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

Browsing in spreadsheets is not new

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Browsing in spreadsheets is not new

[alzoron]

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.

Re:What I want is...

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot (and others) should be returning xml and using xslt to convert it into html.

Lynx?

[gmuslera]

For text mode browsing i would go use elinks, with good (text mode) rendering of pages, ssl support and a lot of other features, but not sure in which state are the latest version of lynx, links or w3m by now. There are plenty of text mode browsers, and speed is just one of the advantages.