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Netscape and Internet Explorer aren't the only browsers, believe it or not. Rose Vines looks at the others and why you'd use them.
Some of these alternative browsers are fossils from the early days, written as early as 1993 with little in the way of development for several years. Others are right at the cutting edge of browser technology, designed specifically to test the very latest tools and standards on the World Wide Web. Others are niche players, developed to satisfy the needs of a particular type of Web surfer -- youngsters, speed demons, the disabled, the jaded.
Why another browser?
Why would you choose any browser but Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. There's no doubt these are the browsers par excellence. None of the other browsers match the features, design or general competence of either of the big two. And, of course, because of their market dominance IE and Navigator have shaped the Web itself: chances are if you surf the Web using the latest version of either of these browsers you'll find most pages run well. Chances are if you use any of the alternatives, many pages will appear broken, only partially readable, or graphically bereft.
:Despite the disadvantages, there are many good reasons for choosing an alternative browser:
Speed and size: The latest versions of IE and Navigator are big. There's no way you can stick them on a floppy and install them on another machine and, if you download them from the Net, you'll spend hours doing so. They're also not lightning fast -- support for all the latest features such as Javascript doesn't come without a payoff in performance. Some of the alternative browsers are no more than a few hundred kilobytes in size and balance their limited feature set with quick browsing.
Additional features: Despite their bulging feature sets, IE and Navigator don't have it all. Neither has Mosaic's auto-surfing and site mapping feature. Neither has Opera's excellent screen zooming. Neither has an interface designed to make it easy for young people to use.
Fewer features: Less is sometimes better. The slimmer alternatives are often easier to learn to use as well as being faster.
Text-mode: Glitzy graphics and animations are lost on many surfers. For those who are visually impaired or who have outdated hardware a text-mode browser is the only way to surf the Web. Such browsers make it much easier on braille and voice-enabled computers, as well as making very few demands on your hardware.
Hardware restrictions: Not everyone has a computer that can handle IE 4 or Navigator 4. An alternative browser can be a saviour for people running old machines and old operating systems.
You hate Microsoft, but want a free browser: It may not be a smart reason, but there are certainly people who feel this way. By the way, despite what many people seem to believe, Netscape is not free. It's free for 90-day evaluation or for use by students, teachers, educational, religious and non-profit organisations. For all others, it's pay up.
A different perspective: There's more than one way to view the Web -- alternative browsers give you a chance to see it differently.
Testing the Web: Some browsers, such as Amaya, let you test Web technologies that are still under development. You can also use the browsers with cut-down feature sets to test your own Web site's viewer-friendliness.
Choosing among the alternatives
BrowserWatch (www.browserwatch.com) lists over 50 browsers in its Browser Boulevard, with numbers over 100 when you count variations on different operating systems. Yahoo has most of these plus some additions in its browser listing (check the Computers, Internet, Software, WWW, Browsers section).
While many of these browsers don't run on PC operating systems, plenty do. How do you choose among the contenders?
The first thing to do is define your needs. Perhaps you want a non-Windows-95 browser or a browser that will run on an old 80386 machine. Perhaps you're after a small browser that also manages your e-mail. Or perhaps you find many Web sites unreadable because of the small print.
You'll find browsers that match each of these needs. The 'gotcha' is that the browser that meets your needs may not have the most attractive feature set. While a lot of the alternative browsers support graphics, sound, forms, tables and so on, many of them don't. Some don't even support the HTML 2.0 standard, let alone HTML 3.2 or HTML 4. That means you'll miss out on some of the snazzier attractions on the Web and many sites won't work properly.
Of course, you can always use more than one browser. If you already have IE or Navigator installed but want additional options, most of the browsers can run alongside each other, even simultaneously.
You can also use earlier versions of Navigator or Internet Explorer. Some people are still using version 2 of these packages and a lot of people are using version 3. The older versions are not as demanding as the latest releases and, in the case of Internet Explorer, they don't burrow into the operating system in the way IE 4 does.
Your guide to the alternative browsers
Amaya
Home page: www.amaya.com
Features: For the technojunkies, this is about the most fun you can have with a browser. It lets you edit and browse a page at the same time, and then save the results -- to your Web-based server if you have the appropriate permissions. You can edit anyone's page on the net and save it locally. Amaya is for advanced users to test latest Web technologies, so it not only supports HTML, graphics and other standards, but also newer technologies such as MathML.
Drawbacks:Not always predictable behaviour; buggy -- can mess up the display and cause system crashes; not obvious how to run it (open the thot\win95\bin folder and run the Amaya application).
Platforms: Unix, Win 95, Win NT, others
PriceFree
Rating:
Arachne
Home page: www.naf.cz/arachne
Features: Not for the faint of heart, but an incredibly graphical DOS-based browser. You need to know about your PPP connection and dialer before you use it, although it comes with software to set up your connection. Arachne features a very smart design with a great interface, support for DOS plug-ins, an HTML editor, and e-mail support.
Drawbacks: Complex setup and configuration.
Platforms: DOS
Price:$US30/free for non-profit use
Rating:
Bobcat
Home page: www.fdisk.com/doslynx/bobcat.htm
Features: Bobcat is the little brother of the renowned text-based Lynx. It's designed to run on minimal hardware -- your old 8086 is perfect for it. Like Lynx, Bobcat is a text-only browser, so it's fast, and it uses the keyboard instead of the mouse.
Drawbacks: Complex to install (in the words of the Bobcat manual: "The configuration is fairly involved... however, the installation is only done once and once finished you will understand how the Internet works a lot better than with other browsers.")
