10 Oddly Useful Specialty Web Browsers

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE to uncover 10 alternative browsers that offer specialized advantages for 3-D searching, social networking, easy scriptability, powerful page manipulation, and the like. Each provides a targeted browsing environment, enabling users to browse Web tables into spreadsheets, browse leaner, browser in text, browse socially, browse musically, or browse smarter on the Mac. 'A purist might object that these hybrids are not much different from a standard browser with extra plug-ins. There's some truth to this, but not always — some of the unique capabilities can only be done deep inside the software. In any case, the job of parsing the terms and creating an exact definition of the Web browser isn't as much fun as embracing the idea that there are dozens of alternatives.'"

Comments

Re:Browsing in spreadsheets is not new

[WrongSizeGlass]

You've always been able to load a URL into a spreadsheet...

I must have missed that feature while playing around with Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc back in the 80s.

I think it was alt-shift-F3 + ctrl-shift-u + ctrl-alt-insert + ctrl-alt-shift-sys_request ... or something like that.

Re:They forgot Pivot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll?

Re:Browsing in spreadsheets is not new

[amias]

no no no , thats a special move in emacs that gives your cursor a rocket launcher

Notepad

[T Murphy]

Notepad is my favorite specialty browser. You name the file (url).txt, and it instantly renders the website as a blank page- think of all the clutter you don't have to deal with! Plus, you can add in whatever text you want- ever wanted to make microsoft.com say "Linux rules!"? Well now you can! I can't imagine how anyone could want anything else.