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Linux Software

Linux Web Browsers Reviewed 251

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
juniorboy writes "This is an article reviewing 5 web-browsers that run on Linux. " Really not a lot of surprises, but its itneresting that the number of reviews of this nature focusing on Linux are increasing.
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Linux Web Browsers Reviewed More

Linux Web Browsers Reviewed

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  • browsers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why isn't there more people out there working on these browsers? Think about it, the web is a HUGE part of the internet, and one that is fairly intertaining and usefull. Yet, there's a whole 5 browsers out there for linux? (well, 5 "working" ones) I mean, come on! Then again, there are only like, 3 browsers out there for windows. Don't think you can get much better than IE5 though. Except, need more advanced options.
  • I used a Solaris port of IE at one time and I was not terribly impressed. I don't think they would do a better job with the Linux port than with the solaris port.

  • ..."snake".

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Huh? I look at any graphics I want to with Lynx. Check out ZGV.
  • Links, my favorite text browser, does everything w3m and Lynx do, but better.

    Not everything:

    * Table borders in Links give a very "dotted" impression, while they look fine in w3m.
    * Links doesn't handle SSL, w3m does.
    * Links doesn't seem to handle bookmarks or cookies, w3m and lynx do.
    * w3m has mouse scroll support, Links doesn't.
    * w3m handles frames, Links doesn't.

    OTOH: Links (and lynx) does incremental loading. w3m doesn't.


  • I just downloaded the very latest version (v 0.82) and it seems that Links does indeed have cookie support now.

    I guess I should also clarify that by "doesn't handle frames", I meant that it handles them lynx-style, instead of rendering them.

    Anyway, get Links at http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links [mff.cuni.cz]
    or get w3m at http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/ [yamagata-u.ac.jp]
    or check out a quick text browser comparison at http://www.zinescene.org/home/browser.ht ml [zinescene.org]

  • Actually, people who have used HP-UX have wished that Mr. Packard would have lobbied harder to have his name put first.

    PH-UX (Which is the expletive of choice for anyone trying to compile anything on those stupid boxes. It almost makes AIX look standard.)

  • I haven't read the paper in question yet, but I just wanted to note that, AFAICR, one of the enhancements in mozilla is a re-write of the network layer to explicitly take into account downloading from multiple browser windows, and giving the active browser window more of the pipe. I don't know if this is in current builds or not.
    --
    My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
  • Just replying to myself to note that the reason why I hadn't read the paper yet was because I opened it in a new browser window. Isn't it ironic? Don't ya think?
    --
    My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
  • Moving between the keyboard and the mouse is the slowest part of the operation. Of course, considering that you almost never need to use a keyboard when browsing, the point is moot. This argument is most applicable to editors, where you have text input, icons/menus (hopefully with keyboard accelerators), and complex multi-panel/tree view windows (e.g. netscape's preferences and explorer's "Internet options", respectively). To operate most efficiently, you need to use both input methods. This is where the input-type switching latency kills you.
    --
    My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
  • Hmm... I know that optimizing for speed is best left until near the end of the project, but I doubt that optimizing for space is similar. The reason is because this is intimately tied to your data structures, and these are relatively hard to change at the last minute. OO design can help here, but some architectural decisions are hard to undo.

    personally, I think that the mozilla engineers will succeed.
    --
    My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

  • "Once running, this Netscape looks identical to the Windows versions. The menus and the preferences panel are the same. "

    Well, not quite. Expecially at higher resolutions, I can never find the help menu on the Linux version. Oh yeah... there it is: about as far away from the other menus as it can be, hidden up there in the right corner where I least expect it.

    I'm sure more regular Linux users don't have a problem with it, but I felt the urge to say something.
  • Does anybody know of the status of the Arachne browser? Arachne was excellent in DOS. A graphical browser that could run on a 286 with 1MB of RAM. I did it, with a (small-as-I-could-find) PPP packet driver. It used to crash quite often back then, but that was in its alpha stages. They were going to make one for Linux, although I read one time a suggestion to use Arachne in DOSEMU with dosnet. I never got that to work, though. I tried Arachne on a 486 with 8MB RAM that I acquired one time, and was almost shaking at how efficient it was on that old machine. Graphical browsing on a 286 just isn't comfortable, let me tell you :)

  • That is odd. For me W3M fired up emacs (actually my emacs wrapper) as set in $EDITOR. In the W3M config the editor is set to: [sensible-editor ] .

  • Thank you! I never really considered w3m before but tried it on your recomendation. I just installed W3M (apt-get install w3m) and it rocks! It displays Slashdot wonderfully. It uses my editer of choice to enter this comment. I probably won't use it for my day to day browseing, but I will be putting w3m on all my machines. Sometimes a text mode browser is exactly what I need. (like when trying to read those online docs when your hardware stops working.) All you Lynx users should atleast give w3m a try. At the very least it will show you what you have to add to the lynx codebase :-)
  • but I thought the point to Mozilla is that it was going to have a *smaller* footprint than, say, Netscape.

    Eh. I don't know if low memory consumption was one of the primary design goals, but if so they haven't reached it yet. I've compiled my own with sources from 4 days ago and it's distressingly worse than Netscape in terms of memory use.

