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Linux Software

Linux Web Browsers Reviewed 348

Posted by timothy from the no-matter-transfer-plugins-yet dept.
scubacuda writes: "A while back, Slashdot posted a Rob Valliere's Linux vs. Windows review. Since then, he has posted a 2002 Linux Web Browser Review." This is a great , straightforward round-up of current web-browsing options, as shipped with distributions. Note though that none of these browsers are static -- Konqueror's CVS version, for instance, now includes tabs and other goodies. So bear your own downloading and installation habits in mind.
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Linux Web Browsers Reviewed More

Linux Web Browsers Reviewed

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  • what?! no lynx!!! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by scjelli ( 569685 )
    the subject says it all...

  • Galeon is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by diparfitt ( 219811 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:06AM (#3484509)
    I've been using Galeon for months at work doing web development (Java!), and I don't think life would be sane if I had to use Netscape.

    It's fast, and does some cool things like disable popups, etc. I also dig the Google search boxes at the top.

    This little browser is just AWESOME!

    • Hear hear! (Score:3, Informative)

      by mccrew ( 62494 )
      Galeon is a great example of the Unix philosophy. Find one thing, web browsing in this case, and do it well. There is no mail client, no instant messenger, or extra stuff to complicate things. Though it does depend on Mozilla libraries, it has a refreshing lightweight "feel" that Mozilla and even old Netscape lack.

      Though not the first to implement the feature, Galeon sets the standard for tabbed browsing.
    • I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.

      • I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.

        I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've never had any problems accessing my PayPal account (or any other of my secure banking accounts for that matter) using Galeon 1.2. As far as I can tell, the PayPal web site doesn't not check or care what browser you're using.

        It is true, however, that faking the browser ID is a feature that Galeon misses.

        DZM

  • What no Dillo? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:06AM (#3484512) Homepage
    A shame that the very fast and neat Dillo [cipsga.org.br] wasn't mentioned.
    • Yeah, what's the dillio?
    • Wow... Dillo lacks some serious features (cookies?)... but it sure is fast. I don't know what people are talking about with Mozilla or Galeon being fast. I mean, they are complete, but they sure aren't fast.

  • Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yoda2 ( 522522 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:08AM (#3484523)
    And it looks like even if you remove these web browsers, Linux will still work.

    • Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:12AM (#3484547) Journal
      But if you remove either KDE or GNOME, you will be unable to access your files. :)

      My two cents: I'm using Galeon with KDE (or, in the words of a fellow LUG member at an InstallFest, "You're doing what?) The reason being, of course, is that I love Galeon's tabs. I mourned the lack of tabs in Konq, but will most definitely go try it out once KDE 3.1 is out.

      :Peter

      • My two cents: I'm using Galeon with KDE Something I've always liked about Unix - you can mix and match applications to create your own ideal working environment. Shells, window managers, mail client, web browsers, file managers - it's all good. Just a pity there isn't one common-looking widget set, as can get a bit ARSE chaotic at times!
      • I'm using KDE with Galeon for the same reasons, but it is certainly where the lack of cut and paste between KDE and Gnome hurts the most. Sending people urls is one of the most common things to do.

        Phillip.
    • > And it looks like even if you remove these web browsers, Linux will still work.


      Yes, but of course, if you remove the browser, you will still continue to not work with Windows...

  • Old software (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:08AM (#3484525) Homepage
    That's the problem with these kind of reviews; Mozilla is at RC1 and Galeon is at 1.2 - I assume the other browsers are similarily updated. A review of such software needs to be done almost literally within a week or two, or it will be obsolete and/or wrong by the time it reaches its readership. Reviewers really should take note of that, and maybe include a small section on what is happening to each product in developer-land.

    /Janne

    • Sayeth the poster:

      A review of such software needs to be done almost literally within a week or two, or it will be obsolete

      Those of us with dialup connections don't have the time to download the 25 Mb of a new browser every week. I don't want to upgrade my browser more than once a year. Business users can be even more conservative, because 'upgrading' can mean installation on hundreds or thousands of computers distributed over several offices or countries. My current employer, an international logistics company, has offices in most countries in the world. We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.

      Unfortuntely, the review did not really address these non functional concerns. It didn't even mention the significance of the Mozilla version number being less than 1.0. So, how do the browers compare in terms of reliability, performance, etc?

      Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM (no sniggerring at he back, we're not that uncommon [slashdot.org]) is barely able to cope with Netscape 6.

      • Re:Slow down, reliability (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Rick_T ( 3816 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:11AM (#3485006) Homepage
        > Why are browsers so bloated, anyway? My poor
        > 133 MHz Pentium with 64 Mb RAM [...] is barely
        > able to cope with Netscape 6.

        You might want to try a more lightweight browser with the same rendering engine - say, Galeon.

        My main workstation is an IBM Thinkpad model 760XD. That's a P166MMX / 80M RAM / 3G HD. Right now I'm running Gnome (minus nautilus), Galeon (to respond to this post), Star Office (to do my actual work), and several smaller apps. I may update to 104M, but my system's quite usable now.

        One thing I do is to use Dillo (http://dillo.cipsga.org.br/) for quick browsing. It's very light, depends only on GTK, and loads in a second or so - even with the apps I'm already running.

      • We still have Netscape 4.7x on our desktop computers. For people who are not 'heat seekers', reliability can be important.


        I think that the MTBF for Mozilla exceeded that of NS4.x last year (that was mentioned in mozillazine or something), so on average it should actually be more realiable...

  • Somewhat off-topic, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:12AM (#3484546)
    The only way I've been able to convince Windows IE users to use Mozilla is by introducing them to the pop-up blocking feature. Once they see that, they're in awe, and once you show them things like tabs, they're sold. Try it with your favorite IE user and see what happens!

    (And yes, there are extra programs to provide this functionality, but the people I've done this with were happy to dump them.)

    • nytimes pop-ups (Score:3, Interesting)

      by asv108 ( 141455 )
      I think the pop-up ad killing capabilities are great, but there seem to be workarounds for web developers. Everytime I go to the NY times [nytimes.com], I still get Orbitz pop-ups from ad.doubleclick.net. Obviously, I can block ad.doubleclick.net in /etc/hosts, but for less technically minded users, there has to be a better solution. You can test out the specific ad in mozilla, here. [doubleclick.net]

      • Re:nytimes pop-ups (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yes, this is a known case, Bug #126224 [mozilla.org] (Though you can't get there with a Slashdot referer).

        Mozilla .9.9 release notes [mozilla.org] mention:
        Setting this pref (instructions
        here [mozilla.org]) should turn off pop-up and pop-under ads that use the onload handler of tags to work around our previous window.open() filter. (Bug 92955)
        user_pref("dom.disable_open_click_delay", 1000);
      • ...a solution? Maybe you already figured out (it's easy). Just open the pop-ups into tabs. If you haven't called for it, you can close them WITHOUT even taking a look at them. I do it with Galeon.

        Besides, they don't know it didn't work. It does harm online ads because they will think it's an uneffective add. They'll figure out one day the must embedd the ads into the page (i an ok with adds as long as they are in-page).

  • 256 MB? No way! (Score:4, Funny)

    by oever ( 233119 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:15AM (#3484563) Homepage
    While all of the browsers run surprisingly fast on slower CPUs, you need 256MB of RAM for Red Hat 7.2 with the KDE desktop.

    This is nonsense.
    198 MB is enough to work comforably.
    • RedHat 7.2 with KDE ran just fine on my AMD 333 laptop with 64MB of RAM, albeit a tad slow at times. I just upgraded it to RedHat 7.3 with KDE3, and it's actually faster now. Konqueror is quite a bit faster.
    • This can go even further...I have KDE on a system with only 128MB. Running Konquerer, Netscape 4.7X (don't have Mozilla, yet), or the other KDE office programs still results in no swapping. Looking at `top` output, however, would lead me to suggest no less RAM than 128MB, since larger apps like Mozilla would definitely be too much.

      For those of you who like to run Mozilla, Open Office, Emacs, etc. all a the same time...go for 512MB. You won't regret it.
    • something must be wrong with my system or with RH7.2 cause i'm running KDE, Netscape (4.79), SO5.1, Mozzila and Gnome apps (Evolution) at the same time on 128meg RAM.


      I do not see a big diff between a PIII 400, 128meg and a PIII 800, 256meg



      I have to try it on a PI 166 with 64 to see how bad it gets. But I conssider the 400 an old system. I think any system with 128 meg or more should be fine for a home or work evironment.

