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21 Linux Web Browsers?
brazilian brain writes "There's an interesting article at trix.net called "browsing the browsers". It's a quick review of 21(!) web browsers already available for Linux or being ported for this platform. From Lynx to Communicator, from Amaya to Mozilla, they are tested or briefly commented. Whenever possible, screenshots are provided.
It's an original article by Ricardo Y. Igarashi, published by Linux in
Brazil and now translated to English in order to share the data with the international Linux community. I hope you enjoy it."
This makes keeping track of where you've been reading here a real challenge, and is a big nuisance in general.
Why has this bug persisted for so long, and is there a cure?
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Why Ah Must Scribble GNU
IMHO the browser comparison focuses on the wrong things. Frame support is not important, nor is anim gif support or interlaced gif support.
:)
.. will never become 'anything'.
Hm, I don't completely agree with you there. First of -- both frame and table support IS important today, when so much of the web actually uses it. Support for graphics on the other hand is just a nice thing to have.
I'd like to know which render the pages correctly, according to spec. Which support CSS (according to spec)?
I agree. Those things should be considered carefully. The browser which follows the standards, in addition to having a decent user interface, is the one to go for.
of course, it should be *small* and *fast* too.
Which allow the user to specify their own style sheets, overriding the pages' layout?
Is that important? Why?
Which support content negotiation?
You mean like multiple language support and so on? Personally I would prefer to have the web in as few languages as possible. Preferably everything in english, and sites that concerns one nation only - in that nations native language.
As you may have noticed, I'm not natively english / american speaking. I'm sure my english writing / spelling and so on sucks. But that's not the important thing. The important thing is that its a HELL of a task to translate things into an umzillion different languages - only major corps with lots of money to hire translators OR major organizations with many helpers - would be able to translate to "everything".
The problem here, is that the bigger will get even bigger, and those who cannot cope and translate into enough languages
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Those 5 are;
Lynx for when you just need something fast and light.
Konqueror and Mozilla for the future 100% standards compliant and gorgeous colored and flash impregnated sites.
Netscape because it's the only working browser for a lot of sites now.
and finally EMacs, because with the Emacspeak add-on You can actually get a voice only interface which is essential for all those blind Linux hackers out there.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
It's true. Linux is a great OS. But I have had too much trouble with Netscape 4.61(en) for Linux constantly gobbling up so much memory that my machine goes into nearly a deep, slow sleep as it tries to constantly swap stuff out. In the end, I have to use my favorite "Unix power user" command (i.e., "kill" :-) ) to kill Netscape every time. I'm sure the product is leaking memory like crazy. So, like many others, I am actively looking for a mean-but-lean browser for Linux -- and to my knowledge, there really isn't one -- YET!. Opera (tested on Windows) is promising, but I don't really like that multiple-document interface. I'd be much happier with a single window as in Netscape where I could always open a second window if I wanted. So, once again I am left waiting. Eventually there will be something really cool, and I doubt it will be IE. My personal suspicion is that even if MS wanted to port IE to Linux, it would be a mess to do it because IE was certainly developed only with the Windows platform in mind.
jon_c wrote:
I would like to know exactly what IE has that is not part of the [W3C] standard.
Well, the one that jumps out first, since you use them, is IE's use of SmartQuotes. ActiveX is not only completely non-standard, it is a security hole. IE 5.0 does not have complete CSS or DOM implementations even though those standards have been complete for ages. Its XML implementation violates standard namespace conventions. Granted, Netscape 4.0 is no better when it comes to standards compliance, but Mozilla is.
so from my casual observations, netscape doesn't support as many standards as IE.
Your casual observations do not support your conclusion. Neither Netscape 4 nor IE 5 fully support standards, your "experts" are merely more used to IE's quirks than Netscape's.
And if Microsoft's is "bending" standards into the browser, that would seem like a good thing.
How? Microsoft implementing an IE-only feature only serves to fragment the web into IE and non-IE camps, and helps Microsoft to tie their customers to them more securely. If Microsoft (and Netscape) were to follow the standards better, consumers would have richer web content available to them, with fewer complications. Netscape has repented and is actively working on standards compliance, what is Microsoft doing to better support the standards?
The W3C page
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Open mind, insert foot.
I did prefer Messie before I discovered Opera. If Opera keeps its standards up with the Linux port, and (being Qt-based) eventually gets the same KDE integration that kfm and Konqueror have, there'll be no stopping Linux. Save the "Opera isn't free" noise... you pay for Messie twice, in buying and then using Winduhs.
A sun Enterprise 10000 server should be about enough to handle MSIE at a reasonable speed.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
I'd like to know which of these browsers provide "easy" user access to LINK. That's missing in all the "major" browsers I've used... even from those ones from the W3C, whose recommendation it is!!
ok, then...
Nothing will save Mozilla short of a complete rewrite, done quickly in record time.
the new interface is horrible
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Don't bother replying unless you can be on topic.
yeah, like IE5 never crashes on NT4. corporate desktop, hell.
Of course, there isn't much chance of Microsoft ever doing such a thing...
I'd bet that they already have. It's sitting on a shelf somewhere, or maybe being used on the inside. Will they ever release it? Who knows? If I was in Microsoft Marketing, and I was interested to see if it would be well received by reading a publication like slashdot, a known linux hangout, I'd be scared to even bring up the issue (with how MS is treated here). I sure as hell would use it, not because I like MS, but because my work involved a lot of browsing on the web, and Netscape, my perfered browser, can't handle a damn thing without falling apart. I'm under the assumption that IE 5.x for linux exists in Redmond, but may never exist for us.
The Good Reverend
When are you damn moderators gonna learn what Redundant means... it means the same thing as repetetive, in other words, it's unoriginal and copies off of a previous post... but how could the first post be copying off of a previous post???
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
If it wasnt for Internet Explorer I would have abondoned my Win* machine for a long time, but since IE is the most used browser on the WWW I have to stick with it. Some might say get Solaris (cause IE works under Solaris). But that isnt the issue.
Some might say get Opera, it has fully CSS and DHTML support according to W3C. Yes it has, BUT the big but, the most users browsing the web uses IE and IE has its own CSS and DHTML model. Wich always tend to crash Netscape browsers.
Unfortunately I dont see anything that will change that really, IE for a free OS, dont think so.
Only alternative for me is to stick with only server-side programming. But that is to runaway from the problem.
I really hope NS5 and its new rendering engine will change all this. Then I can stick with my FreeBSD and Linux box for good!
