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Web Browsers | View information about Web Browsers within our Technology Website Directory section by reviewing this area of our website. We provide a wealth of information online to help our visitors become better informed about Computer Buzz. |
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Web Browsers
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The very first big "killer app" was VisiCalc, a spreadsheet for the Apple II. Not too long after that, the most commonly used PC application program was the word processor, and the spreadsheets came in second. Things have changed drastically in past two decades. The most popular program (now called a "package") these days has come to be the web browser. Email clients are the new runners-up. Let's take a quick look at some of the most popular browsers in use today and some even better ones that you may not have heard of yet.
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Internet Explorer
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By virtue of Microsoft's near-planetwide OS dominance, its Internet Explorer (IE) is currently the most popular web browser with a mind-numbing 79 percent of the market. The UNIX version of IE was only available in 1998-2002, and a couple of years ago, MS killed off its Mac version of IE, so now it's a one-trick pony that runs exclusively as a Windows app.
IE has never been in the vanguard of web browser development. It has been tardy in the adoption of such features as tabbed browsing, and it has never been accused of being the fastest browser out there in cyberspace. It's very early versions were buggy and cheesy, and it lagged behind Netscape Navigator for the biggest part of a decade. Eventually, MS's questionable (read "monopolistic") business practices and Netscape's own incompetent management put IE in the lead to stay.
Moreover, MS's never ending security problems have become the stuff of which legends are made, and IE has played a central role in that whole mess from the very beginning. It's still too early to say if the latest release of IE and/or Vista will be any significant improvement, but the hasty initial security patch releases for Vista are not a good sign.
Computer Buzz can not, at this time, recommend IE for an everyday, heavy duty web browser. It is still not state of the art, and there are others out there for Windows that are.
Official Website: www.Microsoft.com
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Safari
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Apple Computer released Safari a few years ago as its proprietary browser designed exclusively for Mac OS X. It's market share quickly jumped to about five percent and then stalled there. When Microsoft spat in Apple's face by killing off its Mac version of Internet Explorer a couple of years ago, Apple spat back by releasing a Windows version of Safari. With IE's share of the market slowing waning, Safari is virtually guaranteed to make some inroads with a whole new universe of Web users. Ain't competition great?
Historically, Safari has been a quality product, and like almost all browsers in recent years, it's given away totally free. Every once in a great while, you will find a web page that does not display correctly in Safari, but that is invariably a consequence of the web page's designer using non-standard code shortcuts.
Apple claims that it is the fastest of all the major browsers, but we have not been able to confirm that. Nonetheless, we agree that it is one of the speedier browsers currently available, and Computer Buzz recommends Safari for Macs and Windows both. In fact, we'd like to see a Linux version too, but there is no reason to expect that anytime soon.
Official Website: www.Apple.com/Safari/
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Netscape Navigator
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Netscape Navigator ("Netscape") was released in 1994, and for several years it accounted for more than half of all the web browser installations in the world. It peaked in 1996 at 75 percent, but by the end of the millennium, it's popularity had crashed to about 10 percent.
Its early versions were genuinely good stuff, but an unfortunate decision in 1998 to rewrite virtually the entire code base from scratch doomed Netscape. The new code was buggy and clearly inferior to the original; even worse, it took three years to get it out the door. By this time, MS had worked some of the bugs out of its fledgling Internet Explorer and was ready to pounce on its wounded prey.
Netscape tried changing the Navigator name to Mozilla and then to Communicator and finally back to Navigator, but no one was fooled or impressed. Today you can still download Netscape Navigator 9.x for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but time is running out; AOL, Netscape's current owner, officially halted research, development, and support for Nescape on 1 February, 2008. The code has been cleaned up, and the program actually works quite well, but you will probably be the only person you know who is using it.
Official Website: Netscape.com
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Mozilla Internet Application Suite
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Mozilla originally was the pre-release code name for the early 1990s browser that became Netscape Navigator. Today, Mozilla Suite is an almost discontinued, open source Internet application suite that has evolved into other component software packages with new names. You can still download Mozilla Suite 1.7.x (which includes an email client, browser, IRC chat client, HTML editor, etc.), but that will not be the case forever, as new software offspring of the Mozilla Foundation take their places center stage.
There is nothing wrong with Mozilla Suite; it is perfectly good software, and the Mozilla browser works great for us. The only reason Computer Buzz does not recommend it is because it is being discontinued in favor of even better apps from the same organization.
Official Website: www.Mozilla.org
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Firefox
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Perhaps the one single most successful application to evolve out of Netscape/Mozilla's Internet suites is the Firefox browser. It is fast, intuitive, secure, and as bug-free as any browser Computer Buzz has ever evaluated.
