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Linux Software

By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers 86

Posted by michael from the but-I-*like*-lynx dept.
Chris Halsall writes "Based on the great feedback generated by the posting of my Web Browsers under Linux article on /. and LinuxToday last month, WebReview has published an unplanned follow-up article covering four more browsers.

By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers "

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By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers More

By Popular Demand: More Linux Browsers

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  • Considering the cases on DeCSS, Amazon, www.barbiebenson.com, pokey.org, if we make a new browser compatible with the others, won't we get sued for something?

  • I tried HotJava 3.0 for Mac (*duck* sorry, I NEED Quark) awhile back and I was pleasantly suprised. Need's a decent CSS implementation and I would consider it a somewhat serious contender.

    ----

  • w3m is amazing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is anybody working on a grand unified text-based browser? I would love to see a combination of the nice features of Lynx and w3m.
  • When KDE2 is released with the Konqueror hybrid file manager/web browser/ftp client/image viewer, Netscape will be permanently removed from my system. As it stands, KFM is fast, light, and aesthically pleasing, and I use it whenever I don't need SSL, JavaScript, or Java. If Konqueror retains the good features of KFM, I see it as finally satisfying the need for a lean and mean and yet full featured open-source browser. I've heard that table support is being improved as well, which is necessary. I've tried Mozilla, and it's still not only unstable (being an alpha release) and lacking in needed features, but it's just plain UGLY. Konqueror seems to hold equal if not greater promise, and yet it doesn't seem to be drawing the same publicity as Mozilla. Probably because it's not derived from Netscape code, and possibly also because Gnome enthusiasts will have little use for it.
  • I like lynx too, but on most web pages it doesn't
    compare at all with w3m. Moreover, the article is
    a bit outdated: w3m does handle cookies now. It
    handles tables and frames, too. A thing like the
    new-software table at www.gnome.org is pretty much
    unreadable on lynx, but comes out very nicely on
    w3m. Moreover a lot of options like proxies can
    be set through menus, without leaving the browser.
    <P>
    It does have problems with some forms (maybe
    that's fixed in newer versions) but other than
    that I can think of no reason to use lynx
    anymore...
  • I wonder why they didn't put Netfront in there. I mean it works better than Opera and is actually pretty nice. You can find info on it at linuxtoday.com through the seach area!

    Natas of
    -=Pedophagia=-
    http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
    Also Admin of
  • I don't understand why w3m and lynx are even still being developed. It does not require much processing power or hard drive space to have a decent graphical browser. Bandwidth is not really an issue for normal web pages and you can turn off the images in a graphical viewer if you wanted to anyways. I can't see a situation where I'd want to use a text-based browser instead of my normal browser...can anyone enlighten me?

  • Mozilla and Browser Competition (Score:4)

    by Maul ( 83993 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @09:03PM (#1303954) Journal
    The more browsers the better. There is no way you're going to make every single user happy with just one or two major browsers. Right now, most Linux users probably use either Lynx or Netscape 4.x. Lynx is great for text only browsing, but if you want the graphics, you need something within X.

    There are a good deal of browsers coming into the picture though. Opera, Konqueror, etc.

    And let us not forget that Mozilla is shaping up nicely. M13 is actually useable in most cases, and it renders pages rather nicely (and in most cases doesn't actually crash as much as Netscape 4.x). If they can stamp out the expected development bugs, get rid of the debug code (which slows it down a bunch), and get the thing released, I don't think Linux users will have too much to complain about.

    Even if Mozilla ends up ruling, I think we need as many browsers as possible on every platform. This will prevent any one browser from becoming too dominant, and also force web designers to actually write HTML according to W3C standards (something that is often ignored even by "major" web pages). I think the increase in browsers will be a good thing, overall.

    "You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"

  • w3m does support cookies though.. oh well.

    And unless you install a browser as root, only one user can run it?

    Hrmmmmm.... all in all the reviews seem cut and pasted from features lists and
    README's. And when the author interjects his own thoughts, they seem to be
    misinformed.