    • Hell I'm running KDE 2.2 from a Suse 7,3 live CD at home (kinda hard to run it from the hard drive when the hard drive is dead) and I'm barely using more than 1/3 of my 256 megs o'ram

  • That's a dupe (Score:2, Informative)

    by iamr00t ( 453048 )
    March 1 story [slashdot.org]
    It's not new now also, he's using mozilla 0.9.8 ... duh.

  • galeon (Score:2, Insightful)

    by layyze ( 216392 )
    The review was great and all, but did it really say that Galeon was a 20.0mb download? Even with downloading all of the necessary library dependencies shouldn't 20 megs seems a little high. This review stinks of Redhat/Ximian bloat. Although I am happy to see a more update review, even if the test machine may be slightly outdated to what many of us use these days.
    -lt
  • For a full browser suite, the latest Mozilla was the most impressive and like Netscape, has the best looking interface, is available on multiple platforms and includes a good help system. But unlike Netscape, Mozilla is rapidly developing, is easy to upgrade, is better than Internet Explorer/Outlook Express and includes some great features: it can use Tabs by default and saves complete Web pages perfectly.


    Not to be a troll, but it irks me when I hear someone saying "this" is better than "that" cause I said so. It causes me to lose some respect for the reviewer.

    As a happy user of IE and OE, I'd love to hear what the reviewer find better in Mozilla over IE/OE. My experience in the past with *nix web browsers hasn't been all that great. I think the IE interface is quite nice, easy to upgrade, and can save complete web pages perfectly as well (.mht).
    • I can't speak for the reviewer, but even on Windows I prefer Mozilla for two reasons: Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. I can't live without either of those features any more.
      • These are exactly the same reasons I use Mozilla on Windows. Or, in other words, "Me too!"
      • performance, stability, trustiworthiness.

        My fiancee, even after switching to win2000, found IE to be too unstable, and performed very poorly on her celery 300. I installed Mozilla on her machine and told her to try it out, and she has been using it ever since.

        She particularly likes the tabbed browsing, stability, and blocking popups.

      • Pop-ups will return (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mblase ( 200735 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:47AM (#3484807)
        I use Mozilla to disable auto-popups, and I love it. But it occurs to me that if/when IE integrates this feature, it won't be long before it's worked around.

        The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.

        Well, I've written a couple of sites where a user clicks on a link, and JS triggers a popup as well as opening up the desired page. This is done intentionally and for functional reasons; but it's only a matter of time before someone at Geocities or Angelfire figures out how to rewrite a user's page so that every single link triggers a popup in addition to opening the desired hyperlink.

        It would only take a few lines of server-side scripting; a Perl regexp could do it in a second. And then we'll all have to contend with unwanted popups again, opening on the second page of a site instead of the first; only this time we'll have to disable the good popups as well as the bad ones.

        Towards that end, I dearly hope that MS never, ever decides to add pop-up blocking to their browser. As long as they have over 50% usage 'net-wide and lack this feature, no one will see the need to do any of the above. See, unjust monopolies can be a Good Thing....
        • I doubt Microsoft will implement pop-up blocking. I don't think they believe users should have that much control over what they see on a website. Microsoft [i]wants[/i] to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.
          • Microsoft wants to see the relentless commercialization of the Internet, and pop-up ads are part of that.

            I see no reason to argue that. Microsoft is interested in what's good for Microsoft, not for Angelfire or DoubleClick or porn peddlers. Their own website doesn't use unwanted popups, and never has.

            On the other hand, their software is almost universally designed for ease-of-use and large numbers of features, while also lacking security in implementing those features. So I predict that someday, IE will allow blocking of auto-popups, but they will never advertise it or turn it on by default--or make it difficult to work around.

    • Re:What's Mozilla got over IE/OE? (Score:5, Informative)

      by lkaos ( 187507 ) <anthony@codemonke y . ws> on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:41AM (#3484746) Homepage Journal
      1) Tabbed browsing - it's worth all the hype it receives. Mozilla can be configured such that almost any action will just generate a new tab. I middle click on a link, new tab. If a link has a _TOP target, new tag. Tabs are much easier to navigate especially if your like me and tend to have 15 web pages open at once.

