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| There has been a flurry activity in the Amiga web browser market of late. Whether this is a response to the team that are allegedly porting Netscape to the Amiga, the much-hyped AMozillaX project, or simply because the respective developers have finally found the time and the will to work on their products, who knows or cares? I'm just glad it's happening. Personally, I am aficionado of Voyager. I know it has many detractors and several annoying bugs, but it's my browser of choice. I have to confess that I am one of those Amiga users who unfairly dismisses AWeb simply because of its clunky ClassAct GUI. I do like iBrowse: it possesses several useful features that Voyager does not, but I still prefer Voyager. I guess I'm more used to Voyager's bugs than iBrowse's. It's all a matter of taste, really. The point of this blurb is that I am fed up with people disparaging the Amiga browsers. I for one would mutch rather use any of the Amiga browsers than either Netscape or Internet Explorer. Okay, so the Amiga browsers currently lack many of the features of the big two, but most of these features I never need. For me it all comes down to 'feel'. Voyager feels right to me. Internet Explorer's interface suffers from the same convoluted, stulted interface design that makes most Microsoft software a pain to use. Netscape is better, but its sluggishness puts me off. As an example, I have two machines sitting on my desktop. One is this Amiga 4000 with a 060/50 and the other is a 66Mhz PowerPC-powered Mac. The 601/66 is not that much faster than the 060/50, but Voyager on the Amiga is orders of magnitude faster than Netscape on the Mac. This is despite the Amiga's laughable ZorroII graphics speed and poor IDE disk access. Even if the AMozillaX team do get their fingers out and deliver a product, I'm not interested. It's not just because, I don't rate Netscape or that the AmozillaX team have, in my opinion, over-estimated their own abilities. It's also because I do not wish the browser market and hence the World Wide Web to be dominated by two large companies. This is not merely my very British instinct to back the underdog. The Internet is supposed to be a place of open standards - standards which are openly flouted by both Netscape and IE. Perhaps my buying and using a copy of Voyager is not going to make an awful lot of difference in the great scheme of things. But I'm sticking to my principles. Another factor is evolution. With Netscape's and IE's unholy duopoly there is little impetus for innovation. This is not the case in the Amiga browser market. Look at some of the new features promised in iBrowse 2, such as the ability to set viewing preferences for individual web sites. Using an Amiga is about thinking differently. I will continue to think differently by buying a copy of Voyager3 when it's released. I suggest you do likewise. |