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Browsers
This page is still pretty chaotic, but hopefully useable.
- The Past
- Browser Archive on evolt.org.
You can download lots of old browsers here, many of which cannot be
obtained elsewhere.
- Pretty much OK with… a
list of browsers -- a long one -- with links to their pages, nothing more,
nothing less. The point, however, that this page is "pretty much OK" with
all the browsers listed, is wrong: It is completely unusable in Cello.
And Minuet is not a browser, it is an internet suite that covers every
aspect except the web. But in any case the page, which is still
kept more or less current, is informative and interesting.
- Browser History
- World-Wide
Web Browsers is a part of Running A WWW Service by Brian Kelly of the University of Leeds, 1994.
Only few mirrors of this once widely distributed document remain. The
University of Leeds is not among them.
- A
Guide to Cyberspace by Kevin Hughes was first written in September 1993 and revised the
following year. The link above will lead you to the revised version.
The original version was posted in October 1993 by Bruce White to
rec.photo with the header "Incredible new software for showing your
pictures".
- The Present
-
Graphical
This list does not in any way strive to be complete, nor are these what I consider
the most important browsers; all those I tried out are included here, some that won't
run on Windows but might be interested, and some where I'm not really sure why I included
them but see no point in deleting the entry either. This list is in
alphabetical order.
As far as these browsers run on Windows or DOS, I have tested them, have tested
this page with them, and it displays.
- Act10
- Small and compact,
very good stylesheet support, no PNG, no JavaScript. Gave me lots of "Can't connect"
errors, but this could well be the fault of my system and not the browser.
Requires installation and writes to the registry, but these entries seem to be
mostly for uninstalling. You can move it to a different place within your
computer, all you have to do is edit the .ini file that resides in its directory.
Interface in six languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Hungarian),
you could easily create one in your favorit language. No "show source" function.
Freeware, Windows.
- Amaya
- is something like the W3C's official browser. In their own words
Amaya is a browser/authoring tool that allows you to publish documents on the Web. It is used to demonstrate and test many of the new developments in Web protocols and data formats. Given the very fast moving nature of Web technology, Amaya has a central role to play. It is versatile and extensible and is available on both Unix and Windows '95/NT platforms.
As an editor, its probabely quite good, especially if you are a purist
(it has buttons for <em> and <strong>,
but not for bold and italic).
The spell checker suggested changing Linux, website, webring, screenshots,
homepage, and… Christmas.
As a browser, it's pretty pathetic.
Stylesheet support is not as good as you'd expect; and it's the only browser
I know where body tags override style definitions.
Open source.
- AMSD Ariadna
- The download link was broken when I was there, and lately I haven't
been able to reach the site at all (Connection refused).
This is a Russian browser, with built-in translation feature.
I found a rather old version on evolt.org
(1.3, 1997), which really wasn't bad for its time: Full support of the font tag,
tables including borders and background colors, however no gif animations,
no JavaScript. An interesting aspect is that you could set 3d font effects
for headers in your personal style sheet. Might try to emulate this too,
some time.
After browsing the AMSD site
for a while, I found out that the browser has been discontinued:
At present lovers of the antique can also download and
use Ariadna, but please bear in mind, that the browser does not support
frames, cookies, JavaScript, animated GIF files, JPEG format as well as
copying in a clipboard. JAVA is supported by SUN JDK 1.02 installation
on the computer. Other JDK versions are not supported. The last browser
version supports HTML 3.2, sending letters via e-mail and a built-in
English-Russian dictionary. The browser operates both under English
and localized Windows versions.
I even suppose that the abovementioned version 1.3 is the most recent one.
It is a pity, I guess. BTW, it does support JPEG, though it displays
it as grayscale only. Freeware, Windows.
- Arachne
- seems to be the only graphical browser for DOS currently available.
No Java or Javascript, rather weak stylesheet support (basically, only the
stylesheet equivalents of the classic HTML commands are supported; on this
page, links would be green, but headers would not be red), but very good
rendering of traditional table-based design. 16 nested tables are no problem
for Arachne, neither are PNGs or animated GIFs.
There is now a Linux version, too. Both are shareware, personal use is free.
- Arachne is not only a browser;
it is also something like a GUI for DOS. There are many add-ons and plugins:
- Browse X
- Open Source under the artistic
license (same as Perl; this is more liberal than GNU). Requires at least 6.5MB
discspace. No stylesheet support, no wheel mouse support.
Designed mostly for minimal memory usage. Strange, confusing menu (many features
are under "Brx"). Once you've found them, it has some nifty features: You can view
HTML source only for the selected part of the page. Turning JavaScript on and off
is easier even than in Opera. You can filter out banners to a certain extent.
Stable, but there is a certain beta air around it, even though the current version
number is 1.6.0. Windows, Linux and Solaris.
- Cello
- was the first browser for Windows. It was written by Tom Bruce,
cofounder of the Legal Information Institute, who realized that most
lawyers used Microsoft Windows PCs, but there was not yet a browser
available for this system. The name may have been a pun on Pei Wei's
ViolaWWW. A cello is somewhat larger than a viola.
- Nathan Torkington's WWW FAQ v0.1 from April 1993 mentions it first, as "not yet released."
- The World Wide Web News from May
mention it again; Tim Berners-Lee has a copy on his notebook, "and very nice it looks too. The catch? Tom doesn't want to let it out until he has polished it. He plans a July release, with beta test versions available in June."
- In Kevin Hughes' Guide to Cyberspace from September of the same year it is the only
available browser for Windows mentioned; the Windows and Mac versions of Mosaic
were in a closed beta.
