets the standard for tabbed browsing.

Re:Hear hear!

[Chicks_Hate_Me]

Gnu's Not Unix!

Actually this is more of a GNU, philosophy if I'm correct. Keep It Simple Stupid! And a damn good philosophy at. (Are you listening OpenOffice?)

Disabling popups is immoral!

[jjoyce]

I am shocked that the authors of Mozilla and Konqueror have not yet been sued by someone claiming that allowing the disabling of popups is intentionally breaking his/her God-given business model.

nytimes pop-ups

[asv108]

I think the pop-up ad killing capabilities are great, but there seem to be workarounds for web developers. Everytime I go to the NY times, I still get Orbitz pop-ups from ad.doubleclick.net. Obviously, I can block ad.doubleclick.net in /etc/hosts, but for less technically minded users, there has to be a better solution. You can test out the specific ad in mozilla, here.

Re:nytimes pop-ups

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this is a known case, Bug #126224 (Though you can't get there with a Slashdot referer).

Mozilla .9.9 release notes mention:

Setting this pref (instructions here) should turn off pop-up and pop-under ads that use the onload handler of tags to work around our previous window.open() filter. (Bug 92955)
user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);

Re:nytimes pop-ups

[LMCBoy]

Konqueror rejects it properly. Just FYI ;)

identification string

[bcrowell]

I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.

Re:identification string

[DennisZeMenace]

I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've never had any problems accessing my PayPal account (or any other of my secure banking accounts for that matter) using Galeon 1.2. As far as I can tell, the PayPal web site doesn't not check or care what browser you're using.

It is true, however, that faking the browser ID is a feature that Galeon misses.

DZM

Re:identification string

[bcrowell]

That's interesting. I found that I couldn't log in to PayPal with either Galeon 1.0 or Konqeuror. When I changed the identification string in Konqueror, it worked. So apparently PayPal does check the string. But anyway, it's good to know that I can solve the problem by upgrading to Galeon 1.2. Thanks for the info!

Re:identification string

[LuFa]

In fact you can, though not through the interface. Use gconftool -s /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent --type=string "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; oops, wrong! it's:) Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/0.12.5 (Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20011012", for instance

Re:I'm happy with IE

[filmcritic]

Sounds like someone let their little boy on the computer without monitoring him....

Antimated icons? What are they? Oh, probably something KDE will have in it next release. Always playing catchup...tsk tsk.

What is a moran? Someone using Lynx is my guess.

we wiil sue the crap out of your two bit good for nothing company for violatiing the GPL - ooooooohh..the big bad GPL...too bad I can't remember any high profile cases of GPL abuse..probably because no one cares about it! BTW - Netscape had lots more money than the "open source" community and look how far suing Microsoft got them.

Go play with your Spades, Hearts or Minesweeper - right. And you go play what...clones of the exact same games? Right! Because open source is always playing catchup years after the fact.

What is really amusing is the absolute fact that the post was sent using IE and Windows, just like most posts here are. LOOOOVE the hypocrites...just LOVE EM!!!

Old news?

[Rui del-Negro]

This review is from February and I'm pretty sure it was posted on Slashdot at the time.

About the browsers, personally I prefer Opera. Here are the main reasons:

• It's fast, doesn't take up too much memory, etc..
  
• Pop-up blocking.
  
• Integrated e-mail with multiple accounts.
  
• Easy access to the most common options (F12).
  
• Option to open links in background.
  
• MDI
  
• Some nice touches, such as:
  
  • When you create a new window, the cursor is automatically placed in the URL box, so you can start typing the site address.
    
  • Download starts in background while you're still deciding where you want to save the file.

I only wish it had better support for DHTML (I know that a lot of it isn't 100% standard, but a lot of sites use it).

RMN
~~~

Re:Old news?

[mattam]

You missed some:

• Convenient mouse gestures
• google search accessible with a [TAB], with customizable results page
• zooming, Qt freetype support

Re:Old news?

[Rui del-Negro]

Yup, forgot about zooming. I don't normally use the others.

RMN
~~~

You can

[FooBarWidget]

You *can* switch tabs using your keyboard.
Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown.

Re:I'm happy with IE

[Nermal]

While I totally agree with you about the complete idiocy of the post you responded to, I have a question and a couple of comments.

The question is: how could you tell what browser the AC used to post his/her remark? I don't see where that information is shown.

The comments regard your position about the open source world playing catch up. In a nutshell, I think your perception is a bit skewed. I say 'skewed' and not 'wrong' because, yes, there are a lot of Linux tools/games/features that are taken from Windows... which would mean something if that weren't a practice that every participant in the software industry has thrived upon for decades.

