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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."
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?"
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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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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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.