Platforms: DOS
Price: Free
Rating:
Cello
Features: Cello is part browser, part FTP program, part gopher, part
newsreader, part Telnet. In a way, you can think of it as a retriever for information on
the Internet -- Cello provides you with a set of tools all in one window. The Web browser
has rudimentary support for graphics and sound, but focusses primarily on text, and
displays this cleanly.
Drawbacks: This is an old browser, from way back in 1994, so it doesn't support many Web developments; the all-in-one tools make it not so obvious to use -- for instance, you have to open a Jump Menu and choose Launch via URL to go to a new Web location.
Platforms: Win 3.1/95
Price: Free
Rating:
Hexabit Junior
Home page: www.hexabit.com/junior/index.htm
Features: Hexabit Junior is designed to make it easy and safe for children to surf the Web. Its fun, simple TV-style interface makes it suitable for youngsters, and it allows parents to restrict both the sites surfed and the hours of use. A log tracks all the sites surfed. You'll need Internet Explorer 3 or 4 installed to use it and, because of that, you'll find it supports a really broad range of Web site technologies.
Drawbacks: Requires Internet Explorer 3 or 4 pre-installed; the online help needs improvement, especially as the interface is not always intuitive; doesn't support ratings systems -- must nominate each site individually to lock them out.
Platforms: Win 95
Price: Shareware -- US$20 registration
Rating:
HotJava 1.1
Home page: http://java.sun.com/products/hotjava/1.1
Features: This browser is completely written in Java, with the Java Virtual Machine Runtime included. It supports Java (of course), graphics and many advanced HTML features. The design is mostly slick, and it has some nice features, such as the ability to view a list of coding errors on the current page (of course, this means 'errors' in terms of the HotJava browser).
Drawbacks: Surprisingly buggy; the menus need sprucing up; erratic graphics support; jerky screen writes.
Platforms: SPARC Solaris, Win 95/NT
Price: Free
Rating:
Lynx
Home page: www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm
Features: Lynx is one of the best-established, text-only browsers. It's fast, small and easy on hardware resources.
Drawbacks: Text-only; interface takes getting used to; short on help; DOS version a little difficult to setup.
Platforms: DOS (lynx_386.zip), Win 95/NT (lynx_w32.zip)
Price: Free
Rating:
Mosaic
Home page: www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/
Features: The browser that started it all -- everything that Internet Explorer and Navigator do now was built upon the original concepts in Mosaic. This well-established browser has a stylish interface and good graphics support (you can also turn graphics off). It's stacked with fascinating features, such as auto-surf, which automatically follows all links (you can set maximum numbers and depth) and a site mapping feature.
Drawbacks: No longer being developed, so no support for recent HTML or scripting developments (it won't even try to load anything contained in tables), and it hates Java.
Platforms: Win 3.1 (mosaic21.exe) and Win 95/NT (mos30.exe)
Price: Free
Rating:
NeoPlanet
Home page: www.neoplanet.com
Features: NeoPlanet provides a friendly face to the browser, with a channel-style approach and a built-in Web directory, all wrapped in a small package. There are links set up to news, weather, children's sites, and more, and you can localise the content. It builds upon Internet Explorer and thus supports all the same browsing standards (and non-standards). Using NeoPlanet is rather like having a personalised home page on a search engine integrated into the interface itself.
Drawbacks: Requires Internet Explorer 3 or 4 pre-installed; rather clunky and busy interface.
Platforms: Win 95/NT with IE 3 or greater.
Price: Free
Rating:
Opera
Home page: www.operasoftware.com
Features: The pick of the browsing alternatives. Opera is highly customisable, and provides support for e-mail and newsgroups. It's packed with thoughtful features. One example is how it automatically imports favourites/bookmarks from other browsers. Another is the zoom feature, which lets you view a Web page from 20% to 1000% of its normal size -- great if a page doesn't quite fit your screen or if the tiny writing is hard to decipher. Yet another: navigate the Web using one key only -- great for physically challenged surfers. And you can run it on your 386SX just as easily as your Pentium.
Drawbacks: It uses a multi-windowed approach that might confuse some people (you can turn this off); won't handle Java applets, although it does handle Javascript.
Platforms: Windows 3.1/95/NT and OS/2.
Price: US$30 registration
Rating:
Web Prowler
Home page: www.macrobyte.com
Features: A very up-to-date browser which handles Java and cascading style sheets with aplomb, and is also good with sounds, graphics and plug-ins such as shockwave.
Drawbacks: Navigation controls are sometimes buggy.
Platforms: Win 95
Price: Free
Rating:
WebSurfer
Home page: www.netmanage.com
Features: A very stylish, fast graphical browser, which handles HTML 2 and most of HTML 3.0 including tables, forms and secure connections. WebSurfer has a neat "Defer images" button on the toolbar so you can load images later, and a useful History list.
Drawbacks: Doesn't always handle graphics well; no frames support (some would regard this as a plus); installs itself as default browser without asking.
Platforms: Win 3.x or later
Price: Free
Rating:
The best choice
After testing dozens of browsers including all those that made it onto the accompanying list, there's still no doubt that the pick of the bunch is Internet Explorer 4, closely followed by Netscape Communicator 4. Unless you have a solid reason for choosing another browser, you really can't go past these two.
If you're after better browsing performance but otherwise enjoy the features of IE or Navigator, you shouldn't go looking for another browser at all. Instead, customise your browser. Both IE and Navigator let you turn off graphics and sound loading, as well as allowing you to customise how they handle script languages.
Of the alternatives, Opera is a standout. All it requires is OS/2 or any Windows operating system running on an 80386 or better. For $US30 registration (you can try it for free first) you'll get a full-featured browser that's very fast. About the worst thing you can say about it is it lacks Java support. Well worth trying.
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