Lost Carrier
Lost Carrier
http://www.geekboys.org
As a server, Linux still has many places to sit, but on a corporate desktop, I'm sorry to say it's just not ready.
..
.. yet
I think the only things we need to make Linux ready for the corporate desktop is:
- A decent webbrowser. (mozilla / opera coming soon)
- A decent Email program (hmm.. kMail is usable, but not great)
- A decent Office suite (kOffice coming soon)
What more is really needed? *Really* needed? News programs is not that important to the 'big businesses' (i think?), aol instant messagers thingomajigs (or their equivalents) should not be a difficult thing to find, and so on. Quite frankly, I think we'll be ready for the corporate desktop within 6 months.
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
There must be something wrong with your library disposition and configuration.
:)
I've been using Netscape 4.5 since it was released and it hasn't crashed on me even 5 times. I use it for at least 2 hours a day. I do leave Java turned off, though. It uses too many resources and it does tend to crash Netscape.
I agree with you that Netscape is inefficient but wanting MSIE for Linux is being way too radical IMHO.
Try fixing your libs. Good luck
In the way of IRC clients, if you want the eyecandy, the obvious client to suggest is XChat; in my experience (in its' latest incarnation), it is featureful, stable, and not bad performance wise.
Personally, I find tkIRC to be very useable in X11, and it has the virtue of being usable with ircII scripts (it essentially being a TK front-end to ircII).
There is also Zircon, an irc client written entirely in TCL/TK, but I found it had some annoying misfeatures with respect to nicklengths (ircII hard-limits your personal nick-length at 8 without modifying the source, but Zircon refuses to let you op people through the menus without them having a nick of 8 characters or less).
Also, KVirc is meant to be extremely good; I have never used it, however.
Try http://www.irchelp.org for a list of clients to look at.
Hope this helps.
Acronym
(unrepentant ircII-in-an-eterm user)
I think it is important that Mozilla eventually becomes a good/solid browser because it is the showcase for what open source can (or can't do). Looking at the usability of the last few mozialla builds, I can say that IMHO it's moving along OK and seems to be more stable everytime I download it. As such, I believe that the mozilla folks will eventually release a good, standards compliant browser. The key question here is: when? We have to run as fast as we can to catch up to MS and deprive them of the opportunity to bend the web to their own designs and currently Mozilla is the showcase product of that.
While I think the success of the Mozilla project is important for the obvious reasons (visibility, Linux should have an open source implementation of a key technology for the web, etc), I am not all that worried about the availablity of a proper browser under Linux. See, Linux right now has somewhere between 15-20 million users (as far as we can guess) and is doubling every year (even if it's not quite doubling it's growing like crazy). This means, that even should mozilla fail, there will be (in a year or so) a market of about 30-50 million potential users. I think this in itself will attract corporate interest: if you can get 20% of those users to pay you $20 (which is pretty reasonably for a decent browser if you have no alternative), you'd make somewhere in between $120M and $200M. Surely a potential customer base of such a size will continue to attract development efforts (if no decent free implementation is available).
Opera currently seems poised to become the alternative, commercial Linux browser if what I've heard about them holds true on their upcoming Linux port. I think Linux is big enough to attract software companies which can deliver a browser. Yes, it should be open source and this is where Mozilla comes in. I think however that no matter what happens, Linux will be able to operate on the web.
Lastly a few comments (responding to other posts):
alias kns="killall -9 netscape ; rm -f ~/.netscape/lock"
It is sad, but using Netscape nowadays requires preparations like these. (turning off Java helps a lot as well)
I've run Netscape 2+ across at least a dozen machines with various slackware, debian, and SuSe distros. Netscape has been pretty much awful over all of them.
The only thing that playing with your libraries seems to offer is a choice of which particular set of bugs you would like to encounter. "How would you like to crash today?".
At the end of the day, the current distribution of SuSe runs everthing - everything perfectly, except for the latest version of Netscape, which crashes constantly. That's not my problem. It's not even SuSe's problem. It's a Netscape problem. And Mozilla doesn't seem to be making any headway towards fixing this.
I recognize a lot in your story, wrt using/ crashing Netscape on Linux.
However, I'm afraid (and this is really too bad) the frequent crashes and DNS lookup hangs (I thought this is fixed now with the DNS helper process) are limited to Netscape on Unix. On Windows, again I am as sorry about this as the next guy, several Netscape versions are solid as a rock (Netscape 4.51 is a good example).
So there is no need to port IE to Linux, we just need to port the Netscape of Windows to Linux.
I agree, table support is important. But frame support is not - except that if a browser supports frames, it should allow me to turn that support off. Any site that does not work without frames is broken. The NOFRAMES element is there for a reason.
Which allow the user to specify their own style sheets, overriding the pages' layout?
Is that important? Why?
It is important. It would lower my blood pressure when visiting sites that specify too small fonts or unreadable colours (dark blue on black, anyone?). And it would allow me to specify that I don't like a text line to be much longer than 40 em, and that I prefer to have some margins on a page. To mention a few things.
You mean like multiple language support and so on? Personally I would prefer to have the web in as few languages as possible.
Well, I don't agree with you there. I like to read Finnish when I can. Content negotiation is wonderful magic when it is used efficiently.
The important thing is that its a HELL of a task to translate things into an umzillion different languages
I know. I translate Debian web pages to Finnish.
only major corps with lots of money to hire translators OR major organizations with many helpers - would be able to translate to "everything".
Why would you need to translate everything?
What are your top 5 Unix browsers? I am talking about the browsers currently in development, not the ones that stopped development several years ago as this review included. Then a comprehensive review of these browsers can be done, seeing which one supports what standards, available plug-ins, level of png support etc.
Graphical Browsers
- Netscape Communicator 4.7
- Mozilla M11 --> Navigator 5 within 6 months(?)
- Konqueror (within 2 months)
- Opera for Linux (1 year away?)
- That SVGAlib browser featured
Console BrowsersOf course, you might disagree. What should happen then is a good review of the top browsers should be written to compare their features. Not a review of gif support etc, which misses the point completely!
Yes, OCAML also has a native code compiler.
See Chapter 10 of the documentation.
What idiots they are! I guess I won't be going there to check out what programs they will be showing on their network. It is a good thing there aren't such silly requirements on watching network TV.
-Jason
that was fast...
-- Went home. Had to feed the kids.
I have used several of the RC and beta versions of Win2K and I swear it's getting slower and buggier with each iteration. Beta 2 was the best overall, with some odd bugs, but quick and pleasant to use. RC3 is a piece of crap.