Whereas Internet Explorer once had more than 90 percent of the total browser market and Firefox was not even on the radar screen, Firefox now has an estimated 15 percent of the browser action, almost all of it stolen in the last couple of years from IE who now is down to 79 percent . In addition to Windows, Firefox is available for Mac OS X, all flavors of Linux, and UNIX/Solaris.
Computer Buzz recommends that you download this free app and give it a whirl. We think it will quickly become your browser of choice.
Official Website: www.Mozilla.com
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Swiftfox
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Swiftfox is an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox for both AMD and Intel processors. It claims to be just like Firefox only faster.
There is now an installer available that is distro independent. It is a script that downloads and installs Swiftfox in the /opt directory and attempts to use existing Firefox plugins. This is probably the best way for most users to install Swiftfox.
Existing Firefox plugins should work with no additional configuration if you use the installer.
Help is available in the Swiftfox Forum. If you have questions or are having difficulty with any aspect of using Swiftfox please leave a post on the forum and one of the forum members will provide assistance.
Computer Buzz likes Swiftfox, although we consider it to be a shameless knockoff of Firefox, and we are unable to detect any significant increase in speed.
Official Website: GetSwiftFox.com
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IceWeasel
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Gnuzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla Internet Application Suite (which includes the excellent Firefox browser), and IceWeasel is the GNU version of Firefox. Aside from being a shameless knockoff of Firefox, IceWeasel's main advantage, or so they claim, is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the source code from Firefox is free software, the binaries that they release include additional non-free software. Also, Firefox distributes non-free software as plug-ins.
Computer Buzz does not have an issue with the bewildering array of obscure, arcane, miscellaneous plugins, extensions, dependencies, etc. that the open software people constantly distribute with their own free offerings. All other things being equal, we would just as soon go with the original high quality Firefox distro and leave the moralizing to someone else who is seriously in need of getting a life.
Official Website: www.GNU.org
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SeaMonkey
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The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to deliver production-quality releases of code derived from the application formerly known as Mozilla Application Suite. Whereas the main focus of the Mozilla Foundation is on the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email client, there is still one group of dedicated volunteers who strive to ensure that we can have our browser and our email in one integrated app and have it stable enough for corporate use.
SeaMonkey is a free, open source program that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and some flavors of Linux (mostly Red Hat, Debian, and SuSE, and their close relatives). At this time it is not available for UNIX/Solaris or BSD, but we suspect that it won't be too long before that changes.
So if the SeaMonkey browser looks and performs almost identical to Firefox, there is most definitely a reason why. Computer Buzz likes SeaMonkey, and if you like integrated Internet apps instead of the stand-alone kind, we heartily recommend it.
Official Website: www.Mozilla.org
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Opera
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Opera is a cross-platform web browser and Internet suite which handles common Internet-related tasks including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting online, viewing widgets, downloading BitTorrents, and reading newsfeeds. Opera's lightweight mobile web browser Opera Mini and most current versions of its desktop application are offered free of charge.
Opera is proprietary software developed by Opera Software based in Oslo, Norway. It runs on a variety of operating systems including many versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Amazingly, Computer Buzz has discovered that Opera is clearly the easiest major browser package to install on the moribund BeOS (v. 5.0.3). It is also used in mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs, game consoles, and interactive televisions.
Computer Buzz has been using Opera for some time now. We like it, and we recommend it very highly. This is a full-featured, industrial strength browser (among other things) that can take a licking and keep on ticking.
Official Website: www.Opera.com
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Camino
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Camino is a free, open source Mac-only browser that is derived from the Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox code base that has been optimized for OS X. It is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.
Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine used by Netscape/Mozilla. Built and tested by thousands of volunteers, Gecko brings cutting-edge innovations and capabilities to users in a standards-friendly form.
Computer Buzz strongly recommends Camino for all Mac users.
Official Website: www.CaminoBrowser.org
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Flock
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Flock is yet another web browser heavily based upon Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla technologies, Flock is also the name of the company developing the browser. Flock's creators call it a "social browser," due to its ability to interact with popular social networking web services. Such web services include Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Photobucket, and various popular blogging and news aggregation services.
Flock is still in beta, but it is available for evaluation on systems running Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Computer Buzz has used Flock, and we see no reason not to recommend it. We can not recommend it above apps like Safari and Firefox, but it does appear to be a first class piece of software.
Official Website: www.Flock.com
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Shiira
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Shiira is a web browser designed exclusively for Mac OS X. According to its web site, the goal of Shiira is "to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari." (To which, Computer Buzz says, "Good luck.") Its Japanese designers crafted Shiira (in English) to use WebKit for rendering and scripting.