In Cello, you could not only assign font types and sizes to the various
tags, but also colors. The default stylesheet made ample use of this feature.
If your browser is Netscape 6 or higher or Mozilla, you can even how this page
(and many others on my site) would look like in Cello by choosing View
-> Use Stylesheet -> Cello from your toolbar. It is as
close to the original as possible, including the weird cursors (the link
cursor should actually point upward only) and the blank space at the
bottom. BTW, yes,
nearly all of my pages really can be viewed in Cello.
The download link on the homepage (last updated April 1994) does not work. If you
want to have it, download it from evolt.org's
Browser Archive or from a
mirror
with working download.
- Cyberdog
- A browser suite for the Mac. The webpage was last updated "2000.3.5, 16:46:49"
but the download link is still working.
- Grail
- is a browser written completely in Python. It won't run unless you have Python
installed on your computer. In my case, it didn't run even though I have Python
installed on my computer. It seems that the version of Python that I have installed
on my computer is a newer version than the version Grail was written for. So it
won't run. I guess I prefer Perl anyway.
- K-Meleon
- is another development on the Mozilla basis. It looks and feels a
bit more like Internet Explorer. Still in beta, but quite stable. Some
features are still missing, sometimes the cursor does not change correctly
over links, on some shockwave sites I had no sound. Its main advantage
over Mozilla/Netscape is its smaller size. You might want to wait a bit,
but keep it in eye.
- Mosaic
- is the other ancient browser whose stylesheet I have emulated. It can be seen
as the ancestor of all graphical browsers, even if Cello maybe came earlier.
Development stopped in 1997, at this time Netscape had already taken over.
Mosaic never had JavaScript support and always had trouble rendering tables
correctly, but it had lots of interesting features I miss in the modern browsers.
The
first announcement on usenet (for version 0.10 beta) is now available
on the google newsgroups archive.
Windows,
Mac and
X-Windows (Unix).
- Mozilla
- is the open source variety of Netscape. For practical purposes, the
two are identical. Mozilla might have new features a bit earlier than Netscape.
Both have the best stylesheet support currently (December 2001) available.
- Mozilla Style Sheets by Andrew Woolridge. Things you can do:
- Force all links on web pages to be underlined, even if the site author styled
them differently.
- Shrink all images to 10X10 pixels until you move your mouse over them (a
simple "banner ad filter").
- Cause Mozilla's drop-down menus to be semi-transparent -- like Apple's
OS X.
- Change the background color of your Mozilla chrome.
- Test out potential skin changes without having to create a new package/directory/etc.
- Test out XBL changes without having to edit existing XBL bindings.
- Share company-wide style information within a work-group (make the browser
look similar to everyone in that group).
- Change the "throbber" based on which web site you are in.
- Debug your XUL code by creating CSS that outline elements you choose.
- Create a remote style sheet on a server and inherit it on multiple browsers
(using @import).
- Create your own look and feel for any web site you wish!
However, some of this only seems to work with the Linux version.
- Netscape
- is certainly a piece of Web history. Both the center tag and the font tag, for example, were Netscape inventions (1994).
In the beginning, the font tag could only change the size.
Version 1.2 brought framesets.
Version 2.0 introduced frames, animated gif support, and JavaScript. It did
not yet support background colors of table cells.
Here are some pages I still found on the web that are "enhanced for Netscape"…
…and some that proudly proclaim that they are not…
…and some that protested a bit more directly:
There even was an Enhanced for Netscape Hall of Shame once, but that's gone.
- Off by One
- "Yes, Another Free Web Browser" greets you on their homepage, in
large letters. It may be the world's smallest and fastest web browser
with full HTML 3.2 support. It may. In any case it has no stylesheet
support whatever, and few configuration options for the built-in
default stylesheet either. I liked that it displays pages a bit like
Mosaic 3.0, but only a bit.
- Opera
- is what I use now. It is a fully independent development, features
a multi-document interface that is really great once you get used to
it and excellent configurability. Since I use Opera, I have JavaScript
constantly turned off (should I need it, I can always activate it with
three keystrokes: F12-e-F5), and the web has suddenly become a peaceful
place with no popups.
Text only
As far as I know, this list is complete. I didn't find more than
these three (or four, if you count Bobcat separately).
- Lynx
- is the classical text browser, there are binary versions for most operating
systems, including DOS and Windows. It had been developed at the University of Kansas
independent from the Web to distribute campus information. A student named Lou Montulli added an Internet interface to the program, and released the web browser Lynx 2.0
in March, 1993.
- Lynx Users Guide
- Bobcat
is derived from a slightly earlier version of DOSLynx and
"aspires to be a text WWW browser." While Lynx requires atleast
a 386 Bobcat will run on any x86 machine.
- If you would like to learn about the
animal this browser was named after, check out the
World Lynx Home Page, dedicated
to the "only wild feline that still spans the breadth of both Old and New Worlds
in the northern hemisphere."
- w3m
- supports frames and tables. Binaries
for Linux, Sun OS and Windows (needs the Cygwin libraries).
- Links
- (that's the name of the browser) is
a czech project. It has very good table support. Unix,
OS/2, BeOS, MacOSX. There is also an unsupported ("If you find bug, don't
send a bug report and fix it yourself") Win32 version depending on the CygWin
libraries, but unlike w3m you can download the few you need right there
and do not have to install the whole set. I found the browser a bit slow
to react to keyboard input.
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Last modified 2003-11-17