    He seems to like the peer review concept from what I can tell, but maybe he
    should have had some people proofread for errors before he submitted it.

    I might be wrong, but I think if you send in articles to that site they give
    you a check. I think that's probably his motivation.
  • Well, it so happens that I use Mozilla as my main browser while I'm in X. I still have Netscape 4.7 installed, but I haven't touched it since Mozilla reached M13 (Alpha).

    They seem to have fixed the menus, which in M12 took a long time to appear when you clicked on them and a few other really noticeable bugs. It is fast and has _all_ the features I need. I'm not exactly sure which features it's lacking, so it would have been nice for you to specify which were those. :P

    As to Mozilla being ugly, I happen to like it very much, so you don't really have a point there.

    I'm writing all this not because I love Mozilla, but because I don't agree with people bashing some programs for no particular reason. I'm pretty sure Konqueror, in its present devel stage is just as bad (if not worse) than Mozilla is.

    Btw, my favourite browser is links, which apparently, is very much like w3m.

  • Re:More browsers?? Maybe get sued? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe WE should learn to actually write code rather than spend all day on slashdot.
  • "Gnome enthusiasts will have little use for it"

    Well, apparently the current GNOME html code is based on KDE code. (Saw that somewhere on www.mosfet.org, I think, with a link to some page on www.gnome.org)

  • It's nice to hear of some alternatives to Netscape on Linux, but Konqueror is too tied to KDE for my tastes. And the others mentioned in the review are either just too esoteric or too slow for my purposes.

    I wish I knew of a Really Good Browser for Linux, but alas, none exists.

    I like the autocomplete feature of Netscape and IE on Windows, but it doesn't exist for the Linux platform, at least not the last Netscape version I tried. (I admit that there might be newer ones that use autocomplete, but I am still using whatever came with Red Hat 6.1--Netscape 4.1?) Plus Netscape seems to hang an awful lot.

    Netscape on Linux is slow compared to IE on Windoze. Netscape on Windoze is also slower than IE.

    Mozilla is too slow and unresponsive to be more than a lick and a promise to me. (I don't have time to help contribute performance enhancements, sorry.)

    Further, the Mozilla UI seems like an artistic disaster, despite its themes functionality.

    I like the idea of an open source browser, however, and encourage the competent Mozilla team to keep plugging, because assuredly they will get it right and I will use Mozilla on a day-to-day basis.

    I have never gotten used to Opera. Perhaps it is the best thing since the invention of the zero, but it's not clicking with me.

  • How much is much? (Score:3)

    by Jose ( 15075 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @09:14PM (#1303961) Homepage
    case 1:
    You have a lowend pentium or a 486, with little RAM ( 16 MB). Running X, a WM, and some graphical browser, will make your system _crawl_!! Even if you are on T3 connection by yourself, web pages will load up very slowly, and the whole experience will just suck.

    case 2:
    You can't currently run X. If you are telnetted into some box, and want to grab a file off of freshmeat, or run a quick search on altavista, a graphical browser isn't even an option.

    case 3:
    You have a beefy box. But you have a some what slow connection (spent all your money on cool hardware ;) Pages load _way_ faster in lynx/links and w3m, and the only info you really want is the text anyway, unless you are surfing one-handed.

    case 4:
    you are hardcore. Who needs X anyway?!
  • Suppose you're sshed (or Ugh! telneted) onto another system, which has a much faster bandwidth than your system (dial-up modem connected to a T3 or something like that). You want to browse the web to do a quick search for some stuff you want to download on the fast-bandwidth system, where from you could later get them. (Warez sites come to mind. One day they're there, the next they're not)

    Also, I find that reading articles in console to be much easier on my eyes that reading them in X.

    Not to mention probably the most important reason, there are still many quite useable computers (like my old 486) which would almost choke on X+Communicator.

    So are these good enough reasons for text browsers?

  • Dude! You beat me to it by 3 minutes!!!

    lol!

