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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
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.
A sun Enterprise 10000 server should be about enough to handle MSIE at a reasonable speed.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
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!
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.
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):
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.
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
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.
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"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?"
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.
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.
It seemed to be an older review. It listed kfm, along with, of course, Mozilla M10 and Netscape 4.5.
-Brent--
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.
It might be "true", but you know very well that the poster only intended it as flaimbait.
Hopefully, Mozilla/Netscape 5 will fix a lot of these issues. I'm hearing hints from various places that Nav5's XML support won't be as complete as IE5's (anyone know?), and this worries me a little.You want to check out the Netscape Standards Challenge.
-Brent--
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.
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If you're going to be a web designer for a living, you might want to change that elitist attitude. You've already alienated ALL of your possible unix/linux/freebsd/beos users in one fell swoop, coding only for a browser available for a whopping 2 flavors of Windows. Get a cgi script that records browsers and OS types (hell get a counter from thecounter.com) and watch your stats. That'll give you an idea of who is looking at your pages with what. My personal, measley site has around 800 hits and it's an even split between IE and Netscape. Using code specific to either browser is only cool if you have an index page that javascripticiously snoops the browser type and forwards the user seamlessly to the 'coded for whatever' page.
I don't mean to be nosey, or opinionated or anything. I'm just asking an honest question...
...that had netscape not tried to keep up with all the features IE had and just kept to HTML standards and did it well like it had in the past people would still be looking at IE as that annoying program microsoft makes you install when you install windows, and not the better choice.
Do your clients/bosses know you do this? Most business wouldn't be comfortable with losing ~30-40% of the market or having an opinion stated so blantantly. To be perfectly frank, if I saw something like that on a web page... I just wouldn't visit it ever again. I think there are alot of people that agree with me.
Again no offense, I'm not flaming or anything...
However, you should be aware that Netscape is the one that started extending HTML. Sure they worked like the dickens to get their extensions to become part of the HTML standard, but the fact remains that from the begining they did extend html (remember the CENTER tag? or FRAME? or even tr/td where all netscape specific tags in the begining.)
Personally I disagree with you I've used IE3-5(mac(only to 4.5)/win), Netscape(mac/win/linux) and Opera(win)... and I still perfer Netscape. Sure there are standards that it doesn't support, and it crashes alot but it has two huge advantages over the others don't:
1) A very simple UI. Compared with the last few releases of IE, netscapes UI is very simple and efficient.
2) As you can see I use a mix of OS's, and having to deal with a consistent (mostly) UI across all three is really nice. (there are big diffs between IE4&5 and IE4.5 for the mac, btw).
Granted the above is just my opinion, and you are perfectly free to disagree....
RobK
Myddrin
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.
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 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
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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!! :)
- Netscsape for all the pages that just won't work (yet) on any of the alternatives.
- Lynx for fast and easy browsing and actually getting some information instead of eye-candy. And of course whenever all you have is the console or a telnet login.
- KDE's browser to drag-n-drop downloads and to use a pretty okay graphical browser for the simple stuff.
- Mozilla to test your own HTML4.0/CSS and for fun and giggles.
I use all four of these, depending on my mood, task.. Mozilla and Konqueror (the browser in KDE2) will replace Netscape some day but even though both projects look great and are quite useable already, they're not exactly there yet. And Lynx will always be around.As for the other 17 browsers... Opera might get a nice niche market, StarOffice's internal browser is okay.. I haven't tried the rest recently so I don't have an opinion on those other than that I hope we will go to a situation with many different browsers and functionality/integration and only a few rendering engines.
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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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.
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'?"
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.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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.
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...
Navigator is "good enough" for me, and since I need xterms, bash, vi, cron, mutt, etc to get my job done efficiently, I stick with Linux and therefore Navigator.
However, this means I have to put up with frequent hangs and crashes and "killall -KILL netscape; rm ~/.netscape/lock"s, when the Java VM ain't up to scratch. And this is on content that I *should* be able to view. I can do without ActiveX etc, since usually if the site requires ActiveX, it's of no interest to me anyway.
Browsing using IE *is* faster than Nav4.7, more reliable, and altogether an easier and more pleasurable experience (once you turn off that dreadful smooth scrolling).
Hopefully, Mozilla/Netscape 5 will fix a lot of these issues. I'm hearing hints from various places that Nav5's XML support won't be as complete as IE5's (anyone know?), and this worries me a little.
Two (almost opposite) things I hope happen:
does not rely on Java/Flash/DHTML/etc.
Perhaps browsers should have a button in the corner which automatically brings up a form email adressed to the current page's maintainer, making it easy for the irritated Dreamcast user (for example) to send "Dear GamesIsUs, I attempted to reach your Web site using the Dreamcast's browser, because I was eager to buy $300 worth of goods online. However, I was informed that the site required IE4 or greater and that I needed to upgrade my browser. Since there is no browser upgrade available, I was forced to order the goods from another company over the phone".
Enough letters like that ought to wake a few Webmonkeys up. BTW http://special.reserve.co.uk has already done the right (ish) thing and launched a sister site with the same content optimised for 640x480 TV screens.
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There's no such thing as a "Spectrum ZX81". The ZX81 was the precursor to the ZX Spectrum.
:P
I doubt there's the browser for either, but I'm sure I recall mention somewhere of a TCP/IP stack and a WWW browser for the Commodore 64, the Spectrum's main rival. So you're not making as funny a joke as you thought you were
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It might be "true", but you know very well that the poster only intended it as flaimbait.
Isn't it nice to see a different opinion every once in a while? If I wasn't posting comments, I'd moderate him up. Someone's got to be the devil's advocate.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I wonder what I do wrong... StarOffice eats up ALL my memory. It takes 3 minutes to start on my (admittedly obsolete) P166, under GNOME and Enlightenment.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Uh, here's a clue. Lynx is great and everything, but you obviously don't use it, because it doesn't do tables. It complies with standards for the features that it supports, but checking your tables with Lynx makes about as much sense as checking your image alignment with it. :)
If you want nice layout in text, try w3m. w3m's table support is impressive, so it's too bad it crashes so much.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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.