Beware: Outdated page
I only keep this page for historical reasons. I have not added any content
here since 2001. I mainly use Mozilla Firefox these days, but not only.
There's a lot of browsers around, but I choose not to write anything
more about it, except: If you need a lightweight browser on X11, check
out Dillo.
Opera 5.0 beta 6 version for Linux!
Opera Software has just released a beta version for Linux. I
new 3.62 beta for Windows. Another new and interesting browser is out:
Read my short review of the
w3m-browser.
- This page has two parts:
- 1. The Opera Web Browser
- 2. Other Web Brosers (mainly for X11)
The Opera Web Browser
The last version I have tested, i Opera 3.60 for Windows, which is available
in many different languages, including "nynorsk". :-) My review of this browser
is like this: It's fast and nice, most pages display correctly, even those
using MSIE or Netscape specific tags. CSS and Java (plugin) works fine.
As in previous versions, Opera 3.60 continues to be the smallest, fastest and
most flexible web browser on the market today. The download file is now 1.3
MB (3.5 was 1.1). After using it for a while, I experienced a couple of
"crashes", but it actully happens more seldom than I experience with Netscape.
Go to the Opera home page to find
out more. Download your own copy and test it.
May be you want to read more about
java support?
Or may be you want to read about
plugins?
What is Opera?
The Opera Web Browser is a very small browser, it's very fast, it's user
friendly, and it's also capable of handling JavaScript, server push, SSL and
CSS. Opera runs quite happily on a 386SX with 8 MB of RAM and 1.7 MB disk
space. It offers nice keyboard navigation (no need to use the mouse) and the
viewing is very customizable -- you can easily switch on and off almost
everything. It has an integrated news reader and a simple mail client for
sending mail. Check out the available versions and download a copy from Opera
Software's download
page.
Project Magic
The Opera Software's Project
Magic is a project for porting this nice browser to other operating
systems, including OS/2, Mac, X11 (includes Linux), Psion/Epoc, BeOS and Amiga.
Check out the latest
status for each
operating system.
Other Interesting browsers:
There is a whole lot of web browser projects out there. But most of these
projects are far from being usable yet, or they are outdated/dead. I will only
mention some browsers that I think are interesting (might be an unfair
selection).
First my conclusion so far:
Lynx and
w3m is nice and good text-only
alternatives (I use them for many tasks every day).
Amaya and
Mozilla is very interesting projects
that I will keep my eyes on and check out as it progresses. Others too have
interesting projects, but they're moving too slowly ahead. So I think
Opera will come and save us!
:-)
So right now, IMNSHO, Netscape Communicator is the only alternative for
Unix/Linux/X11 users (with Lynx and w3m for high speed text-only browsing).
Netscape is a good browser, but in my opinion it's far too big and far too
slow, so I'm looking forward to a stable version of the
Opera for Linux/X11.
If you're very interested in browsers, you can check out more yourselves. I
got tired of it. :-) Good places to start your search might be:
Here are my comments on some browsers:
Lynx -- Nice and Fast Text Only Browser
Lynx is very nice to have sometimes
when you're seeking some information and a stupid web designer has killed his
web site with graphics and animations. For example when you're entering a
painful page of frames, Lynx lets us choose which frame -- easy and simple.
Many pages will look strange in lynx, though so may be the new
w3m is a better choice.
w3m -- New Nice Frames Capable Text Only Browser
w3m is a pager/text-based WWW browser. It
is a similar application to Lynx, but it has several features Lynx doesn't
have. It can render tables and frames (converting frames to a tables), it small
and it easily displays document given from standard input.
This browser actually shows most tables and frames nicely formatted, and I'm
starting to love this browser. I also love that it uses vi style keybindings.
Try it out!
Amaya -- W3C's Browser/Editor
Amaya is the browser of the World Wide
Web Consortium. The latest release is the Amaya 2.0a public release (7th of
May, 1998). This release includes the support of HTML 4.0 and XHTML. This
Amaya release includes a lot of new features like a multi-level,
multi-document undo/redo mechanism, a secure authentication protocol and
configuration menus. With this Amaya release, one can download, edit and
publish CSS style sheets as well as HTML pages. Amaya also provides an
efficient mechanism to test and associate external style sheets with HTML
documents.
Amaya is intended to be a comprehensive client environment for testing and
evaluating new proposals for web standards and formats. A large part of the
intended features of Amaya are implemented in this release, but some of them
are not complete yet.
Mozilla -- browser(s) being developed from the Netscape source
Nescape made their source code accessible to the world on the
Mozilla web site. The project is moving
a little slow, but they're making progress. But still, the last alpha version
I tried, crashed heavily executing the simplest tasks.
Arena -- The former W3C testbed browser, now developed by Yggdrasil
The Arena Web
Browser's latest release is from March 24th 1998. Arena is a graphical
web browser comprised entirely of free software. Its origins predate
proprietary packages such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer
and Mosaic. It is the source of a number of innovations which have since been
copied by other web browsers, such as HTML tables and style sheets. This
is an interesting browser, like many of the others, but it does seem like
it's being developed pretty slowly -- like many of the others. The latest
version is from November 25th, 1998.
Mosaic -- The mother of many browsers ...
The Mosaic
browser is a classic browser, but it seems like development was stopped on
January 7th 1997.
Emacs W3 -- a text based browser for Emacs.
If you're a hardcore Emacs user, the
Emacs
W3 browser might be something for you. If you don't like changing from
Emacs and over to Lynx -- try this one.
BTW: The author of this page is not in any way associated or paid by
Opera Software or any other commercial software developer. It's only my own
opinions written down.
This page is viewable with any browser. It's tested in Opera,
Netscape, W3M and Lynx.
This page was last updated on
Saturday, 22-Aug-2009 21:59:25 CEST.
Since the 22nd of August 2009, this page has been visited
1061
times.
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