    And that was with --enable-optimize and --disable-debug arguments passed to configure. I desperately want to see Mozilla succeed, and I've no doubt it will be a worthy rival to IE, but I'm not sure if it will be suitable for low-memory machines.

    On the other hand, I remember reading about it being adopted [netscape.com] for some low-cost "web appliances", which I have to assume won't be very memory-rich. So perhaps this is just pre-code optimization bloat. I sure hope so.

    Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty

  • >Leave your hand on the mouse

    How do you type that way? That's gotta be slower.

    Note, that I still prefer the mouse for web browsing, but a lot of time is in fact lost with moving the hand back and forth. You can't just leave your hand on the mouse unless you are just mindlessly clicking away.

    /me notes that I reached to the mouse to post this... :P
  • it would certainly make things easier to use if there was only one UI. But that's not linux is all about even though alot of people like to delude themselves into thinking that linux can be easy to use.
  • I don't care if there are 5 million reasons why you think that IE is the greatest browser in the universe. It's not going to be ported to linux. Ever. Let me repeat that. No IE for linux. So what do you do about it? 1) ditch linux because you feel that unless you have IE, everything will suck 2) brainwash yourself into thinking that IE sucks even though you just gave 5 millions reasons why IE rules 3) help out the mozilla project to make sure that it's a better browser than IE. Submit bugs, run it all day until you have to send a talkback report, read up on it by visiting mozillazine or mozilla.org, read the newsgroups-anything...heck maybe even check out the source code or design a cool skin for it. Mozilla is open source and designed by people who know how the web works so that it doesn't screw up under bad html (99% of all websites :))
  • #mozilla

    What network is this on?

    --

  • Though there are other text mode browsers, w3m & emacs/w3 spring immediately to mind.
  • Bull.

    IE on it's native platform (I used Win98) is flaming fast, about the same as netscape in the bugs department, and has full PNG suppport unlike netscape, which butchers the images or flings them off to an external viewer.

    I hate to say it, but the Linux/netscape combination is less stable than IE and Win98.
    M$ may be evil, and they may make a slow, buggy, single-user OS, but they have a very good web browser.
  • Another browser is set to do to w3m what w3m did to lynx - it's called "links" and it's available on Freshmeat. Really you have to see it in action.

    The only thing I miss in links is (a) http authentication (coming soon, I guess) and (b) w3m-like navigation.. but oh well, can't have it all..
  • please scream graphically so that we lynx users can ignore you. thanks!

    --thi

  • As a Linux user it pains me to agree. IE is fast (being built into 98 helps), functional, pretty (with full screen access), and just better except in the ftp department. I used to love Netscape to death until I saw what IE 4 and 5 could do in the HTML department. IE has terrible FTP which takes time to load and has a clunky interface at best. I somewhat prefer Netscape's mail in comparison to Outlook Express. Its strait to the point and does the job well. We definately need help in the web browser department. Preferably something with truetype font support (if Enlightenment can do it netscape can do it), Webpage rendering, they should steal IE's ability to save the entire webpage intact, and they should chose a better gui tool kit (Netscape does'nt seem to fit in with my other X apps). Mozzilla looks exciting and I can't wait to make that my main browser. KDE is also doing a fantastic job. There are so many beautiful apps in Linux and it is saddens me to see us do so poorly in the HTML environment.
  • Ever hear of statically linking libraries. I could write it using one gui toolkit and statically link the libraries it needs. Thus you can run it as long as your on the same chipset, and as long as you have X. I believe netscape does this. Microsoft can create there own gui toolset and use it for their browser solving that problem. (Note I do not believe they would ever do this).

    Multipule user interfaces do not keep video games, cell phones, etc, from being widely accepted. Windows may have a good user interface that even a monkey can use but how efficient is a monkey when it comes a user interface. More choices are better than one choice.
  • I tried "Konqueror" from KDE2's pre-release awhile ago. Although it's still a bit unstable, it's also not released yet and KDE has a reputation for releasing really stable stuff.

    It's already loaded with features: CSS1, Java, Javascript, plugins, embeddability (in KDE apps, or other apps in the browser), progressive page rendering (and pages actually look right!), a working font dialog (darn you, Netscape), drag-and-drop, and it's also a file manager. Oh, and its FTP mode is the best I've seen in _any_ Linux software, hands down.

    I hope to switch most of my browsing to it when KDE2 comes out.

    I don't have a lot of confidence in Mozilla, which has been big, slow, and non-functional since day 1 despite endless promises that "the nightly builds are way better, just wait for milestone n+1."

    Have fun
  • pretty much the same as lynxs..but with a few inhancements. its on Freshmeat
  • It's an example of one of the horrible multi-functional applications that do many things imperfectly.

    Well, it is meant to be a replacement for MS Office :o)

    (Sorry, couldn't resist it!)

    Tim
  • Not to make this a flamewar or anything, but...
    Links, my favorite text browser, does everything w3m and Lynx do, but better. Links supports background downloading, colors, and renders stuff (even slashdot) much better than I've seen either Lynx or w3m do.