NB: I use FreeBSD at home
...Is the best damn browser out there. It's fast and supports all major standards, etc.
Linux sucks for web browsing / client use. It's still a server OS as much as people want to argue...
I don't think anybody else has mentioned this... The Corel File Manager has a build in web browser that seems to work fairly well, although I haven't tested it extensively yet... It brought up Slashdot just fine, and some of the other sites I tried. I have not yet seen anybody mention this feature of the Corel File Manager... or has nobody else tried typing a url in the Corel File Manager?
What about this escape thing the FSF was working on? Or have they abandoned it? I think you can find it on the GNU alpha FTP server.
I tried to use IE 4 on solaris once. It took a few minutes to start up (did some font hashing and other stuff). After that it worked for only a few more minutes (quite slowly), and then crashed. I've never tried it again ;)
It starts with an "L" and ends with an "X"
It doesn't work. I download usertool.exe from
ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu/pub/cygwin/latest/
--the only ftp site that works. It aint have no cygwin1.dll
CY
Sorry...got a "not responding" the first time and assumed the worst.
Anyways. Was surprised to see so many linux browsers. I was under the impression there were far fewer than that. Good to see that they're coming along nicely...maybe there'll be some healthy competetion for Mozilla when it comes out. As it stands now, tho, with all but a handful of those on the having no frame support, i think i'll stick to netscape (untill Mozilla, of course).
-- Went home. Had to feed the kids.
| I want to know about png support.
I want to know about png *transparency* support. The only Linux browser I've tried so far that even attempts it is Mozilla. Netscape does PNG, but no transparencies, which makes one or two of the images on my site look a little silly.
For the crowd that can't look at PNG at all, at least the jpegs render...
It's really a shame HTML has become some much of a page layout language.
/. for instance) would work much better if you could just wack keys for 'next message', 'skip thread', 'move up'. No more hunting around with the mouse for all those links and buttons.
If there would just be a good standard set of those link attributes, to indicate things like 'next', 'up', 'home' etc. then you could put key bindings to them in a browser.
All those HTML message boards (like
For what it's worth, I think Netscape runs significantly better under Irix than Linux - it does crash, but it crashes less often.
I've used Netscape 4.x under Irix for well over a year now, and it's never brought down X. I turn off Java because Java does seem to crash it - but it crashes IE under Windows too.
However, I do agree that it's pretty horrible in its rate of freezing up the machine for agonizing minutes as it does its DNS lookup.
As others have mentioned, Mozilla is a complete rewrite, and I think you've explained quite well why that was necessary. Let's just hope it winds up working well.
D
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Personally, I'm waiting for KDE 2.0 and Konqueror. If Konq. can't hack the job, then I'll go for Opera. The commercial non-GPL'd, Norwegian browser. Personally, I think i'll go for Opera in any case, since I really think its the best browser available.
:)
However, its interesting to see that there are so many browsers available. I didn't know about any except Netscape, Arena, the KDE-thingomajig in addition to lynx.
Mozilla will sure be interesting. But I have a nagging feeling that I won't like it. I don't like netscape today (even though I use it, because of lack of alternatives.. hmm, maybe I should look closer at these 21 when I get home from work) - and I don't think I'll like mozilla when its released. But we'll see.
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
...most of the browser are not even close to viable alternatives to the "classics", ie. Netscape and lynx. Most of them render only a subset of html, and/or render what they do understand in odd ways.
I'd say, wait for Mozilla 5. The M11 release works great on my computer (ie, bombs only about every 15 minutes as long as you stay away from password-protected areas, compared to every 45 seconds of M10). Also, KDE 2.0's browser ought to be interesting.
But besides that, there's not much out there.
It is important. It would lower my blood pressure when visiting sites that specify too small fonts or unreadable colours (dark blue on black, anyone?)
;)
:-) I quickly changed the settings and reloaded.
:-)
.. I *DO NOT* like to use programs that is translated to norwegian neither. Even though Opera is available in norwegian, I prefer the english version .. when I use windows that is.
Well, your claimed webpages that doesn't do "noframes" decently (iow display more than "this page require frame-support) is broken. I'll claim that pages with dark blue on black is broken
But OK, i see your point here, even though we disagree about the frames.
Well, I don't agree with you there. I like to read Finnish when I can. Content negotiation is wonderful magic when it is used efficiently.
Even though I'm norwegian, I really prefer to read the web in english. At least when the original site is english. Its the same when I read books. If the author is english, I prefer to read the english books instead of those translated into norwegian. If the author is norwegian, its the other way around.
I recently found that Debian had suddenly gotten support for norwegian. And that the browser I was using had *shudder* set norwegian as the preferred language. My eyes nearly popped out of their sockets when I screamed 'noooo'.
I *DONT* want to read debians homepages in norwegian!
.. And
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"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
http://www.fornax.sk/cgi-bin/projekty/show.pl?20
I've noticed netscape is a lot more stable if you disable its disk cache (set to 0 in prefernces).
Take a look at "links". A great new console browser, supporting tables: http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
You might not want or need FRAME support but it *is* part of the HTML spec. So, yeah, FRAME support is important.
I will not give an opinion of Mozilla and Netscape here because most of you know how good or bad they really are, but I can comment about Amaya.
True enough Amaya may be very html compliant, but I found it to be a slow memory hog when trying to work with it. It seemed to have some serious memory leaks, even worse than Netscape.
I share your grief on the Netscape issue, though. Its error handling has got to be the worst of any program I've ever seen. I, too, am getting fed up with typing "rm ~/.netscape/lock"; I might as well set up a cron job to do it for me every 30 minutes. The problem, however, is that it's not just Linux that it sucks on. Netscape crashes reliably for me on every OS I've used it on: Irix 6.5, Linux 2.0 and 2.2, FreeBSD (both the native binary and a Linux binary running under emulation), Solaris, Windows 95, 98 and NT, and MacOS. Sometimes it'll take X with it (segmentation fault in the server on Irix), other times it'll cause the entire OS to slow to a crawl (Windows NT) and require a reboot. Other times, it'll just cause the machine to reboot (Mac OS 7). I'm convinced that nothing will save Netscape short of a complete rewrite; its code would simply be too buggy to be of any use without major walkthroughs and audits (which would probably take longer than rewriting the damned thing.)
I would love it if Microsoft ported IE properly to Linux. If it proved to be better than Netscape -- which it would not have a hard time doing, I daresay -- I'd use it.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My experience with the Solaris version of Internet Explorer was good for a couple of hours until it started freezing on startup, which it has very consistently done ever since. Rather sad, since it really looks like the Windows version, but right now it performs miserably.
