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

One page

[Anonymous Coward]

All on one page.

Re:How about a "Facebook Firewall" browser?

[pjt33]

It used to, but it doesn't any more. Now you have to, at minimum, block static.ak.connect.facebook.com as well. I've installed AdBlockPro today to take care of it in a more sweeping way.

But I think David Emery was wanting a generalisation and just used Facebook as an example. I don't know how well common sites would work with external content blocked - whitelisting would be necessary at least for things like jquery.

Re:Dillo

[Jorl17]

No, you can't. I've programmed some features of Dillo myself and I look at the amazing work that the regular developers do. It is fast, memory-efficient and efficiency-centric. You can't compare a fully crazy assed GUIed application like Firefox, Chrome and IE (though Chrome is the least expensive of these three) with Dillo and FLTK. The Fast Light ToolKit makes it *really* fast and responsive -- similar to Chrome before all the fucktards started adopting it. Its CSS is increasing and there are *some* plans for basic Javascript. It is something else and I use it whenever I need real speed.

Of course you can just wget something and even make scripts to only get the text out of it, but then you'd just be "reading" the internet, which isn't enough for some things. Dillo is a much more advanced Links.