  • If you are blind (visually challenged) text browsers make sense. Then you can have a text to speech converter. Using graphics navigation is tough for text to speech.

    When running on a modem, I usually turn off graphics for speed.

  • I want a text-only browser when:
    • I am sitting on a text-only console (often by choice), or telnetting over a slow line.
    • I am interested in the text, not the pretty pictures.
    • I am comfortable with keeping my hands on the keyboard, rather than the mouse.
    • I want the browser to start up immediately, rather than take several seconds. (It just makes no sense to start up netscape to view local text-only documentation, for instance.)
    • I want a browser that doesn't crash.
    • Lots of other reasons I can't think of now, or can't put into words.
  • I guess those reasons are pretty decent, it's just that I don't consider a 486 "usable" considering you can buy a Pentium MB w/ chip for probably $100 or less. Also, a few years back I ran Mosaic on 486sx/25 with Win 3.1 and that ran very fast.

  • If you like 'w3m', try 'links' too... (Score:4)

    by egnor ( 14038 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @09:26PM (#1303969) Homepage
    ... though it doesn't get nearly as much press, it has a lot of interesting features in its own right (like asynchronous table layout, background downloading, and a UI which I much prefer to w3m's).

    It still lacks some things (like cookie support), though. See the home page [mff.cuni.cz] for more info.

  • Damn. It's amazing what a difference a word makes... That should read "CORBA-like".
  • Not everything has X. Pretty simple reason.

    The text terminals at uni don't.
    My server here at work doesn't.
    The windows ssh client I am sometimes forced to
    use doesn't.
    My new box before I get X running and I need to
    look up the web to find docs on how to get an X
    server running.

    Bandwidth is often an issue. w3m looks a shitload better than netscape et al with images turned off.

    Theres just a couple of situations. I'm also
    guessing that if and when any wants to write a
    voice browser it would be a lot easier to work with
    the code base of w3m or lynx which than netscape/
    mozilla (although that is _pure_ speculation ;)

    Benno
  • > w3m does support cookies though.. oh well.

    My mistake. Please expand that bit to read "support cookies across sessions". Several sites I use maintain a lot of data in never-expiring cookies. I consider this a fairly major shortcoming, although as written it is wrong.

    > And unless you install a browser as root, only one user can run it?

    Generally, the bigger browsers with lots of support files do not work well when loaded into a users' account, or at least, permissions must be expanded beyond what is minimally required otherwise. We're trying to encourage our readers to install them as root because it's the norm, and generally easier.

    Overall you seem pretty negative. Sorry you feel writing is so easy. A lot of work went into this and the previous article, but even so, mistakes will slip through.

  • This only lists a small portion of browsers that are capable of running in linux, there was an article not long ago with quick reviews on 21 Linux Web Browsers? [slashdot.org], the article can be found here [trix.net].

    I have a personal preference to any browser that is not capable of javascript, although, it does have it's uses, as we have seen this week, with the CERT release [cert.org], there are some things it can do that we may not like...

    I personally use some of these browsers after Netscape has Crashed (TM) for the 10th time in as many minutes, it reminds me too much of another OS I do my best to get away from :)


  • I clicked on the link, but all I got was a page about the Spice Girls. Moderators, DON'T moderate this up.

    --
  • Most of the time I just use lynx because it good at handling cookies, but when I goto sites like hotmail that needs a browser that supports https I use w3m, but for thing that really need to be rendered properly I use links. w3m is good at rendering things but no where near as good as links. Try looking at a tv guide and you'll see the difference or even just goto hotmail. Anyways each of these browsers have something that the others don't, Lynx: Good with cookies, Everyone know the controls w3m: ssl, 80% perfect rendering links: 99.9% perfect rendering, can keep on smurfing while downloading files, great mouse support Stick them together and you'd have one cool text based browser, but until then I guess I have to keep switching for what works best on each web site.