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Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
It should.
Get the full tools from Cygnus themselves if usertools doesn't -- I can say with absolute certainty that it does contain that DLL. Also, be sure to start w3m from the Cygwin batch file (bash, etc), which sets the environment variables appropriately (the dll isn't, I believe, put inside the standard Windows search path). If the bash in the usertools (which needs the DLL) runs, so will w3m.
When I recently upgraded Netscape Communicator on my Linux machine, I was disappointed to see that not only was it no more stable, perhaps even less so, but also that no real advancements in basic functionality had been made; only bloat driven by the Marketing folks. For example, the Shop button.
/. comments. I hate hunting for the spot I left off at so much, I tend to middle-click to open a new window for each thread I want to follow and close them when done with the thread! However, with recent releases, this has become more and more problematic - every time, every thread, I have to keep my fingers crossed that Netscape won't crash when I close the window. And much of the time, it does. Less often if I use Alt-w, more often if I use the window manager's close button (WindowMaker). Netscape is virtually unusable. What's wrong with these people? Why are they wasting programmers' time with Shop buttons when there are long-standing bugs to hunt?
I have never intentionally clicked the Shop button beyond that first time out of curiosity. But each time I download a new release, I wish for the Back button to function correctly. I've tried MSIE, and damn the thing, it goes Back to the point you left off. Netscape goes back to some random position in the document. This is unbelievably aggravating, for example, when reading
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
Yes there is: Appgen. And you're right about the "huge cost to redo [them] for Linux" but the cost of maintianing them now is pretty close to the cost of converting them. TCO is so much better with Linux it's scary.
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I was a microsoft junkie, till Windows 2000. I have to use it at work and can't stand it. It is horribly slow. After realizing this I decided to go to Linix at home instead. It is so much better.
- A decent webbrowser. (mozilla / opera coming soon)
- A decent Email program (hmm.. kMail is usable, but not great)
- A decent Office suite (kOffice coming soon)
I completely agree with you about the web browser. The email client point is ify. I still can't find anything better than pine or mutt for email but I'm sure that a GUI client would be good for the masses.
I will disaree with your point about a good office suite. If you define a "good" office suite by it's capibility and functionality then Linux has two; ApplixWare (which is fantastic) and StarOffice. The problem people have is they define a "good" office suite as being exactlly like MS Office (which is NOT all that great).
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If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
This is to correct a factual error in my post. I referred to characters 223 for open curly double quotes, 224 for close curly double quotes and 222 for open curly single quotes. I had forgotten that the method I was using to find out the codes reported the number in octal, not decimal. The real numbers are 147, 148 and 146, respectively.
As a biproduct, they don't match the German S, Thorn, or accented a; rather, they fall in a block of numbers that is reserved for use as control characters. Under the right circumstances, who knows what a terminal might interpret them as.
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Open mind, insert foot.
You put the .dll either in the programdirectory, or with the rest of the .dlls in \windows\system (or %SYSTEMROOT%\%blahblahblah%... on NT, which is usually \WinNT\System)
Or maybe \windows\system32.
It will likely find it in any of those three spots.
-- quack quack quack
The Solaris and HP ports of Internet Exploder were horrible, if I remember some posts in earlier threads about this. IE's power lies in the integration with the operating system, which is typically Microsoft. Porting IE to Linux in two days is impossible, and I don't think it will get a big userbase in the open source community.
In the beginning, IE was developed because of Netscape. The Netscape browser was an attack to Microsofts APIs, as Judge Jackson's Findings state. Microsoft has no reason to release IE for Linux - they won't make money and they won't improve image.
One offtopic thing: this is one of the messages that always get moderated up as insightful: "Microsoft may seem Enemy #1, but it indeed helps Linux towards standards." While that is a truth we don't always consider, we should take care of problems ourselves instead of begging MS to port IE.
That's your choice. My choice is different.
Perhaps it'd be good if the ideal browser had a switch that allowed you to turn CN on or off, depending on one's mood ;-)
From what I've heard (correct me someone if I'm wrong) XSLT isn't going to happen in mozilla for release. But you can do anything you like within the bounds of CSS + DOM + Javascript (see a long thread about this on xml.com).
Having said that - I think XSLT will come very quickly after release. There's already (IIRC) IBM and Sun working on implementing XSLT within mozilla, so I suspect a plugin will come fairly soon.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
I was a heavy lynx user till I discovered w3m. Now it's
45%/45% (the other 10% being Netscape). w3m handles tables
very nicely (try reading www.gnome.org on lynx) and
you can use lynx keybindings if you like. On the other
hand it doesn't display pages partially while downloading
but only after it's received everything.
In my personal experience, Netscape is the best free industrial strength browser for windows. I definitely prefer it to IE5 for several reasons. Before you get excited and hit the flame button, read all of the paragraphs below.
I prefer netscape to ie because imho netscape loads faster, does a much better job of rendering pages, and is much more stable.
I see a lot of comments regarding the fact that Netscape is slow to load, as opposed to ie, which is fast. To those people, I propose a challenge: remove ie from the windows shell, and then evaluate again. The first thing you will notice is that Windows loads 8-10 seconds faster (on a k6-3 450, 192 MB). The only reason I can think of for this is that Windows is already loading IE when it boots up... 'launching' IE simply shows it on your screen. The equivalent function in netscape would be to open the messenger, then click "New Navigator Window". Instantaneous. MS is fooling you into thinking that ie is fast by hiding the real time it takes to load. (I am probably betraying my ignorance of how it works; feel free to correct me. I am an engineer, not a programmer.) The second thing you notice is that Netscape loads much faster; I would go so far as to say twice as fast. I would be very interested to know why this is, since my computer should not be resource limited in this situation.
The only real evidence I have that netscape renders faster is anecdotal; I had always used Netscape on my NT box at work (PII 300), until the network people decided to only allow IE5 to access the proxy servers(I don't know how they did this, but we recieved a message saying to switch to ie, then netscape stopped working). Forced to switch, I immediately noticed that anything I did on the network was slowed- pages that used to take 3 seconds to d/l and render (i.e. a slashdot page with 150 comments) now gave me time to go get coffee. Since this happened overnight, I am pretty sure that the browser was the culprit.