    "If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
  • I'll have to second this. Links is an excellent text mode browser. I use it on Linux at work and on OS/2 on my home computer. Very fast and nice page formatting. There are some minor features that I miss from Lynx but the overall functionality makes up for them. I find myself using Netscape less and less.
  • I love Lynx as much as you do however... no frames and poor table hacks have made me use it less and less. I prefer w3m. It does almost everything better than Lynx. Also, if you'd like to see pictures, you don't have to save it and then view it again... you can just pipe it to svgalib plug.

    I wish Lynx and w3m combined their forces and made a single, console based, browser.


    --
    GroundAndPound.com [groundandpound.com] News and info for martial artists of all styles.
  • Ummm, try "Technology Preview." Translation: Pre-alpha.

    And that's really what it is. It's not here yet, by a loooong shot.
    --
    - Sean
  • Ummmm... NEXT!

    Hate to break it to you, bud, but these particular functions happen to be open and well-documented.

    I've used them myself on a couple of occasions to embed rudimentary browsing ability into some of my Windows Apps.

    It's called the Microsoft Internet Transfer Control, it exists as both standard (DLL) and ActiveX (OCX) libraries and is well supported and documented.

    Sorry, but you stuck out on that one. Learn what you're speaking about next time!
    --
    - Sean
  • My understanding is that a large part of the difference is that Mozilla is going for Java support (easily 1/2 a browser's capabilities) whereas Konqueror is not.

    Also, in a more generic sense of the same issue, K is "farming out" a lot of its capabilities to bits of KDE that already do it (image rendering, for example), while Moz has to do everything "in-house," as it can make no assumptions about the system it is running on -- it may be on a barebones X with Gtk, for all the developers know.
    --
    - Sean
  • It sounds appallingly difficult, also something absolutely essential. I read an article a while ago about a blind sysadmin which I assumed was a hoax - have you observed her using it? Hats off to the developers!
  • I'd agree that there are problems with Netscape under Linux. One of them seems to be to do with font display.

    A concrete example of what I'm talking about is trying to display classical Greek fonts. There do indeed exist Adobe-encoded classical Greek fonts and I can install them, use them, good example being Ismnin.pfa. I can go to edit->pref->fonts and select the installed font which I've preview with xfontsel. Now, I go to a nice online database of classical greek texts with morphological analyses and links, the Perseus Project and look at some work by Aeschinus [tufts.edu]. They have the option of displaying actual, greek text using the Ismini font if one uses the "Change Greek display" button at the top of the page and select the Ismini font. Does it work on Linux? No.

    It works on Macintosh damn well though.

    These worthy people (it's a great project) point out that they can't support everything, and indeed they do support several different Netscape versions on WinXX and Mac and several different IE versions.

    They claim in their Font Help section that there are fundamental problems with Netscape displaying different fonts.

    Anyone have any take on this? At the very least it would discourage anyone trying to use current tools used in Classics from using Linux and Netscape. A damn shame.

  • I'm going to give it a shot right now. I've always been put off running Lynx to be honest just because I like the pretty pictures - is that a new planetary science icon? Also, for other sites do you find that you lose much contextual information...picture equivalent to a 1000 words blah blah etc?


  • Hmmm, you seemed so happy with it I decided to try it too... Pretty cool stuf indeed. I'm sticking with w3m in text mode too.... One slight minus is that it ignores $EDITOR, and starts vi for editing textfields... I'm typing this in vi now, and what to get back to my jed. If you're reading this, :w is the way to store changes and quit...

    Hmmm, that just saved... Well, I can try :q now, everything should be saved with :w...


  • The weirdness! I'm using w3m/beta-991015...
  • Normally, I don't reply to ACs, but this is an exceptionally well-written post for an AC, so I will address it.

    Having to take your hand away from the keyboard, and all the way over to the mouse.

    Again: Leave your hand on the mouse. Use one hand for keyboarding, and one for mousing, and you'll find your browsing experience is much improved. If you refuse to do that, well, don't complain when the hammer makes a lousy screw driver.

    Having to physically move the mouse.

    Turn up your acceleration. I can cover the entire screen area of my 1600x1200 pixel desktop with small wrist movements. You're not using the mouse correctly; no wonder you have trouble with it.

    I'd like to see how long it would have taken you to write that post of yours if you'd had to click each letter on some onscreen keyboard with your beloved mouse.

    You're big on this whole "using a screwdriver to hammer in nails" technique, aren't you?
  • While I think your review is slightly(?!) terse, it does bring up an interesting idea...could we bug MS until we get a copy of IE for Linux?

    Honestly, while I love Linux to death, its ability to do web browsing is still somewhat restricted. NS 4.x has been probelmatic for most people I know, the only people I know who use lynx are masochists (j/k! calm dowm ;-) ), and Mozilla is still in the "getting there" stage. (I'm right now dloading Opera and going to try that in a few).

    Does anyone think that MS is even thinking of porting IE to Linux?
    --------------------------
  • w3m addendum

    w3m does support vi-styled movement

    w3m has gpm support (you can click on links). People who like to copy/paste strings may be annoyed by this, however.

  • In order to configure w3m, type 'o'. There's a place to specify your editor of choice in there (among other things).