I think it can be pretty well demonstrated that everyone takes ideas from everyone else in the industry and in about equal portions, too. I mean, sure, KDE and GNOME have a similar look and feel to Windows. That's a good thing since Windows has a very well put-together (IMHO) interface. On the other hand, let's look at some features of Microsoft OSes that were 'stolen' from other OSes:

• GUI (taken from Apple, who got it from Xerox)
  
• Preemptive Multitasking (Unix, VMS, et al)
  
• Process management (same)
  
• Command line shell (same)
  
• etc, etc, etc. You could list practically the entire feature-set of DOS, much of which still exists in modern MS OSes, in this list.
  

And for a very recent Windows (XP) feature taken from Linux, try Task grouping on the taskbar, which Gnome had while XP was still in development.

This isn't an anti MS flame. I am unashamedly writing this from 2k/IE at work. And though my personal preference is for a *nix environment, I've been pretty happy with their post-NT OSes (embarassing security gaffes aside). I'm just saying that a proponent of any platform accusing another of 'playing catch up' is really just the pot calling the kettle black.

My .02

Cheers ...

[vrai]

Time to start rebuilding (now I wish I hadn't cleaned up the source directories) ...

Load galeon faster

[MicroBerto]

The article points to a post that shows how you can get galeon to load faster by keeping it in memory at all times. This can be done by running galeon -s &...

But do I want this to run at startup? It will ALWAYS take 10 or 11 MB of ram up... and I always have my browser open anyway. Sometimes when doing intense things, I'll close it. But it's nice to know that if you run galeon -s at your gnome startup, you can get in very quickly.

Latest version of everything except Konqueror

[gupg]

Its curious that the reviewer used the latest version of all the software except Konqueror. He used Konqueror from KDE 2.2.2 which is about 6 months old.

The latest from KDE 3.0 has been out for a while now (atleast a month); so he cannot even say its brand new, so he couldn't review it.

Anyone else see some bias ?

Re:Latest version of everything except Konqueror

[damiam]

Ummm... Opera was the only browser to have its latest version reviewed. Netscape, Mozilla, and Galeon all have one or more new releases out. If anything, it's a pro-Opera bias. But I doubt that, it's just someone who hasn't seen the light and insists on using old versions because "it's too much trouble to upgrade".

Not true

[0x0d0a]

Huh?

Dillo *does* support cookies (at least in the copy I'm using), has one of the very best (if not the best) listed support for PNG on the libpng website, *does* support bookmarks (right click on a page, choose add bookmark), sort of supports frames (a la lynx...you can navigate to one frame). It supports tables well enough for all the pages I use, though the (rare) nested table does post a bit of a problem. It does not support CSS, I agree with you there.

I keep a copy of mozilla around, but all my day-to-day browsing is done in dillo. I like a fast, responsive web browsing environment. Mozilla does not cut it (at least on my machine).

Re:Not true

[damiam]

IIRC, there is a cookie patch out there, but it's not in standard dillo[1]. I stand corrected on the PNG support, but it seems that my version of dillo(0.6.4) doesn't support background images, which is almost worse. And yeah, it does have bookmarks. I don't use dillo often, and it doesn't have the most intuitive UI, so I didn't see that.

But really, for most people, a browser that supports no CSS, Javascript, or frames (lynx-style frame support is useless in most cases, for example pages with a framed navbar) is not very useful. If it works for you, that's great. But in most cases, it's not a viable choice.

[1]. I see that a new version of dillo has recently been released, with cookie support. Apparently it hasn't gotten into Debian yet, so I'm not using it.

Re:I'm happy with IE

[c4tp]

When I'm on a Win box, I always use NetCaptor. It invented the tab (even before Opera) and I compare it to Galeon in terms of features, like popup block, and just has a nice look and feel to it. But the best feature of them all is the CaptorGroup, which is like bookmarking multiple sites into one set. Check it out on a Windows near you!

not enough info

[spectatorion]

I kind of wish that this review went into a little more detail with respect to getting nonstandard content to be viewed. All it seems to say is that with Opera and Netscape, you need to manually configure PDF viewing and that these browsers support most Netscape plugins. It does give the specifics of whether this person was able to get Java, Flash, etc. running in these browsers easily, what kind of configuration was required, and other headaches possibly encountered. I am currently running Mozilla on Win2K and I am yet to get Java to work, although I haven't tried recently. Maybe I am missing something, but each time i try to install Java, my system hangs. It's about the only thing I run Netscape/IE for. Anyway, I am hoping to move to Linux soon, but want to be sure that I will be able to smoothly run Java applets and Flash and other things of that sort (I guess those two are the most important). Anyway, does anyone have any comments on their experience with this? I'd like to know.

Re:want to try ...

[fferreres]

...a solution? Maybe you already figured out (it's easy). Just open the pop-ups into tabs. If you haven't called for it, you can close them WITHOUT even taking a look at them. I do it with Galeon.

Besides, they don't know it didn't work. It does harm online ads because they will think it's an uneffective add. They'll figure out one day the must embedd the ads into the page (i an ok with adds as long as they are in-page).

Re:I'm happy with IE

[Daengbo]

>What is a moran? You know... kinda like "maroon," the Bugs Bunnyism