I have also seen a lot of comments saying how unstable Netscape is. I have noticed this on my home computer as well- sort of. Once again, I don't think this is Netscape's fault. My evidence is more interesting this time: I had a nice, stable environment on my machine, with netscape 4.7 and ie5 beta that my Diamond video card installed for me; one day I got bored and decided to upgrade to the new version. Upon upgrading, Netscape suddenly started crashing. Literally every time I accessed a java applet in a seperate window. I changed nothing in my netscape configuration- only my ie setup, yet what was affected was netscape. I removed IE5, reinstalled windows and netscape, and now everything works well again. I haven't had netscape crash since.
I am not a linux bigot, or even a MS hater- in fact I have been accused of being a MS lackey on this list more than once. My preferred windows browser is actually opera, except it isn't free and I dislike the MDI. I have used Netscape on linux (mandrake 5.1) and unix (IRIX 6.2), and it sucks on both; linux much worse than irix. In fact, the lack of a good linux web browser is keeping me from using linux for anything other than a cheap terminal server when I need to access an sgi from my pc... maybe I will try again when mozilla gets up and running. Or opera. But on Windows it is and has always been superior to IE, and you are fooling yourself if you say it isn't out of some sense of egalitarianism or generosity to MS.
To borrow Neal Stephenson's OS metaphor and apply it to browsers, the point I have been trying to make here is that if having a Toyota in your garage causes your Ford to run poorly, one answer would be to sell the Toyota. If your garage is currently unable to hold a Toyota and you have a rusty old pickup, it might be better to try and fix the pickup rather than inviting a product of dubious integrity into your home. Or maybe you should buy a porsche from the guys over at Opera.
Scudder
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I can't agree with you on that I think Windows 2000 is memory hog which doesn't merit the upgrade from NT if you are using it as a desktop OS. It may be worthwhile for servers but as we are talking about web browsing I don't feel it's worth considering.
rm ~/.netscape/lock seem a familar command to anyone?
Oddly, in 4.7, you don't have to, it checks to see if the pid is defunct before asking. It does ask for example if you launch it twice.
--
Support for XML itself (the core spec) is trivial. Both Netscape and IE do well there.
Support for the DOM (the API to XML/HTML used by JavaScript) is harder. I believe both will have mostly equivalent DOM1 support when Mozilla is released.
Mozilla will do better with CSS/XML integration because they will do better with CSS standards compliance in general.
Mozilla is supposed to have XSLT support. It doesn't now but the code is under active development. The XSLT engine works standalone but now must be integrated with the browser. If they get this right, then their XSLT support will be one year more modern (read: standards compliant) than Microsoft's.
Netscape wins in use of XML for "other stuff" like menu customization, news feeds and so forth. That XUL stuff is butt-ugly but it is still XML!
All in all, I think that the XML picture is pretty positive for Mozilla and will become even better once more cooks get into the kitchen.
Paul Prescod
In the early/mid 90's bill stated that he would port MS software to any platform that had more than X users.
Statement was in response to a question asking if ms would continue to support Word on the Mac platform. Hint was that if Mac dropped below X users, than no more mac sw from microsoft.
I'm sure Linux has more users than the mac in the early 90's. Would really like to find that quote.....
Oh, almost forgot, I agree NS on linux totally sucks. Features are fine, great IMAP4 client but crashes are totally unacceptable. I think the "just turn off java" people don't realize how much this hurts Linux. I for one will not deploy Linux on any desktops at my workplace until there is a stable browser available.
I often tell people that Netscape is Linux's greatest Enemy.
I agree, table support is important. But frame support is not - except that if a browser supports frames, it should allow me to turn that support off. Any site that does not work
without frames is broken. The NOFRAMES element is there for a reason.
Rubbish - many sites require frames for very good reasons. I personally try and ensure my sites are at least mainly usable without them, and I have some sites with no frames at all, but to say that sites using a standard, accepted tag are "broken" is way over the top. Why do people get in such a flap about frames anyway? Most mainstream browsers support them fine, navigation has been fixed (early Netscape frames nav was a mess), and they help provide a consistent interface without constant reloading of static elements.
If you are unable to access a site because it uses tags you don't *LIKE* you are free to ask the webmaster to do a version just for you....but if s/he doesn't then it's like it or lump it time IMHO.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
WARRING: you are using netscape, a now inferior browser due to it's desier to try to compete with microsoft instead of doing what it did best. It was crushed and hasn't worked properly since version 3. Please change your browser as soon as possible.
I design websites for a living, and have been for what, over 3 years maybe? And I find this utterly ridiculous. There is no reason to do this. It requires just a little bit more effort on the designer's part, but it's not like you would need to spend months of it. I think this is totally unnecessary.
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SSL management should get pushed out to an SSL proxy, so that there would be common support for SSL for all browsers, whether they natively "do SSL" or not.
The point here is that by doing a proxy right, once, this eliminates the need to tightly integrate crypto into all of the web browsers.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
This is going to sound weird but if I login as user A netscape is unstable and crashes very easily. Yet if I login in as user B and connect to the same pages it's stable. I've already fixed the fonts problem that was causing the jvm to crash so I no longer have that problem. Do a dejanews search, something along the lines of java causes netscape to crash. Search the comp.os.linux.* newsgroups.
.netscape directory, etc. etc. . I also do not use the wrappper file, though I have tried it.
BTW I've tried isolating the ENV and moved directories, tried cleaning out the
Neil Cherry - Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
you are using netscape, a now inferior browser
the worst thing I'm finding with netscape is the older versions that a lot of our clients are using (.gov, madated to use only netscape) is that sites using certificates to authenticate are failing.
while MS has a stranglehold on the windows desktop, corporate users will continue use IE.
from a development point of view this is good, but from a technological standpoint I'd like to see a real competitor. It's worth noting there's a lot of wintel/ie users out there and it's difficult for competitors (free or otherwise) to break into this market.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I use lynx on win32 a lot. Then I hread w3m and download the zip file. I couldn't run it because I need "cygwin1.dll" (something like that, I am not at home right now.)
.dll file, where do I put it huh? The fabulous helps files come with w3m don't say nothing.)
Search "cgywin1.dll" on google reveal tons of "cygwin-19991123-.dll" type of stuff. I have no idea what it is. The only entry I think I understand is about cygnus library for emacs. Searching cygwin1.dll on cygnus.com reveal nothing worth a damn. I think this is *nix users' trendy discrimination toward window users. (Even if I have the
If this is the document standard for a decent non-commercial program, I think I'll stick with windos for a while. (I use cheap $20 winmodem and Netzero, and I don't even have a cd-rom for a laptop Yeah call me a window cheap bastard.)