  • Re:IE for Linux would be good... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On the contrary, I find Netscape a joy to use, although I have been using a lot of w3m recently. As an alternative, if you're not interested in fanciful plug-ins and java then try the built-in browser which comes with KDE. I have friends who swear by it. Some have mentioned that it is much, much faster than Netscape. Internet Explorer on Linux would be a nightmare to use. I've tried it previously on a Solaris machine and it's painfully slow. Microsoft's inexperience at producing an X application is showing, and worst the product introduces bloatware into un*x. Microsoft should stick to writing WinDOS products.

  • review ignores reliability (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is yet another feature-focused review tossed at the Linux community. I think we review things forgetting the biggest reason we started using Linux in the first place: Linux and BSD don't crash or behave unpredictably.

    If you want a feature-obsessed culture, you know where you can get it. And you know what problems come along with it. Java is a big deal. Rendering all pages readably is a big deal. Mayby plugins matter, too. But none of this is as important as a browser that doesn't crash and can view the simplest pages in a readable way.

    Netscape is legendary, on all platforms but especially on Linux, for crashing, for freezing sometimes just briefly but obnoxiously and others for several minutes, and for displaying text in an unreadable 4pt font that's locked down becuase their font size dialog box is broken. I don't care if I'm reading ACM articles or Slashdot or porn--problems like this make a browser simply unuseable. My technophobic neighbors stop by on occasion and ask to use ``the Internet,'' and literally half the time they end up writing these four-page-long gushing letters to their girlfriend in Hotmail, and Netscape bunges it up, crashes, and loses their email. I find myself using Lynx (and now w3m) not because my machine is too slow, but because it doesn't crash and the text in an xterm is big enough to read. Frankly I think that's exactly why a lot of people use Lynx. This is an absurd situation, and the review all but ignores it.

    I'd like to see a review that dealt more with stability than rendering quality in obscure situations.

  • I love the Web. I hate the Web. I love information, interactivity, communication. I hate banner ads, slow loads, and animated gifs. I've conquered most of these with three tools which work under Linux/xBSD and even legacy OSs:

    • Junkbuster [junkbuster.com]. It kills junk -- banner ads, sites you don't want to see, cookies. Do it. It's good.
    • Squid [freshmeat.net]. Caching proxy server. Stuff you hit often stays cached. Really good for static graphics, not so good for CGIs. Also good. You may also want to look at wwwoffle [freshmeat.net], an offline/online caching browser.
    • gat [columbia.edu], the Gif Animation Toggle. Works for Netscape or Opera, Linux or 'Doze. Prevents animated gif looping. You see one cycle of animation, then everything freezes. Very cool.

    I feel like my browser is mine again. Or, as the ads say: the Web is once again your friend.

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Gopher wasn't the web without graphics. Gopher was a hiarchy of text files, which could be accessed remotely. It didn't have hyperlinks. It wasn't a "web" of anything. It was a bunch of nodes. And, as such, it worked fine, but it wasn't quite enough to be revolutionary.

    Crossreferencing is far more important to the spread of the web than graphics, IMHO. With crossreferencing, adding something to the web increases the value of all the web, not just your site. Instead of the web being just someplace where you can put content to make it public, the web is a whole system. That, and the web came to be around the time when people started to be able to access it in large numbers.

    Graphics aren't unimportant, but they weren't even much of an option when gopher was around, and they weren't very exciting when the web was starting either.

  • The Solaris and HP/UX versions of IE all suck rocks.

    If you want to use IE under Linux, I've managed to run IE 3.0 for 16-bit Windows under Wine (the colors are fixed now, yay!). I can't manage to install IE 4.0 or 5.0 yet--they seem to require a network install.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • You should give w3m a shot as well. lynx is nice -- I used it for a while -- but w3m, combined with low available resources, knocked Netscape out of the picture on my computer. It renders tables and frames exactly as they'd appear in a graphical browser (except, of course, that the pictures aren't present), makes it easy to view an inline image, and supports mousing in an xterm. I'm sure it does more that I'm not thinking of :)

    The only real problem with w3m is that it's sometimes unstable and/or has odd/inconsistent responses..mainly due to the fact that it's still in development. But most of these are minor annoyances (for example, the context menu is entirely broken) and don't interfere with browsing.

    Daniel
  • IHMO, what's most shocking to me is the high demand for Browser Plugins, and the obscurity and difficulty of getting them working with Linux Browsers.
  • Oh no! Here we go... you can't mention Vi without [X]Emacs. It too can browse the web!
  • This is the kind of crap that I hate seeing. People say, "The web was only meant for text," and "Graphics suck, they make the web slow." You know, when the first books came out, they had only words in them, no pictures (unless you count the letters as pictures). But then discovered that you could put images in books as well, too, and even though it cost more and took more time to print, the did it. Why did they do it? Because graphically it was more enticing. Sometimes it does absolutely nothing to enhance the story, but sometimes, they're very beneficial.