      2) Scripting security customization. Almost all the annoying aspects of JavaScript can be individually blocked with Mozilla. This includes disabling pop-up ads or pop-under ads or those stupid things that resize your window. The nice thing is that Mozilla is smart enough to differentiate between an action that occurs onLoad or something verses one where you actually click a link.

      3) Sidebar. The mozilla sidebar is pretty neat for two reasons. On the one hand, it provides easy access to things like bookmarks, history, and searching. On the other hand though, the sidebar is built on Mozillas XUL technology such that any webpage can install a new sidebar (well, you have to allow the page to install the sidebar). Freshmeat, CNN, and a few other sites have great sidebars that provide headlines and search facilities (in a compact, easy to use manner).

      4) Integrated everything. Mozilla has a built in mail client, WYSIWYG editor, and address book. The WYSIWYG editor doesn't get the attention it deserves. Its really evolved from the horrible Composer of Netscape fame into something that rivals any editor that I've ever used. The mail client is really nice too with all sorts of searching and filtering capabilities that I am not aware of in Outlook (although I only use Outlook at work).

      A lot of these things are just showing up in the newer releases (in a usable state at least). When the 1.0 milestone is released, I would really recommend checking it out. The release candidates so far definitely have changed the way I use the internet.

      • You forgot that it also allows you more non-work time while you wait for the damned thing to load and it increases computer memory sales, helping other geeks out there.

        Seriously, Moz is a great browser, but its *bloated*. Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load. In fact, I'm guessing if I decouple IE from Explorer [winguides.com], IE would still load faster.

        Sure, I'm patient enough to wait for Moz to load, but OTOH, I don't expect bloat from any of my web browsers.

        And no, I don't want to use the quick launch. I like to conserve my memory.

        • Horribly so. Opera has a brief loadtime on my Win98SE/AMD 1.33Ghz/256M memory home machine, but Moz takes a relatively long time to load.


          Why should I care about the loading time of Mozilla; it's been running since 2nd day of this month, around 7 days now, so the few seconds that starting it are quite much lost in the around 86400*7 seconds that have been passed since ;)

      • Tabbed browsing - it's worth all the hype it receives.

        I use Mozilla on Windows and Linux - and I love tabbed browsing, it is the killer feature for me as I don't tend to visit sites with popups.

        However I find one thing lacking in Mozilla's tab browsing - it isn't possible to switch tabs via the keyboard. To switch to a new tab you have to use the mouse. I've downloaded the source to see how hard it would be to add this, but I've not got round to unpacking it yet.

        It's all very well to open new tabs with the mouse, or Ctrl+T but until I can cycle through them with Ctrl+Tab, or similar, I'm gonna be a little grumpy ;)

        • Try CTRL+Page Up and CTRL+Page Down. I think you'll be happy.

        • many people have already pointed out the answer to the switching tabs via the keyboard option, but what I do not understand is why they chose CTRL+PAGEUP/DOWN instead of something like CTRL+TAB. The usability problem with pageup/pagedown (at least on my keyboard) is that the right hand must leave the home keys to advance to the next or previous tab. So basically, even though you can switch tabs via the keyboard, I don't do it because I might as well reach for the mouse with the right hand. At least using the mouse, I could pick a tab towards the middle of the list :P
    • From personal use of Mozilla I prefer it over Internet Explorer for many reasons but mostly because of the all the features for power users. As has already been mentioned by the reviewer it has tabbed browsing that is great but aside from that it has a plethora of other great features I will list in point form.

      • Complete control over Javascript, you can disable it all together, or just popups, the resizing of windows etc
      • Powerful search tools, you can choose the search engine of your preference while as far I know in it only uses MSN for searching in the URL bar. On top of that you can also select a bunch of text in a webpage and then bring up a context menu and do 'Websearch for "xxxx"' very handly for looking up things from articles.
      • The blocking of images from servers of your choose, get for getting rid of ads
      • The blocking off cookies from sites, again great for stopping those Doubleclick and Cnet cookies etc

      That's atleast I handful of things that I know Mozilla RC1 has that Internet Explorer version 5 doesn't have. But hey at the end of the day it doesn't come down to features, just personal preference.

    • Don't forget text zooming with the mouse wheel!!
    • You can save entire webpages with mozilla as well. Creates a nice little directory with the images.