The Squeak Smalltalk system is available for many different platforms, including Linux. I use its included browser, called Scamper, when I want to look at sites with Flash. It doesn't handle tables or frames, but I expect that to change soon.
Squeak, including Scamper, is 100% open source
Opera's main advantage comes from the Windows platform, where it was:
a) Not IE,
b) not Netscape,
c) still reasonably fast and full functioned.
This was enough to win it some die-hard fans, especially among people who didn't like the alternatives, but were forced to use Win32 in the office.
Not a bad little product, and it catered exactly to what people were looking for: a change from the alternatives.
--sugarman--
Can someone explain to me why everyone is so gaga over opera? I don't mean this as a flame, I just think there is something I missed.
I downloaded it, played with it, and I found the UI to be confusing (the back and forward buttons are on the top menu, not on the window that it refers to, for example), and not well designed for how I browse the web. (I usually browse durning breaks of concentration, and flip back and forth between an IDE and a specific webpage... opera with it's mdi doesn't allow that easily.)
Sure it's small, but for the $30, I could get more memory, and sure it's fast, but even on my t1 at work the render time is swamped by the download time.
I mean honestly, could someone explain to me, I want to know what I missed!
Myddrin
I haven't run a Microsoft platform system since IE decided to corrupt the system I was running on and lose the entire contents of that system for me. So Running IE is not an option for me unless Microsoft wants to port IE to the platform I currently run on. Which is exclusively Linux. Has been too for quite some time now.
When Netscape does crash for me (something that does not happen all that often really) I just xkill it and start it over. When IE decides to dine on someone's system, hey who knows what they'll have to go through to get up and running again? System integrity issues aside, I'd still rather run Linux. I like my individuality and would rather not be assimilated by the collective.
Whenever I see a website that tells me what browser I have to run in order to view it to me that's my que to hit the home button and go someplace else. So I guess I have never seen one of your sites? Also, I say to myself "what a dork, coding propretary HTML. Are they trying to lose viewers?"
Look at Slashdot. They don't care what browser you use. I could probably hold my connection cable against my tongue and get the content off this site. (I'll let you know New Year's Eve on that one) Good sites never discriminate against what browser the viewer chooses. What's that say about all your sites oki900?
What Redhat really needs is a browser, perhaps that is why they are interested in mozilla. Of course, mozilla is open source but the source is still restrictively controlled by AOL. If Redhat could not buy mozilla from AOL they should not develope it. Here is my reasoning:
- Microsoft is trying to take command of the personal computer market through the internet browser market. Redhat is obviously a competitor to Microsoft.
- A good multi-platform internet browser would get a lot more people to notice Redhat sooner.
- Redhat's big product (linux) would benefit from such a browser.
Of course, true hackers are suppose to be a lazy bunch and do not like making stuff that already exists. Redhat wants to stick with Mozilla becasue it already exists. But there are many internet browser out there that are under the more attractive GPL. Redhat could foster one of those GPL browser into something really special.I've been tracking MS IE development on
Solaris - there isn't any.
When a new version of IE comes out they
release a solaris version, but its so buggy
you've only got a 50/50 chance of even opening
the front page - it always dies within 2 minutes
of browsing for me (Solaris 2.6, recent patches).
Even with these problems I keep downloading from
the MS site and guess what... the file I download
doesn't change - between April and November 1999
the same unusable buggy IE5 was available.
This indicates that either no-one uses IE5 on
Solaris, or haven't logged any faults or that
MS don't care. Probably a bit of each.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
Depends on the corporation. Our desks run NT4 and there's no way they could be switched to Linux in the near future. Apart from the 3 important things you mention there are a whole raft of tools that different people use, from DTP to Presentation Graphics to Accounting & Payroll frontends, third party data interfaces (like Reuters & Bloomberg screens), and within the Systems group we need things like UML modelling tools, and requirements managment stuff. Now I'm not saying none of these are available on Linux (frankly I don't know) but even if one of them is missing it's a major headache, and to avoid a mixed desktop environment (which is Evil[tm]) it would probably prevent a Linux rollout. Add that to the cost of support and retraining....painful.
And no we don't need NNTP readers or instant messaging. And what about contact management? Scheduling? Workgroup calendars? Basically all the stuff in Outlook - we need all that. Desktop video conferencing? Linux probably has that actually...but you get my point!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
A decent Email program (hmm.. kMail is usable, but not great)
A decent Office suite (kOffice coming soon)
What more is really needed? Well for one you have to either have App duplication or 100% integration that doesn't cost money.
You can't use put up a mail server and go against the corporate model. We use GroupWise 5.2 accross the department. We'd need a GroupWise Linux client or we'd be stepping on people's fingers and that's a no-no.
We use SAP. Fortunately SAP has this just about coverd but we have other big business apps that are Win32 based. We're trying to move to web based corporate apps but certainly not in 6 months. Maybe WINE or something similiar will help. That's to be determined though.
I had hope for Mozilla, but it looks just as bad. I have hope for Opera, but it is not out. Can't we get some of these browser writers together to write a browser and not a full apps suite? And maybe the memory footprint won't be totally silly ...
Run it under Wine. Last I checked, I could get IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 to run under Wine. I can't get IE 4.0 or 5.0 to install with the stupid network installer, so I don't know if Wine will run the current crop of Internet Explorer versions, but it'd be fun to try.
:)
And heck, if it doesn't work, and you want it that badly, post to the newsgroup, or try to fix it yourself...
I guarantee you, if MS ported IE with Wine, it'd run better on Linux than it does on Solaris or HP/UX, easily. And it'd probably have some advantages over the Windows version. (stability--if IE crashes, it doesn't bring down Linux
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm, isn't Igarashi a Japanese name?
As for mozilla, I think it is going to be the future. The component based model is the way to go. As it is, there are a number of browsers in that list that are all based upon the same code bases, mMosaic and Mosaic, and then all the xmHtml based browsers. They all have the same weaknesses too since the rendering engine is the same.
Mozilla will fix that when they get it stable. There is already a GtkMozilla component, hopefully, gzilla, mnemonic, the GNOME help view, and other applications will start using the mozilla engine and then benefit from it. I would also like to see a QT/KDE based mozilla component but I don't know of one yet, as it is they are writing their own browser and it looks pretty powerful.
Include some CORBA integration with that and start browser enabling applications and the Linux with KDE or GNOME platform and Mozilla browser starts to look very compelling. We just need to weather the storm of IE specialized sites.