    Slashdot readers talk, on one hand, about e-commerce and how it's revolutionizing our lives and how it'll be great when we have this perfect 'Netcentric society. On the other hand, they, they say, "Woe is me, the 'Net's changed so much since I was using back in the day!" Why do companies put graphics on their web page? Because it helps to make the web site more appealing graphically. Most Companies are defined by their corporate image. That's a visual representation. Microsoft in text and Microsoft in logo are two very different things. I would hate to go to a web site of a company that I use and not see their logo, because as a consumer, it's comforting to know that I have the right site, and that image confirms that. I'd hate to go to a friend's web site and read about how great his trip to Spain was and not be able to immediately pull up the images he's talking about. I can do that because of the power of graphics. I miss out on something when I use w3m or similar text-based graphics. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and who knows how many a moving picture can be.

    If a Shockwave plugin means I get a presentation explaining a something to me in less bits than a similar animated GIF, great. If an animation shows me what the product looks like more clearly, that's great, too. If someone decides to simply scan their brochue and upload it, then yes, that sucks. But do not look down on Shockwave and GIFs and similar changes in the way that the Web is used. It's revolutionizing the world, and I for one am glad that people are making it at least a little nicer to look at.

    Except for this guy [somethingawful.com]. That's just awful, both in terms of images and in terms of text.
  • What would be great is to have IE's rendering engine ported to Linux in an efficient manner. I suspect that this will all be irrelevant when the new Gecko engine is finalized. Basically, I use my Windows machine to browse the web, and the reason is solely because IE5 has a very speedy rendering engine and pretty solid support for upcoming CSS1/p/2 HTML4.0 standards. Yes, they've added in their own tags and they do support deprecated information, but that's in addition to standards support.

    I can do without the extra infringement on my OS and the tendency for it to crash after rebooting from Windows Update.
  • In the 15th century, when illustrations were first placed into books, to take an image and put it in a book involved making a woodcut or an engraving -- a nontrivial amount of work, not one that would be undertaken simply to make a book "more enticing." I find it more likely that illustrations would be published with a purpose: maps, art, etc. If it did "nothing to enhance the story," I doubt that that publishers would have gone to so much trouble.

    There were illustrations in books before the 15th century, and they were done by monks for religious texts. Two reasons: show the glory of God; explain the illiterate exactly what the page was about. And there's the famous hand-done first-letters; incredibly difficult and time-consuming for the effect of simply making the first letter of the paragraph look a little nicer.

  • I use w3m and emacs/w3 everyday at work(e/w3 for at least 5 yrs). I am really impressed with w3m. IMHO, it blows lynx out of the water. While emacs/w3 is slower, I spend most of my time in emacs, so the integration is nice and I have been able to configure it to work with my company's proxy. I've tried to get w3m to work, and for some reason it doesn't.

    I also believe that emacs/w3 will display images with XEmacs, but I'm not sure if it does with GNU Emacs. William Perry has done a great job!

  • I believe that Opera is going to release a text based web browser for linux. sounds cool nice table and frame layout supposedly. anyone use it yet?
  • Of course it has! The browser, Links [mff.cuni.cz] is an amazing text-based piece of work. It supports frames, tables, the mouse through gdm, looks and performs well. It even has pull-down menus that hide when not in use. Helper applications are supported for viewing graphics or even Realaudio. What more could you need?
  • I'd rather not download either of them.

    A site whose only options are a 30K flash or a 100K animated GIF is not a well-designed site.
    ________________________________
  • Oddly enough there hasn't arrisen (or at least to my knowledge) any other text-based browser to rival Lynx. While this may seem trivial the very nature of Lynx is often one of it's greatest assets. It can be easily used from public terminals by connecting into your box so you can use your own settings and bookmarks. It runs much faster than any of the graphical broswers. Most importantly it's often an excellent resource when you've gotten your modem or nework card up and running under linux, but still are having trouble getting X going. If a text-based rival to Lynx was to come out the functionality of the text-based browser market could only improve making these tools almost equal to graphical browsers for everyday surfing.
  • Although, Linux by far is my favorite OS, and KDE is my favorite Window Manager (Of any OS). However, there is no good REAL WORLD graphical browser for Linux. Ya, Lynx is the best in text, and the best of any browser, but many pages will reject text only browsers. Netscape sucks. On my end, the Java is still slow, crash prone, and does not work right half the time. Opera for Win32 is nice. Its fast and does everything the other do, but its not out for Linux yet. IE is good, but it does not work in Linux. Modzilla looks good, but still is beta (Does the Java work?). Everything else does not hold up, not even the KDE built in one (No Java).
    What Linux needs is a real browser. Right now it looks likes Modzilla and Opera are the two up and coming browsers. I wish IE would be ported, but that ain't never going to happen.
  • There should be a stable Mozilla within a few (~2-3) months. There should be a branded Netscape based upon Mozilla within about the same time frame. This is my opinion, judging from the Mozilla chatter on #mozilla and on the news.mozilla.org newsgroups. YMMV.
  • I use Netscape 4.7 on Linux with no problems.

    The load is faster than Netscape on Windoze. The crashing problems I had were with the glibc version, which appears to be really buggy (perhaps a problem with threads?)
    Switching to the libc5 version cleared up a lot.
    (I have Caldera 2.2, which uses glibc 2.1)

    Incidentally I'm posting from Mozilla M12. Its come a long way, but still has a long way to go. Perhaps there will be a stable version by the end of the year (guessing, don't really know)


  • Well, I'm trying /. in Lynx now and it seems OK. It's a little less intuitive than the graphical version, but still fine.
  • I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 and Emacspeak the Web was closed to her.