And the Japs are not sloppy competitors. (Just ask GM, Ford, and whatever is left of Crysler.) Shiira has some enhancements that Apple's Safari lacks: full screen mode, more sophisticated tabbed browsing, floating palettes, a Page Info window which shows the underlying codes of the page being viewed, and Page Dock which shows thumbnail views of all your tabbed pages.
Written in Cocoa, Shiira is open source, and its source code is released under the BSD license. The current version requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
Shiira is not our favorite Mac browser, but Computer Buzz does not hesitate to recommend it.
Official Website: Shiira.jp/en
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OmniWeb gets a Gold Star
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OmniWeb is, in one special way, different from all the other browsers in this list: it costs money. Albeit not much. It's a shareware program that'll set you back fifteen bucks if you like it. And you will.
Published by The Omni Group, who also publishes OmniGraffle, OmniOutline, OmniPlan, and more, OmniWeb is one of the more advanced, full featured browsers available today. Like Camino and Shiira, OmniWeb is a Mac-only product at this time, and there are no immediate plans to port it to other platforms.
Computer Buzz gives OmniWeb its Gold Star Seal of Approval, and we recommend it to all our Mac-user friends even though Jason Snell at Macworld reported that as of 2007 OmniWeb accounted for only one-half of one percent of the traffic on that magazine's web site.
Official Website: www.OmniGroup.com
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iCab
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The Germans who publish iCab like to advertise it as "The Taxi for the Internet." That represents a uniquely European perspective; if this browser were a home-grown US product, it would probably be likened to a muscle car.
It comes in two versions: just plain iCab (no charge for the download), and a more feature-laden iCab Pro for $29.
The English on the iCab web site is a little peculiar in places, but if you can overlook that, the browser itself is strictly a quality product that is highly customizable and configurable. We found it to be stable and dependable, and we have no hesitation in recommending it as yet another alternative browser for Macs. We have no info on plans to port it to other architectures.
Official Website: www.iCab.de
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Avant Browser
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Avant Browser is a popular freeware web browser which unites the Trident layout engine built into Windows with an interface intended to be more feature-rich, flexible, and ergonomic than Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE). It runs exclusively on Windows 98 and above, including Windows Vista. Internet Explorer version 6 or 7 must be installed.
Avant Browser allows users to browse multiple WWW sites simultaneously and to block all unwanted pop-up pages and Flash ads. The integrated cleaner helps users clear all traces and maintain privacy.
The built-in Yahoo and Google search engines enable users to search for web pages, images, groups, directories, lyrics, software, and news on the Internet. Avant Browser provides options for blocking the download of Flash media, pictures, video, sounds, and ActiveX components, so users can efficiently use their bandwidth and speed up page loading.
All opened pages can be stopped, refreshed, closed, or arranged with one click. It also comes with a built-in RSS reader. Its similar-web-sites-bar displays web sites that are related to the opened web pages.
Avant Browser immodestly claims to be "the fastest web browser on Earth!" Computer Buzz remains unconvinced, but it does appear to be a slick, professional product that we are not afraid to recommend for Windows.
Official Website: www.AvantBrowser.com/
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Galeon
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Galeon is a web browser for the GNOME desktop environment that is popularly used with many Linux operating systems. It is based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. Galeon's self-declared mission was to deliver "the web and only the web."
At the time of Galeon's creation, the most popular web browsers were large multi-functional programs that were slow to start and often impractical due to their high memory usage and processor requirements. Galeon was the first mainstream graphical web browser that specifically focused on the reduction of peripheral functionality. Galeon is famous for introducing "Smart Bookmarks," bookmarks that take an argument and can be used as toolbar buttons with a text field used to enter the value for the argument.
Galeon's initial development team split in 2002 saying, "the current approach is unsustainable" in the resources required for maintenance.
By today's standards, this is an entry-level browser. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, but we have so many better choices available now that there is no compelling reason to recommend it. At this time, Galeon is still being maintained, but just b-a-r-e-l-y. Consider it dead.
Official Website: Galeon.SourceForge.net/
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K-Meleon
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K-Meleon is a web browser for the Microsoft Windows platform. Based on the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox, K-Meleon uses the native Windows application programming interface to create the user interface, and as a result, it is tightly integrated into the look and feel of the Windows desktop. This also makes K-Meleon less resource-intensive and more responsive to user input, which is important for users of low-end hardware.
K-Meleon is released under the GNU General Public License and runs on the Win32 platform. The current release version of K-Meleon is 1.1, which was released on May 22, 2007.