Mozilla M11 already scrolls and renders much faster than Netscape 4.7. I'm not sure if they are running with optimizations off or debug symbols either.
I had the experience of using IE for the Macintosh a year or so ago. I had invested a lot of time putting IE 4.0 dynamic HTML stuff in our Intranet site: expanding and collapsing outlines, text with neat drop shadows, etc. Netscape ignores all of this stuff but displays the pages OK. Under Windows these effects were quite nice but on the Mac they were broken badly. MS didn't bother to do their own HTML extensions right on the Mac.
I had to rewrite a lot of JavaScript, eliminate all use of VBScript, etc. to get pages that were useable on IE for the Mac. I checked out MS own site and found out that they did browser detection and avoided doing anything with dynamic HTML when IE for the Mac was detected.
I really like IE for Windows and would use a Linux version if it was as good as the Windows version. My experience suggests that MS would not put its best effort behind such a browser.
I am also one of those curmudgeons who enjoys using Lynx from time to time.
Install Cygwin (available from sourceware.cygnus.com). If you want to use it to port your own software, you'll need the full version (a rather large download, including gcc and other development tools); Otherwise, the user-tools-only version will do. Oh -- and, joy of joys, it comes with bash for win32!
i have, at one time or another, tried most of the browsers mentioned in the article, and dropped them all -- all but netscape. why? with all its quirks, netscape is still the one with the features, the one where the menus actually work, the one that i trust when i'm doing my banking or trading stocks thru. i really really wish that the mosaic people hadn't stopped development on THE original graphical browser, but oh well. i eagerly await the finished version of either Mozilla or Opera. i am willing to pay (!) for a good fast browser that won't suck up my limited resources (but not too much!! :)
Does anyone know a good browser for the Spectrum ZX81?
As for the Spamazon thing; consider:
- There is some art to choosing passwords. Choosing badly is a bad idea.
- The extent of the exposure to exploit at Spamazon is somewhat limited.
- If you make interesting changes, such as to address, you are required to enter the credit card number.
- They don't report back the credit card number.
- They tend to send you email messages concerning impending orders.
Is that to say that they are provably providing a real secure system? No. But it's not more insecure than you giving a waiter/waitress your credit card to charge a restaurant bill.Happily, these days there are tools that are reasonably good at storing things you can't possibly remember. I pick formally random passwords, and cut/paste between a semi-secure application and the web browser.
This all adds up to there being pretty limited room for dramatic, not-readily-cancelled, harvestable credit exploits.
For more secure, take a look at American Express' Blue, which requires that for online sales, you have the credit card handy, and actually have it interact with one's PC. Win32-only, at this point...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems the HTML "spec" is almost irrelevant. For every site which serves proper, compliant HTML, there are 3 which do not, and to be considered usable, a browser has to handle whatever shit is thrown at it.
Ever since I got involved (about 1993), the Web has been based on "it seems to work, it'll do" - and Mosaic and Netscape are partly responsible, by being so liberal with the HTML they were willing to accept and (attempt to) render.
Don't blame Tim Berners-Lee, his HTML was designed for a specific type of structured document. Tables, frames, BODY BACKGROUND=, these were all snuck in by Netscape, whereupon the W3C had their hand forced into including these features in later HTML specs.
I remember early CERN documents, which discussed the attribute=value pairs within an HTML tag. (to paraphrase) it said "In future, the <A$gt; tag might have an attribute which indicates whether the link is the next page, a footnote, an image, a reference to another part of the document, etc. A browser would do certain things with these attributes, whereas an application printing the document would use the information in a different way."
Has the HTML standard fulfilled that kind of promise? Nope. It's been shoehorned into a layout language, which is something it was never intended to do.
Here's hoping that XML fulfills its promise, and once again structure and layout are properly separated.
In the meantime, though -- formal "standards" don't matter one jot in the current browser market. While there's so much non-standard-compliant junk being spewed out by http servers, to succeed in the marketplace a browser has to accept it. Since a de-facto standard is no standard at all, I guess we have no standard.
(My apologies to the few sites still using pure, W3C compliant HTML. I salute you.)
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I am been a linux user for a long time, I hate windows 98/95 But windows 2000 is so stable, and fast. I would rather use it than linux any day. Don't bother replying if you never even tried it.
KFM does the same thing (browser/file manager integrated with the rest of KDE) only much better and faster (at least in the 1.1.2 version).
It isn't a perfect web browser but displays 90% of pages correctly. Hopefully Konqueror will be even better (at least better than Nutscrape).
Who cares?
I want to know about png support. After all, we burned all our gifs, didn't we. Didn't we? Oh, if we are slashdot, then we didn't.
(Actually, I'm seeing about 9% failure rate amongst users from a broad cross section of society coming to my site unable to view png's. Most are Win3.1 or Mac+IE users. Upgrade options are Opera or Netscape4.5/Mozilla respectively.)
It was an interesting roundup though.
This is probably flamebait but I might as well post it anyway =) There is a version of Internet Explorer for UNIX.. more correctly, for HP-UX and for Solaris. I use Solaris myself daily and I love using it. Anyway, tried the IE for Solaris, wasn't much faster than Netscape, a bit more stable. Outlook Express came with it and frankly, it sucked. Wouldn't support the æøå characters I use on my norwegian keyboard ;) also wouldn't let me make the @ symbol... a bit of a drawback in an email proggie eh? Might've just been a bad setup by me, wouldn't surprise me... Anyways, just my two cents, netscape is buggy and slow but it's the best that's out there :) -Cefwyn
UNIX _is_ userfriendly, it's just particular about who it's friends are....
Windows itself is unstable, and it has given me more trouble than any browser. On first install of W96b, MSIE crashes really troubled my home machines. They would blow up on start up of the OS, but eventually and mysteriously they stabilized. I've been using Netscape 4.1 and 4.5 on my WinDoze machines at home and work without a problem. Last year they started to get a little flakey, but an update from W95 to W98 solved everything! Come to think of it, this is why I migrated from Win3.11...Bitchen today and broken tomorow.
Microsoft will be Microsoft. They are greedy, and will try to force costly yearly upgrades of all their software.