    I've several blind friends who prefer IE over any other web browser, including Lynx. A speech program like "Jaws" works quite well with IE. Besides images, the hardest things are frames and forms. Navigating frames is quite difficult in Lynx, but much less in IE. And while forms remain difficult, they suck less in IE then on another browser.

    -- Abigail

  • Me: Leave your hand on the mouse

    You: How do you type that way? That's gotta be slower.

    Sure. But you see, most of my browsing isn't typing. I'm in input mode, sucking up information from the web. For the occasional keystroke during browsing, one-handed typing is just fine.

    /me notes that I reached to the mouse to post this...

    Sure. But that isn't browsing. That's entering a comment. When I switch tasks from browsing to typing, I put both hands back on the keyboard. Isn't that hard. The occasional task switch from mouse to keyboard and back again isn't significant, compared to the benefits you get from browsing with the mouse.

    Of course, I really would prefer to have three arms, but until cyberbioengineering gets a lot more advanced, I'll have to live with it this way. :)
  • I do the exact same thing at present, and I find it to be an unacceptable solution to the parallel browsing problem, because it's so resource hungry and such a pain to manage all those windows (not to mention that probably 1 out of 5 times I close one of my open windows in netscape, it closes ALL my open windows. THIS DRIVES ME NUTS!).

    Here are a few tips I have for Linux+Netscape users who have these problems:

    * Download Netscape Navigator only -- not Communicator. The extra functions of Composer and Messenger appear to significantly decrease stability. I'm not saying I never have a crash, but it happens pretty infrequently. The Navigator-only version also has a smaller memory footprint.

    * Close windows with the "File -> Close" menu command or the [ALT]+[W] keystroke combination. For some reason, using the standard window frame decoration "Close" icon seems to be more likely to cause a crash.

    * If you are using Red Hat, make sure your fonts are sane. Your font catalogue in /etc/X11/fs/config should include all of the following:
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,
    /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,
    /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
    Make sure you have the appropriate RPM packages installed, that your font server is running, and that your XFree FontPath is pointed at your font server. This smoothes out some things, especially Java.

    * Consider disabling the Java Virtual Machine (not JavaScript (well, you can disable it if you want to, but you don't have to)). Netscape's JVM still has trouble.

    I agree that you shouldn't have to do this, but doing so has significantly improved stability for me. As the subject line suggests, it functions as a stopgap measure until a better Linux browser is available.

    (BTW: I read your white paper. I've seen pre-caching software available for MS Windows. It isn't as smart as your system, but it is there. You might be able to coax something like a caching proxy server into doing what you want. Run HTTP through your proxy. Write a small program to accept a Netscape link via DND, and tell the proxy to fetch it ahead of time. Klunky, but it might work.)
  • I am sorry. I know how much our community is depending on Mozilla succeeding but can anyone verify that Mozilla is using 30+ megabytes of debugging code?

    The more I hear this the more shallow it seems. I mean what use is debugging code when the debugging code is that intrusive in the program? Alpha or not, most software starts small then increases as features are added. Or is my impression wrong and software is bloated shortly after development begins and then gets trimmed of 20% by beta?

    I would really like someone to verify that Mozilla is as bloated as it has been because of the debugging code. I would also ask why would that much debugging code be needed?

    **Or is Mozilla very large and resource hungary without debugging code as well.**

    I am sorry but I have many doubts. I really hope I am wrong. But I fear there is less substance in the "debugging code" scapegoat than a hopeful myth.

    Please someone put me in the know.
  • I choose to avoid some sites because of the "shove it down your throat" philosophy. There any number of people who don't know they are not good web designers. The nice thing about straight HTML is that it mostly enforces some basic interface to the Web. Now if Joe Designer does his page in Flash, I have little idea what to expect. Do I click on this? Is it an outside link? Will it pop up it's own window? How long must I wait before the text becomes readable and quits dancing?

    I can't wait until XML becomes ubiquitious so that two-thirds of the web designers learn what the difference between content and presentations is. Then maybe I can force my own stylesheet to the web.

    One can dream.

  • That's right, mixing up layout and structure has caused quite a mess.

    I hope website designers (at least of those sites that I care about ;-)) start rethinking their appoach. There is a chance with WAP and all kinds of hand-held devices that we will see content providers storing their stuff as XML and creating several versions from it - HTML with fancy graphics, text-only HTML, WML for your cell phone, etc. Not necessarily because it is the _right_ approach (from a W3C point of view), but because it is the easiest solution for them in the long run.

  • lynx has this big advantage, also, that it can make something sensible out of Unicode. Netscape is just fscking worthless in this respect: it doesn't even understand — (the em-dash character). Unfortunately, I use — regularly in my web documents (no bugware!), so they're about unreadable with Netscape. Same for “ (the English-style open quotes) and so on (though I tend to compromise and use `` instead of “ or possibly the French double quotes ).

    lynx run in an xterm with wide chars enabled and a fixed-width Unicode font is so far the best solution I've found to viewing Unicode characters correctly.