    ---
    # iptables -A INPUT -s 0/0 -j DROP
  • Well, I really love Lynx. It's a complete browser, just lacking some not so trivial features (frames, tables, javascript...). I don't still see Links as a replacement for it. It doesn't have basic authentication and good cookies support, a way to interrupt transfers, among others features present in Lynx. The latest w3m refuses to compile here, so I'm waiting to see what changed since my last try (4 months ago?). I'm not using graphical browsers (Netscape for Linux is really a piece of crap), and Mozilla isn't suited for me. I'm also against using any browser that's not OpenSource.
  • Moreover a lot of options like proxies can be set through menus, without leaving the browser.

    If you're talking about Lynx, try LYNXCFG://reload/ . You should be able to reload almost all settings without leaving the browser. Don't forget that w3m also have SSL support like Lynx, but not as a patch. You don't need to tweak a patch to get it to compile with a new version.

  • You should be able to get Lynx to compile with SSL support without major problems. The patch [mentovai.com] isn't maintained for ALL (development, pre, and release) versions, but it works fine. Yes, I'm just waiting to see it incorporated in the sources, but there are some american stupid laws, you know.

  • Re:Konqueror! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, Mozilla is ugly, because there's few effort put into making it pretty. Instead, the developers are putting the efforts on standard compliance and performance so that you wouldn't be using something like NS 4.x in the future. Besides, mozilla is easily themable, so it can be made pretty if someone puts efforts into it.

    I wouldn't even dare to use KFM for browsing web pages. The rendering speed is slow on my PII-350, and it crashes more often than NS4.7. But most importantly, I wouldn't use KFM for the same reason that I wouldn't use IE on windows -- it's integrated into your desktop. When KFM crashes, you cannot launch apps from KDE anymore. This is really annoying, and I wish Konqueror wouldn't have the same mistake.

    We see Mozilla being ported to several platforms, but Konqueror will only work where KDE is available. That means if I'm on a windows machine or a mac, I'll be glad when I see mozilla is available. I've always respected netscape because it supports multiple platforms (what would unix be like without a mainstream browser?). Mozilla will follow the same, but Konqueror will always be confined to supported unix platforms.
  • I've already seen some complaints about NS 4.7, Motif, and XAW. (Here and attached to other articles.) I don't see what the problem is. I've provided a screenshot [lsu.edu] of a prepared desktop.

    (It appears that my department's server doesn't feed PNG's properly, you may have to your box and display locally. A JPEG was too big for my taste.)

    My window manager is UDE. My workspaces/virtual desktops/whatchamacallits are just color schemed and minimal. What apps I use that use xrm always match (colors, fonts, etc.) the workspace in which they are opened, so the desktop is consistent. The screenshot has three windows:
    (1) At the bottom of the stack (top left of screen) is Netscape 4.7 after running a bit of my own JavaScript. This is the mode which I usually use for reading long documents, except that the window would be maximized. All the functions of NS that I need are available through keystrokes and button 3.
    (2) In the middle (stack and screen) is GNU emacs running the ansi-term from which I took the screenshot.
    (3) At the top of the stack, in the bottom right of the screen is NS 4.7 again; this time without my JavaScript. I don't like any thing that uses vertical space since I'm used to reading paper that is taller than it is wide. (Though I may have to get my hands on a green-and-white line printer someday.)

    I'm a minimalist (I suppose) so I've cut down on the windowing fluff as much as possible. The screenshot was taken at 1024x768 on my 12" external monitor. That's right 12" external; it can be a relief from running 800x600 on the 10.4" laptop LCD. (No cricks in the neck either.)

    What I'd like to figure out is how to make my little JavaScript execute whenever a new browser window is opened. I imagine there's something in preferences.js or netscape.ad that would make it possible, but I haven't found it yet (probably for lack of trying).

    Sometimes I think that people who complain about these things are waiting for a magic desktop. That makes me wonder why they don't use CLX.
    Ever notice . . .
    Microsoft and its allies assume everyone is stupid.

