The following chapter is dedicated to the web users. Some hacks and tricks setting up current versions of common web browsers. Please feel free to contact me, if your favorite web browser is not mentioned here. (As this is a really early version of the WWW-HOWTO, most of them are likely not to be listed...)
Personally, I prefer the Emacs - W3 browser and Lynx as they have some speed advantages and there is no need to retrieve the complete graphics through my slow speeded dial up line ;)
Lynx is the smallest Web browser I know and use - but ist has many special features, so don't skip this chapter.
Emacs - well there is nothing to say about the Emacs W3 browser, its just Emacs, like the Emacs news reader, the Emacs mail reader etc. pp.
Netscape Navigator is the only browser mentioned here, which is capable of this new funny things like JavaScript and these nice <APPLET> tag feature needed tu run Java. Please report if there is any other web browser which can do the one or other. I'd really like to know.
There are rumors, that Microsoft is going to port the Internet Explorer to varios Unix platforms - maybe including Linux. If you DO know something more reliable, please drop me a mail.
The smallest (?, hm, something around 650 K executable) and maybe fastest Web browser available. It does not eat up much bandwidth nor system resources as it only deals with text displays like any console, terminal or xterm. You don't need any X Window system nor additional megabytes of system memory running this little browser.
Furthermore, the source code is available, too.
The latest version is 2.5 and can be retrieved from http://www.wfbr.edu/dir/lynx or from almost any friendly Linux ftp server like ftp://sunsite.unc.edu under /pub/Linux/system/Network/info-systems/www/ or mirror site.
Or, take a look at the Lynx enhanced pages http://www.nyu.edu/pages/wsn/subir/lynx.html for information on using Lynx.
Just retrieve the archive, unpack it, read the README and
follow the steps told in the INSTALLATION file.
If you don't want a source distribution, you'd maybe retrieve a binary distribution for the Linux on Intel based systems available on sunsite.
Lynx compiles and runs on my system without any problems on both Linux 1.2.13 and 2.0.x.
Well, there are. For a complete description, just read the manuals and doc files that come with Lynx.
To get a nice glimpse, just type in
lynx --help
In my humble opinion, the most special feature of Lynx against all other web browsers is the capability for batch mode retrival. One can write a shell script which retrieves a document, file or anything like that via http, ftp, gopher, WAIS, NNTP or file:// - url's and save it to disk. Furthermore, one can fill in data into HTML forms in batch mode by simply redirecting the standard input and using the -post_data option.
There is one sad thing about the Emacs W3 browser ;) If you got GNU Emacs or XEmacs running, you probably got the W3 browser running to. Not much work in this HOWTO. If you feel, that there should be more information about this, please let me know.
The Emacs W3 mode is a nearly fully featured web browser system written in the Emacs Lisp system. It mostly deals with text, but can display graphics, too - at least - if you run the emacs under the X Window system.
The most recent GNU emacs package is available under ftp://prep.mit.ai.edu, the most recent XEmacs could be retrieved from ftp://ftp.xemacs.org.
Yeah, you made it. The Queen of WWW browsers. Something almost like
Emacs is in the world of text editors. Netscape Navigator can do nearly
everything (except cooking coffee... but maybe java will do...).
But on the other hand, the most memory hungry and resource eating pice
of web browser, news reader, mail reader
(pop3), mail & news editor I've ever seen.
My latest version of the Netscape Navigator Gold (export version) is from 28-Aug-1996 and (c) 1995, 1996 Netscape Communications Corp.
(As I live in Europe, I can only get the export version...)
The first place to get the Netscape Navigator for Linux as binary distribution is on ftp://ftp.netscape.com. The second - as these servers are heavily loaded - may be any friendly netscape mirror site. You might as well ask archie about this. Maybe, you'll be happy and find it on a cd rom - this will save some bandwidth as the archive is quite large ( 2.5 MB).
Unpack the archive und read the README file !
There is really nothing strange about this, you know.
There are some reports telling that there are problems running java applets with the Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0 even if java is activated in the otions dialog. The archive known to me contained a file java_30 which must be renamed to java_30.zip. After this, any java applet should work fine within the netscape environment.
If you continue to have problems using java applets like Netscape Navigator hangs or just terminates after downloading a java applet, take a look at your libc version. Just do a
ldconfig -v | less
libc.so.5 => libc.so.5.xx.yy
For more information on Java on Linux or Java programming, please read the JAVA-HOWTO or visit http://www.sun.com.