Official Website: Kmeleon.SourceForge.net/
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Epiphany
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Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop which is popularly used by many versions of Linux and BSD/UNIX. It is a descendant of the Galeon browser.
Epiphany is one of a family of web browsers that use the Gecko layout engine from the Mozilla project to display web pages. Like many Gecko-based browsers, Epiphany supports tabbed browsing, cookie management, popup blocking, and an extensions system.
Whereas most browsers feature a hierarchical folder-based bookmark system, Epiphany uses categorized bookmarks, where a single bookmark (such as "Epiphany") can exist in multiple categories (such as "Web Browsers," "GNOME," and "Computer Software"). Another innovative concept supported by Epiphany (originally from Galeon) is "Smart Bookmarks" which take a single argument specified from the address bar or from a textbox in a toolbar.
Epiphany was developed from Galeon with the aim of making a fully GNOME interface compliant web browser and a very simple user experience. As a result, Epiphany does not have its own theme settings; like Firefox it uses GNOME's settings that are specified in the GNOME Control Center.
Official Website: www.Gnome.org/projects/Epiphany/
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Konqueror
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Konqueror is a web browser, file manager, and file viewer designed as a core part of the K Desktop Environment. It was developed by volunteers and can run on most UNIX-like operating systems, including Linux and BSD. It is licensed and distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Konqueror's user interface is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, though it is more customizable. It works extensively with "panels", which can be rearranged or added. The panels are quite flexible and can even include a console window. Panel configurations can be saved, and there are some default configurations.
Navigation functions (back, forward, history, etc.) are available during all operations. The address bar has extensive autocompletion support for local directories, past URLs, and past search terms.
The application utilizes a tabbed document interface, wherein a window can contain multiple documents in tabs. Multiple document interfaces are not supported.
Konqueror has been developed as an autonomous web browser project. It uses KHTML as its layout engine, supports JavaScript, Java applets, Cascading Style Sheets, SSL, and other relevant open standards.
Konqueror integrates several customizable search services which can be accessed by entering the service's abbreviation code (for example, gg: for Google) followed by the search term(s).
Konqueror's rendering speed is on par with that of competing browsers, but sites with malformed HTML are sometimes less well rendered than by other browsers. Problems can also result from the use of plugins on a Web site which cannot be run under the operating system on which Konqueror is run; the use of QuickTime movies, or Shockwave animations can result in such problems. However, SWF (Flash), PDF, Java applets, and other plugins are supported if the respective software is installed.
Official Website: www.Konqueror.org
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SlimBrowser
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FlashPeak's SlimBrowser is a tabbed multiple-site web browser that uses the Microsoft Trident rendering engine. It incorporates a large collection of features like a built-in popup killer, skinned window frame, form filler, site group, quick-search, auto login, hidden sites, built-in commands and scripting, online translation, script error suppression, blacklist/whitelist filtering, and URL alias.
Official Website: www.FlashPeak.com
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NetPositive
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NetPositive is the default browser that came with the now-defunct BeOS operating system. It has partial support for JavaScript, but no Java or CSS support. NetPositive originally was the only web browser available for BeOS, but that is no longer the case.
It is still included in the Zeta OS as the default browser for opening saved files and links from other applications, due to unfinished implementation of the native OS bindings in Mozilla Firefox for BeOS. However, Firefox is now promoted as being the primary browser on the platform.
NetPositive is probably the one single most primitive browser that Computer Buzz has ever tested. As much as we love the BeOS, we can not recommend this pathetic excuse for a browser to our worst enemies.
Official Website: Not Available
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Minimo Mobile
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Okay, so Minimo Mobile is not exactly a PC-based browser. It runs on mobile devices (think PDAs) that use Windows Mobile 4.2 or 5.x. Maybe it shouldn't be on this list, but it is.
Minimo Mobile uses Mozilla Technologies to produce a highly usable web browser for advanced mobile devices. Features include: fast access to mobile content via Homebase start page, support for modern web standards (Javascript and AJAX), social bookmarking (whatever that is), tabbed browsing, RSS support, security (TLS, SSL3), international support, cross platform capability, and widget and extension support.
Official Website: www.Mozilla.org
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WorldWideWeb/Nexus
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Just as a historical footnote, let us mention that a now-defunct browser called WorldWideWeb was the world's first Web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web itself. WorldWideWeb (WWW) was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol (FTP) but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.
A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee to write WWW (and also to serve as the world's first web server) during the second half of 1990 while he was working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on Christmas Day, 1990, and successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public in August 1991.
On April 30, 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain, making it free software. Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program used many of NeXTSTEP's components WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class.
WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets and downloading and opening any file type supported by the NeXT system. The browser was also an editor. It allowed the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited.
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