  • links (Score:1)

    by a_LAN ( 8653 )
    STILL links wasn't listed, despite the many comments of praise after the last one. links is undoubtebly the best web browser (yes, web browser, not just a text-only web browser) ever written. Grab it at http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/vyplody/l inks/
  • A 486 is perfectly "usable", as is a 386 for that matter. I don't see what the cost of a replacement has to do with it. As for graphical browsers, the whole point of the Web is text, if you think about it (hypertext, remember?), so a "text-based broswer" is a pretty good tool for using it. If you just want pretty pictures, a TV is cheaper and easier to set up than a computer anyway.
  • It is possible to install netscape as a non-root user so that other users can use your install. For example you can have a group 'netscape' and assign group executable privelages to your non-root install.

  • Another useful trick with lynx is that I can just press `E' and edit my current URL. This is actually incredibly useful, not least for reading slashdot: I can easily read one article with a different threshold simply by editing the threshold= part of the link, instead of actually loading the article, change my threshold and reloading it. I can do the same in Netscape but it is a lengthy procedure that requires switching between keyboard and mouse a lot.
    This is just one of those tiny things that makes me a lynx-fan.
  • hehe... I find it interesting that Konqueror was given such rave reviews, even though it is an *integrated* browser. I seem to recall something about a company making an integrated browser and a whole bunch of people upset by it :)

    Just kidding! I actually like IE, and if Konqueror is as good as IE than I'd probably start using it (of course, then I'd have to switch to KDE).

    Of course, I'm kindof in a good mood: quakefest [purdue.edu] starts today -- lots of fun!

  • Well, there is w3m, which I use for 99% of Web browsing now. It was mentioned in this article.

    Daniel

  • That is cool! Can you email (or send a link to a howto) whatever you did to netscape to reduce the menu like that! I wasn't even aware you could do that. Goodbye SHOP button.

    my email is mcorde61@xSPAMxmaine.edu

    (email =~ s/^(.*)x.*x(.*)$/$1$2/ of course :)

  • Here's what I like to see (from the last sentence of his article):

    I suspect it won't be long before browsers on other operating systems start to play catch-up.


    - Mike Roberto
    -- roberto@apk.net
    --- AOL IM: MicroBerto
  • In your .Xdefaults file put a
    Netscape*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false

    Netscape*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
    to disable the destinations and myshopping buttons. Dunno about any HOWTO, I gleaned this from a mailing list.
  • I use Lynx for viewing documentation that has been written as HTML. At least as long as it is mostly text, and doesn't use any fancy formatting, a graphical browser would probably be overkill.

    (These articles have pointed me to some browsers I wasn't aware of before though, so I might reconsider.)
  • Links? links-x.y.z. links-current is like CVS, may be unstable. Again, Links is a decent text based browser, but authentication support should be included ASAP. A way to interrupt a connection (like Lynx's z) may help too, especially when you have a poor modem and just want to load the top of a page with 200kb.

  • Hmmmm, it appears The Great Taco has disable ALL HTML in "Extrans" mode. No doubt related to the CERT alert. However, "HTML" mode still works. How odd. I liked Extrans; it saved the effort of marking up all my paragraphs. Oh well.

    A lot of people find Netscape Communicator on Linux to be unstable. And they are right. However, there are some things you can do to dramatically improve stability.

    First and foremost, download Netscape Navigator (the stand-alone browser version), and NOT Communicator. The mail, news, and HTML editor components of Communicator seem to significantly reduce stability. This alone has cut my Netscape crashes to only occasionally.

    Next, make sure you have all the proper fonts installed. Netscape expects certain fonts in a few places, and gets rather confused if it doesn't get them. The Java VM in particular has this problem.

    Notably, some versions of Red Hat Linux don't configure all the fonts properly. Check the /etc/X11/fs/config file's catalogue section to be sure all of the following are included:

    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,

    It is okay to have more, just make sure the above are included, both unscaled and regular.

    If you can do without it, turn off Java support (not JavaScript -- the two are completely separate things). Netscape's JVM is remarkably unstable.