    (Note: Unicode is not just useful in foreign languages. Some punctuation signs like the ellipsis, or, as I mentioned above, the em-dash and the quotes, are to be found in Unicode. As a matter of fact, Unicode is more useful for English than for French, because nearly all the French characters are in ISO-8859-1, and the French-style quotes are there, whereas the English-style quotes are far away in Unicode tables.)

    lynx has its irritating features, though. It can't render tables, and that's a pain. w3m at least does that correctly. Also, lynx displays <i> as underline: that's stupid, <i> is italics, not emphasis (emphasis is <em>), and if it can't do italics, it should do nothing and ignore the tag. And it doesn't understand <dfn> (now that should probably be underlined).

    And lynx completely ignores CSS. Agreed, in text mode, there isn't much you can get from CSS, but at least the margin definitions wouldn't be too hard to implement, and that would be useful.

  • There is lynx, sure, but there is w3m, and there is..ther is..elvis! Yes, elvis, the hyper-improved-and-two-million-features-added-vers ion-of-vi browses html files instead of editing them! And you can always pipe your graphics through with zgv if you have SVGALib (which some people seem to dislike *shrug*)...and oh i almost for got...
    don't you use telnet to browse the web? :)

    $ telnet some.host.com 80
    GET /
    HTTP 1.1 [you know the rest]
    ...
    $

    And heck! The telnet-way of browsing is the easiest of all to install! its in netbase! :)
    #include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1); }return(0);}
  • Does this mean we have to revise the old aphorism
    "Every program written at MIT expands until it can read email"
    to
    "Every program written at MIT expands until it can browse the Web"
    ???
    s/MIT/GNU/g if you like.
    --
  • I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 [indiana.edu] and Emacspeak [cornell.edu] the Web was closed to her. While it is true that the blind are a niche market, there is an environment out there that does give them access to the Internet, and it is only available because of free software!

  • That's your experience versus my experience. I've found quite bit of Director based content in my time. For example, Adam Sandler released a Director based movie called "The Peeper", which I qute enjoyed. There were quite a few amusing little Director games on mediadome when it was still around.

    The whole thing is a matter of YYMV, though. My original point wasn't that these things are necessary for everyone, but the lack of plugins does make surfing under linux not as good as under Win32. In an age where more and more applications are being moved onto web servers, a factor in OS domination will be the Web browsing experience.

    As an aside, this is why reviews like this one are important to linux. It tells people that linux has decent browsers. After a win32 person reads such a review, they may say to themselves "Hey, all I really do is web surf on my computer, maybe I should try out linux as my OS".

    As for not being part of the standard, the HTML 4 loose DTD [awpa.asn.au] has object [awpa.asn.au] as part of the standard. Thus embedding objects is part of the standard. Shunning a site because they embed a Director movie is like shunning a site because they link to a PDF.

  • It's odd how people forget that gopher was the web without graphics. Gopher never took off nearly to the extent that the web did, and gohperspace a pretty much ignored subset of webspace now. Yeah, it might because http understans MIME, but IMO it's because of the graphical nature of the web that it's doing so much better.

    BTW, I think you meant to link here [somethingawful.com], and I agree: aweful.

  • OpenText [www.opentext.com] used to have a blind developer (as in programmer) working for them. He may even still be there. Basically, he had a VT like terminal that would speak to him. It doesn't surprise me that there are blind websurfers, especially because of the lawsuit against AOL for ADA Non-Complience [slashdot.org]

  • Last i checked alot of plugins speed up web browsing. Would you rather load a 100K animated GIF or a 30K Flash object? Sure the first time download is alot for the flash plugin, however it does let you save _alot_ of bandwidth in the long run if sites use it right.
  • Shit. Moderated down, because I posted something unpopular. *sigh*

    "Linux will never be the most popular desktop OS until it has the best browser."

    I personally don't think Linux stands much more than a snowball's chance in hell at becoming the most popular desktop OS (in anything resembling its present form), but your point is well taken. Browsing The Web has been the biggest source of computer sales ever, and Linux is without a decent browser. All I was suggesting is that (a) IE is worse than Netscape (which it definitely is, in my experience), (b) MS isn't likely to port it, and (c) in the time it would take to do so, Mozilla and Opera will both be available.

    So yeah, the browser situation for linux sucks, but porting IE isn't going to help anything.

  • OK, since you asked, the least I can do is answer.

    1) On any computer I've used IE on (usually NT-based, I'll admit) the browser has frozen up for 10 seconds to two minutes at a time. Worse, it locks up the ENTIRE COMPUTER! Netscape has never done that to me.
    2) Netscape crashes far less for me than IE. This seems to be a case of, 'your mileage may vary.'
    3) Fonts? I don't have any problems with fonts. They look the same in both browsers.
    4) IE5 may have finally started following some standards. IE4, in its day, was the single worst browser available for the W3C and CSS standards. Regardless, the latest version of both are pretty weak. MS was, last time I checked, trying harder than Netscape to push its own non-standard HTML extensions as well.

    But it's all splitting hairs. Both are poor, bloated, slow browsers. Opera and Mozilla can't come fast enough for me.
  • Linux is managing to do what the linux ocmmunity really wanted... become more mainstream and make in roads into the M$ server market.