      Moz also has themes with which you can change the look and its one of the easiest packages on *ix to install IMHO
    • I switched to Mozilla because of the loading time. IE takes 10 seconds from clicking the icon to having my homepage (my.yahoo.com) rendered. Mozilla took 3. Considering startup time is what switched me to IE in the first place, switching to Mozilla was natural. Since then I've become addicted to the tabbed browsing.
  • I just read his review. He said Konqueror is faster than mozilla loading, this is because he is running it within KDE! I here use windowmaker and find mozilla to be alot faster (1.0 rc1). Also he is running these browsers on a slow slow machine. (Even slower than the average on the current slashdot poll). Konqueror is a great browser if your IN KDE! Also there is alot of changes since Mozilla 0.9.8 and 1.0 rc1. I find 1.0 rc1 to be about 30% faster then 0.9.9. I really hope next time that they use the lastest browsers.

  • How far these browsers have come (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:23AM (#3484611)
    since February, huh?

    I can't wait to get the new Redhat 7.1. Anyone have a review?

  • Acrobat plugin with Mozilla/Galeon (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ender Ryan ( 79406 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:24AM (#3484624) Journal
    To get the adobe acrobat plugin working with Mozilla/Galeon, simply copy the netscape4.x plugin file, nppdf.so, into $HOME/.mozilla/plugins.

    note: I guess if you didn't read the review you will not understand this post...

  • As a Linux user, I'm very excited about how things are developing in the web browser arena. Galeon works great, and it appears that Konqueror has its share of fans as well.

    I was reminded of this while attempting to find a good Gandalf "wallpaper" for my Gnome setup. I notice that Galeon has a "use as background" item under the right-click menu for images, but it does not appear to function (on my setup anyway). Does anyone know how they expect to implement this? Setting the background image is pretty WM-dependent, IIRC.

    In conclusion, if anyone has a good Gandalf wallpaper, plz email me or post a response. I'm looking for close-up, where he looks stoned, pipe is a bonus but not a must. A hi-res cap from the scene where he's muttering "riddles in the dark" would be ideal, but I'll try anything. TIA.

  • Intl Support (Score:2, Informative)

    by drivel ( 229435 )
    I am using Mozilla and it seems that it is the only browser with decent intl (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) display support. But it RC1 still has problem with CJK printing.
    • I'm using Opera 6 Beta 2 and it certainly seems to render the pictographic languages well (with anti-aliasing). Since I can't actually read them I don't know just how good it is, but it certainly isn't just a screen-full of empty boxes.

      TWW

  • Missing (Score:4, Funny)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:25AM (#3484632) Homepage Journal

    My browser is missing!

    Even though the rendering engine could use some work, they didn't bother to review

    telnet sitename 80

    • Re:Missing (Score:3, Funny)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      You've got to be kidding! This browser sucks. It doesn't have tabbed-browsing, themability, popup ads, cookies, branding or even a pull-down for reporting bugs! Clearly this browser is for those losers who wish to see that *shudder* "content" stuff.

      Go back in your hole you accademic hack! ;-)

      PS: It doesn't render CNN.com correctly. Crap, just like I said.
    • telnet sitename 80

      There's an awful lot of overhead in that one for a protocol you're not even using [isi.edu] when you connect it to an HTTP server! Here's a lighter-weight alternative:

      nc sitename 80

      (What's nc?) [freshmeat.net]

    • Re:Missing (Score:2, Funny)

      by nrosier ( 99582 )
      While it works very well on normal web-sites, it's very slow on SSL. I've got a hell of a time decyphering it...
  • What?!No review of world-fastest, favorite browser of every true geek!?

    Come on, be wise, please include lynx next time..

  • Printing Problems (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Famous Brett Wat ( 12688 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @10:50AM (#3484829) Homepage Journal
    I'm fairly happy with the range of Linux browsers, except for one significant gripe: they all suck at printing. Konqueror's pagination is screwy: it overlaps from one page to the next and can crop pages halfway through a line. Galeon and Mozilla seem to have a problem with bold fonts: they treat them as though they have the same pitch as their non-bold counterparts, and thus bold text tends to overlap the following characters. This is visible even in "print preview" mode, so it's not a printer-specific matter.