    Consider turning off JavaScript, too. Not only can it be abused (CERT advisory, blah, blah), poorly designed code can make Netscape screwy.

    Keep an eye on the memory usage of Navigator. Navigator has some severe memory leaks in it. If it starts to grow larger then 50 MB or so Virtual Segment Size, exit and restart it.

    No, none of these things are acceptable behavior for a browser, but they will get you by until Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, or whatever GUI browser replacement you favor is ready.

    As an aside, if you are using Communicator, ALWAYS turn off "JavaScript in mail and news" -- apparently Netscape wants to be like Microsoft and allow people to send you emails that take actions.

  • (Drifting off topic here, sorry...)

    Well, apparently the current GNOME html code is based on KDE code.

    Ya know, this single statement is actually rather insightful.

    There are a lot of people (not pointing fingers here, just making an observation) that say GNOME and KDE are a duplicated effort and they they should merge into one project, yadda, yadda, yadda.

    But here we see how Open Source Software makes that line of reasoning obsolete. Because all the code is open, both sides are free to borrow code from the other. Indeed, we have seen code being borrowed by one, improved, and then reincorporated back into the original. This not only reduces duplication of effort, but encourages the developers to make their software compatible whenever possible, because it may save them some work in the future.

    I just wanted to get that off my chest. Yes, I feel better now. :-)

  • As for graphical browsers, the whole point of the Web is text, if you think about it (hypertext, remember?), so a "text-based broswer" is a pretty good tool for using it.

    While I'm not disputing the usefulness of a text-based browser, I do disagree that the whole point of the web is text. It isn't. The point of the web is connected information. Information can be expressed in a number of ways: Written word, spoken word, images, etc. Ever hear the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words?" It is often true. I object to sites that use images when text would do, but I also object to those who think the <IMG> tag should be banned when a diagram would obviously be much clearer then ten pages of text.

    End of rant. :-)

  • You get to move around with the keyboard instead of the mouse (much quicker). You don't have to sit around all day waiting for some insignificant picture or banner ad to pop up. All you get is the straight goods -- the content. When I go browsing, I want the content. Occasionally I'll decide that some things are better viewed in Mozilla, and I'll pop into X to view it. Even while I'm in X, I'll use w3m before I'll use Mozilla for most sites.
  • There's another one that's been missed: MMM, which runs on most Unices and is available here [inria.fr]. It's written in Objective Caml and seems a little outdated (1997). I haven't tried it myself (it wants old versions of libtk and libtcl which I can't be arsed to install) but even if it's of no practical use, it lets us say "There are n+1 browsers available for Linux!".
  • There's another one that's been missed: MMM, which runs on most Unices and is available here [inria.fr]. It's written in Objective Caml and seems a little outdated (1997). I haven't tried it myself (it wants old versions of libtk and libtcl which I can't be arsed to install) but even if it's of no practical use, it lets us say "There are n+1 browsers available for Linux!".
  • There's another one that's been missed: MMM, which runs on most Unices and is available here [inria.fr]. It's written in Objective Caml and seems a little outdated (1997). I haven't tried it myself (it wants old versions of libtk and libtcl which I can't be arsed to install) but even if it's of no practical use, it lets us say "There are n+1 browsers available for Linux!".
  • Yes, I've heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words"; but I don't think it is often in fact the case. Point taken, though: the web isn't just about text, and information can be conveyed in other ways. Text is, however, far and away the most common means of conveying useful information over the web. We could get by with a web without images; a web without text would be well-nigh useless.

    In my experience, web sites that are useful are usable with a text-only browser (though of course you can always view images with lynx via X & xli, if you have to); pages requiring a graphical browser to make sense are very likely to be content-free creations of corporate marketing.

  • Mozilla beta's seem pretty nice. However, i use mostely netscape, or kfm. Lynx and w3m is V'E'R'Y' nice for people who wants to search information, read articles, reply, stuff like that but if you do graphic manipulation, you HAVE to use netscape or kfm, but i like netscape for it's all in one - function, some people don't want that, anyway, I'm not -some people- and I want to go things fast.... BTW, does anybody knows when mozilla goes in final release?
  • When you want to write a Perl script to pull data out of Web pages, like stock or options quotes (I've done that several times), lynx simply rules!

