If you surf the Web, chances are, you're using some version of Netscape Navigator; Netscape has an 84% share of the browser market. Perhaps you're satisfied with it. Perhaps you like applications that consume huge amounts of RAM and are reluctant to let it go to other open apps. You might like frames, which not only waste valuable screen-real-estate but also are an aesthetic nightmare. Maybe you're happy with Navigator.
I wasn't. That's why I began my "Quest for the Perfect Web-Browser." I didn't find perfection (for that, I would have to code it myself to meet my own entirely subjective criteria), but I did find many good ones, alternatives to what I refer to as "The Netscape Hegemony." Here are the results of my quest.
Mosaic: The very first Web-browser, and it shows. Although Mosaic's clean and simple design are still worth emulating, the performance is just not there. There are "enhanced" commercial versions available, as well as the original NCSA model. Lean and reasonably speedy, Mosaic is a good "down and dirty" browser if RAM is tight.
Cyberdog: Originally a showpiece for Apple's OpenDoc technology, Cyberdog has now become a key part of that company's Internet strategy. While the OpenDoc system is brilliant, Cyberdog (currently available as a 1.0, although I beta-tested the last pre-release version and they're virtually identical) is still a pup. Touted as "an integrated suite of Internet utilities," Cyberdog has great potential, but is still fairly twitchy and unreliable. A great idea that needs more work.
Lynx: Sure, multimedia capability is what has made the Web such a hot item. But if you don't want to spend you time waiting for huge inline graphics to display and worthless Java applets to download, the text-only Lynx is a great way to get information in a hurry. Use terminal-emulation to connect with your Internet service provider, use the SLIP portion of your SLIP/PPP account, and be amazed at the speed. It's not pretty, but it works beautifully.
And the winner is...
Microsoft's Internet Explorer: Hands down, the best browser available. Instead of making you wait for images to load before you can see the text (this is especially annoying if all you're looking for on a page is a link to another page or URL), or forcing you to turn off the "Auto-Load Images" option, Explorer inserts place-holders for images, displays the text, then starts inserting the inline graphics. It may sound like a small thing, but this has made using the Web much more pleasurable and much less frustrating. Explorer is explicitly based on Mosaic, and Microsoft has done a surprisingly good job of keeping the best features of Mosaic, adding a few innovations of their own (which I actually like!), and not straying too far from the original. It supports tables, takes Java plug-ins and (hurrah) doesn't do frames. It does require a great deal of RAM, but that is my only complaint.
All in all, the lesson I've learned from my Quest is simply this: if you're not satisfied with a browser, or any other program, look around and find an alternative. Keep looking until you find what you want. Just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's the best for you. |