    I experienced these issues using the versions of the browsers supplied in Mandrake 8.2. It's possible that these are distro-specific problems, but I doubt it. Reply with your related experiences, if any.

    • I had that problem with Galeon and Mozilla as well. It went away for me when Mozilla 0.9.9 went into Woody. Alas, I had to compile Galeon myself. They removed it for some reason. The Galeon is version 1.2 it also prints pages with bold fonts in them fine now.
    • Opera works great for printing! Prints the page as rendered, includes the URL in the footer of the page... at least as good as IE. I have no complaints. I'm still using 6.0 TP3...

      Its not Open Source :(, but you can get an adware version for free. (And those of you who know how to use a search engine [google.com] can easily find ways of disabling said adware... SHHHHHHH!!!! The DMCA police might find out!!!!) :)

  • It seems that Galeon (mozilla), the old netscape, Opera, etc. all have problems interfacing with "the outside world", i.e. the monitor and the printer.

    It took me forever to configure my RH7.2 box to display fonts in Galeon so I could read them. Opera still doesn't work right.

    And printing is another headache - either it's cutting stuff off or setting the wrong zoom level, etc.

    What needs to be done here is a better way to interface with the windowing system and the printer subsystem (isn't postscript pretty well understood these days?).

    We're so close to having these things kick butt on IE...
    • To significantly improve your netscape browsing experience under linux try the following lines in your .Xdefaults:

      Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 20
      Netscape*documentFonts.xResolution*iso-8859-1: 100
      Netscape*documentFonts.yResolution*iso-8859-1 : 100

      This helped the font situation out for me no end.

      There are other things you can do, such as importing some of the Microsoft TTF fonts as many pages now specify those fonts in their HTML.
  • I hope I don't get an RTFM, but anyway is there a linux browser with the Quick Search feature (Web accessories) [pcworld.com] that IE has had since v4.0 where I set the registry key

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchUrl\g
    (Default) = http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&sa=Google+Search
    Where %s is automatically substituted with the search keywords you enter.

    Using this I just type in the address bar:

    g mcdonalds big mac rat found inside

    ... or whatever, and the search results with Google appear immediately? Can any linux browsers do this or do I need to use a tcsh script with lynx?

    • It's not a Linux browser, but OmniWeb [omnigroup.com] for Mac OS X does this..

    • There are the keywords [mozilla.org] in Mozilla and the Smart bookmark [sourceforge.net] in Galeon.

      And in Mozilla the url bar provides a quick way to access you favorite search engine.

    • Konquerer 2.2.2 (and probably up) has this. Look in the Enhanced Browsing section of the settings for a list of the 25+ additional shortcuts (e.g., "gg:browser features" in the address bar will search Google, change gg to ly and you search in Lycos, etc.).

  • Pointless illustration award (Score:4, Informative)

    by j_w_d ( 114171 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:04AM (#3484948)
    The "review" provides a remarkably useless screen image of the "preferences" or setup screens for the three browsers of choice.

    Regarding Opera, he reviews the "static" build which has a download about twice as large as the "shared." I registered Opera years ago. It has always been superior to IE with multiple pages displayed, speed, and price, since the "adware" ads are pretty much indistinguishable from the eye clutter on the standard web page these days any way. However, for less than $40 you can still let MS know there is web software that is really worth the price. It is worth noting that many of us who use Opera register it. The company has survived in a market where ALL the competition is free, which I believe really speaks to the browser's quality.

    The biggest Opera handicap is programmers of secure webpages that test for browser versions rather than available security services and send you messages to "upgrade" to something more secure - like IE.

    Regarding IE, there was an article on CNET a couple of months ago where the writer, Robert Vamosi, asserted that IE had an increasingly dated interface due to the appearance of tabbed browing (which was pioneered by Opera.)

  • It has always struck me that what Linux really needs is a good framebuffer based browser that handles graphics.

    Linux users like to boast of the OS's ability to revive old and low resource hardware, but try running X/GNOME on a 586 with 32MB and you won't get very far.

    Sad to say WinNT handles that a lot better.

    So, is there a good framebuffer based browser out there?
  • I am shocked that the authors of Mozilla and Konqueror have not yet been sued by someone claiming that allowing the disabling of popups is intentionally breaking his/her God-given business model.

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