    $page = `lynx -source http://whatever`

    Then parse $page with your favorite batch of regular expressions, and you're set!
  • I just upgraded from 4.61 yesterday, and you're right. I might downgrade back.
  • Nautilus is the future GNOME filemanager/webbrowser. It is very preliminary right now but it looks like it will be cool. Who wants to use Mozilla seeing how bloated it is and all of this theme shit... Why can't developers just use the widgets so the app will use the global theme the user has selected!!!

  • I wish a little more attention were paid to the status of Unicode in the various web browsers.

    Consider for example this Unicode test page [eleves.ens.fr] I wrote. While it is acceptable for a browser not to have the appropriate fonts for the rendering of Sanskrit (the Devanagari alphabet, one of the most complex parts of Unicode, together with Arabic, because of the ligatures and the reversal of position of the vowel i), it should at least offer a transcription of it: yes, there are quite a few million people in the world who use the Devanagari alphabet (it is used in Hindi). Also, the fact that the different kinds of spaces are generally not correctly displayed is quite inacceptable.

    Perhaps Unicode status does not attract much attention because of the erroneous belief that Unicode is not useful for typesetting English texts. That is wrong: the em-dash, the en-dash, the English quote characters (as opposed, e.g. to the French quote characters), the ellipsis, and various similar punctuation characters are not found in the standard ISO-8859-1 character set but only in ISO-10646/Unicode.

    Netscape is probably the worse of all (though the little I have seen of w3m indicates that it tries hard to compete with it). For example, it selects the display font according to the document encoding, which is an absurdity, in contradiction to the fact that all web pages are ``at the bottom'' in Unicode (and all Unicode characters are always accessible through the &#xxxx; encoding, whatever the document character encoding). The (related) fact that Netscape does not recognize &mdash; and such has always driven me out of my wits. Amaya, despite the fact that it is the W3C [w3.org]'s own web browser, used to be quite bad at Unicode; it has made much progress recently (but I think it still cannot use an ISO-10646-1 font even if you have one). Mozilla is also still incomplete in this respect. Lynx and Links are both quite good. In fact, Lynx in a UTF-8 xterm (compiled with --enable-wide-chars) with a fixed-width ISO-10646-1 font is still the best we have in the matter of a true Unicode web browser; but since UTF-8 breaks ncurses, it will sometimes behave strangely; and the combining diacritics, which have to be handled specially, are not so.

    We are still very far from the beautiful rendering I show as png images on the test page I mention above. Sigh.

  • Maybe you should look at this:
    http://cmdrtaco.net/linux/dl/xdefaults [cmdrtaco.net]

    Just found with Google
    Google Search [google.com]
  • OK, I've decided to share my secrets. ;-)

    Go here [lsu.edu] for the configuration used in the screenshot.
    Ever notice . . .
    Microsoft and its allies assume everyone is stupid.
  • sounds a bit crazy o me. show me where you read it, please. a link.
  • Unless you put Netscape 4 on...

    I have a 486/66 with 16mb running Netscape 3, Enlightenment, Emacs, and a few xterms. It isn't too slow. (The system was originally Slackware 3.1, with heaps of extra stuff compiled from source. On a 486, compiling is slow.)

    Don't forget that the 'net and the Web were around before 586s...

  • Livid site went down temporarily ... try it now.
  • Can't see a situation where you'd like a text-only browser?

    Well, when all you want is the text on the page and you don't care about the banners or stuff.

    When I had only seen Lynx, my opinion was pretty much like yours: text-only browsing sucks, why would anyone want to do that? I have a good box and fast internet connection, but these days I still use text-only browsers very much.

    The only feature I find lacking on them is that you can't `open link in new window'. But other than that, text-only browsers rock.

    You should give w3m a try. :)

    Alejo.

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