The article points to 21 different browsers is great. The recomended Netscape 4.5 has worked just fine on my Linux Machines. The article claims things are getting better for other browsers. Knowing this, why on Earth would anyone want to put themselves at Microsoft's mercy?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hey, take a look to w3m. Im' writing in it now. It does render thepages (in text!!) very good, you can even click on the link with the mouse (works under X, I'm on a Sun box now) and reder both table and frame. You can even scroll up and down adn letf right (if the page render bigger than the xterm =)
I almost thought you weren't ignorant. For the umpteenth time: Mozilla is not Netscape. In fact, there is virtually 0 shared code between the two. Additionally, Mozilla (which should be considered a completely new application) is still in a pre-alpha state -- probably will be "alpha" in a couple of weeks -- and crashes about as much as Communicator 4.7 (a ".7" release of a RELEASED product).
I agree that Communicator is garbage. I don't agree that Mozilla is. Mozilla may not be a panacea, but it will expose Communicator and IE as the worthless crap they are.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Debian's "unstable" glibc2.1+smotif linked versions of Navigator and Communicator 4.[67] are all rock solid on my system, even with Java enabled.
You can get the communicator .deb's here, which you'll probably want to convert to .rpm's for your SuSE distro. with Joey Hess's alien program.
From what I've heard, IE 3.0 for Win 3.1 is the last version of IE that runs under Wine. Anything later is too integrated with the OS. When I tried to run IE 4.0 under Wine, it thought I was reinstalling Windows...
In these unusual circumstances, Linux sputtered and died, but everything (of course) worked fine after the reboot and fsck were done, and interestingly enough, the Network Neighborhood icon in Windows got un-broken when I did that.
There's some weird kind of trend here. Whenever I do things that I'm supposed to do with my computer (like install new software or recompile the kernel) it starts working worse, but when I do something completely moronic, things work better afterward.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I just started working with M11. Wow. The UI is totally different and much better. This is really an amazing accomplishment. I think this is definitely a usable browser. I don't like rm -f .netscape/lock or ps -ax | grep netscape either. I don't seem to have any problems with Java, although Midi files sometimes cause problems. I want to try Konqueror too. What I would like to see is complete DHTML, CSS, XML support and support for some kind of standard GIMP-creatable animation, along with PNG graphics. Then, I think web development would become a lot easier.
I believe that Opera started in Norwegian and was translated to English, which kinda goes against your argument.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
What more is really needed? *Really* needed?
A whole lot, I am afraid. Lots of businesses use internal software developed under VB that would represent a huge cost to redo for Linux. There is no accounting software for Linux. Many AS400 applications have Windows clients, but no Linux clients. There is no HR software for Linux.
The list of missing pieces is long and imposing.
Well, I just found out Mozilla M11 supports alpha-channel PNG graphics. XML? CSS? DHTML? I think I may start using Netscape less and less.
Netscape is just so full of bugs it's unreal. It crashes a lot. Every time a page contains a java applet or attempts to use a plugin you're sitting there with fingers crossed wondering if Netscape's going to crash.. again.
rm ~/.netscape/lock seem a familar command to anyone? And why does Even when it works, it's dog slow. It's table rendering takes forever. The java VM is so slow as to be unusable. And it really would be nice if the entire Netscape program (i.e. all the windows it might have open) didn't freeze up while it's waiting for a DNS lookup.
The fact is that Netscape is an embarassment to the Linux world. We tell people about this solid, reliable, crash-free computing environment, which it is, and then we sit them down in front of Netscape. And it crashes. And they give us strange looks, and decide to stick with Windows.
I would like to see Internet Explorer for Linux. IE is a fine web browser. It's not perfect, but it's vastly more stable than Netscape, and very much faster. And there are already Solaris and HP versions, so porting it to Linux would be the work of a few days.
Just think of the good publicity Microsoft would get if they released it. All us die-hard geeks would have to pause for a second and reconsider our feelings towards them. It would help in the ongoing anti-trust case. And people would use it.
Of course, there isn't much chance of Microsoft ever doing such a thing... which is exactly why they should. They should do it to prove that attitude wrong. If it is wrong of course...
AFAIK, The INRIA implementation of OCAML can compile and bytecode-compile OCAML, so the bit about OCAML being interpreted is incorrect. see: caml.inria.fr BTW, an OCAML entry won the ICFP contest this year.
Which of them support secure access methods? (e.g., SSL, https)? Is it just Netscape, all of them, or a random selection? He could at least say, that's one of my main considerations when choosing a browser. Also, where it was developed, so I can know that there is no sucky encryption key limit imposed.
21 web browsers and none can beat the stability and speed and features of IE5. Sure you can look at static HTML pages with just about any hacked-up browser but what about javascript? It always crashes with Netscape on Linux. Sure you guys can say "o javascript is a useless feature all we need is lynx" well try to do online banking sometime with just static html browsers. Your not going to get much banking done. And of course you can say well just make everything cgi, we don't need javascript, well then you stress out your server dishing out a million cgi pages which ruins the whole point of text-only browsing which is low-bandwidth on both sides. So the bottom line is either linux gets reliable javascript/dhtml/java browser or it's relugated to a server only OS like a Novell box locked up in a closet somewhere.
The problem is a two parter, Microsoft produces non-standard (as per ISO 8859-1) characters in their output, and most non-windows browsers expect standard characters. Netscape on NT generally uses Windows' non-standard fonts as its default, and that is why you have no problem seeing the characters. Try switching to another OS, or even a standard ISO mapped font on Windows, and you'll see the problem.
Most recent Microsoft products use a feature called "Smart Quotes", which converts normal apostrophies, single quotes and double quotes to non-standard characters supposed to represent curly single and double quotes. If you view his post carefully, you will see that it does not use ISO 8859-1 characters, nor does it use the entity names. It uses character #223 for open curly double quotes, character #224 for close curly double quotes, character #222 for apostrophies. According to the list you referenced, those should be the German sharp S, lowercase a with an accent grave, and a capital Thorn, respectively.
If Microsoft were following the standards, it would have either:
* Left the quotes and apostrophies alone; or
* Used the HTML 4.0 tags ‘, ’, “ and ”, as needed.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I'd like to know which render the pages correctly, according to spec. Which support CSS (according to spec)? Which allow the user to specify their own style sheets, overriding the pages' layout? Which support content negotiation? These are the questions I'd like to see answered, since those are the things that are important for the advancement of the Web.
As someone who is attempting to get management's approval to switch our groups PC's to Linux, this is something I've already come up against.
In a business environment you have to get the work done first and not be toying around hot fixing programs. We also can't wait year after year for features to catch up be they hardware or software.
As a server, Linux still has many places to sit, but on a corporate desktop, I'm sorry to say it's just not ready.
A good thing coming out of this article would be to have several of these independants form up and focus on ONE browser and get it working 100%.