    Given the success of Linux over the last 12 months why does /. still seem amazed whenever it appears in the mainstream press? Is success that difficult to cope with? :)

    Psike.

  • They all suck.

    Ok, now let's work on making a real browser. Maybe we could outsource the IE team, I heard they are worried about their stock these days.

  • Browses the web fine, and a whole lot (maybe too much) more. Free, with support from a large, quality focused vendor. Duh.
  • I think Konqueror will be amongst the good choices possible once KDE2 is released. With java and javascript support it will hopefully be a mature browser. For current CSS support progress, take a look at http://www.mosfet.org. Those CSS-test-links certainly shows netscape's flaws!
  • As, on average, the text content to graphic content on a webpage is 1:30, and considering that most of what slashdot is about is text, and that most of us use Linux or some form of Unix or other, and given that Lynx is freely available to be used on such systems, and because Lynx is a text-only browser, I believe that, if all of us used Lynx in our day-to-day slashdotting, we could minimise the slashdot effect.
  • I agree that it is bad to "integrate" the browser to the OS in the way that MS has done. But lets not forget that the browser is the most important and heavily used application. Few people will give a low-performance browser "a fair chance" just because it works a on a cool OS. Also, shouldn't Netscape be able to exploit a total understanding of the linux OS to make their browser faster and better? Some of the browsers for linux mentioned in the article are a total joke. NO ONE would ever use Amaya to browse the web. Lynx is only for emergency situations or for people who have no choice. Netscape cannot compare to IE. Yes, it is "unfair" to compare the two browsers on different platforms, so what? The computer industry is based on unfairness. The only way microsoft will be buried is if people are given *better* alternatives. This has nothing to do with fairness. In my opinion, the article was mushy and never got to what should be the prime point: All general purpose browsers for linux suck, and MUST be replaced something better. That said, mozilla seems very promising. I hope that it can develop into a stable browser soon.
  • As far as I can tell, the point of Open Source and Free Software, and ultimately the linux mentality is on of collaboration.

    Well, then, collaborate. If you can't/wont contribute (code) to the solution, quit bitching. If you don't like a particular browser, write yourself a new one or contribute to a project like Mozilla.

    I personally found the article interesting. Was it perfect? Nope. Was the guy wrong about some things? Maybe. Some things said were opinions *gasp*.

    -FP

  • E-commerce, text, and graphics (Score:3)

    by KMSelf ( 361 ) <karsten@linuxmafia.com> on Saturday January 15, 2000 @01:39PM (#1368784) Homepage
    When it comes to steak and sizzle, the problem is sites which confuse the two. Graphics and additional content are useful, but they're value-added over basic, accessible text. Accessible by people (including the disabled), accessible by machines (including, say, intelligent shopping agents), accessible by a variety of computing devices, including Palm and other handhelds, phone (text-to-voice -- unless you want a pel-by-pel breakdown of that gif), and a variety of devices whose display dimensions, formats, and characteristics are currently unknown.

    The power of the web is its ubiquity -- access from anywhere, anytime, without a requirement for proprietary solutions -- hardware or software -- at either the sending or receiving end of the channel. While high-speed access is going to build its way into the fixed-site (and even some limited-range wireless) nodes, universal access from anywhere has to deal with the limited bandwidth and channel space of wireless.

    Smart design is simple design.

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • Answer (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @02:54PM (#1368785) Homepage Journal
    I quote a bit of text from John Walker's 'Hacker's Diet' pages, which should be taken as a hint towards the answer you seek:
    "Why So Many Versions?

    The Hacker's Diet spreadsheets were originally developed in 1990 with Excel 2.1 on Microsoft Windows 3.1. Some of the components in the package use Excel macros which are, for the most part, relatively simple and straightforward compared to those found in a typical corporate Excel application.

    Nonetheless, thanks to Microsoft's practice of "strategic incompatibility" and utter contempt for the investment made by their customers, these rudimentary macros have required specific modifications for every single new version of Excel in the decade since they were originally released, and things have gotten worse, not better, since Microsoft introduced the new Visual Basic programming language for Excel (itself a cesspool of release-to-release incompatibility), due to what appears to be a deliberate Microsoft strategy to destabilise the original macro language in order to force customers onto the new one (at a cost to Microsoft corporate clients I estimate on the order of a hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars).

    The upshot of this is that while in a reasonable world spreadsheets and macros would be capital, created once and then used thereafter with no additional attention, in the world of Microsoft, software developed for their platforms is a "wasting asset" more like a stock option with an strike date about 18 months from the time it was developed. By then Billy Boy or one of his Kode Kiddies will have changed their mind about something (or simply introduced a gratuitous incompatibility, whether for strategic reasons, due to sloppiness or incompetence, or just for the Hell of it) which pulls the carpet out from under the application and its users when they "upgrade" to a more recent Microsoft release (which is increasingly involuntary as more and more new computers are sold pre-loaded with the latest releases of Microsoft operating systems and applications, offering the customer no option but to pay the "Microsoft Tax" bundled in the cost of the system)."

    Does that help?

  • Large footprint? (Score:3)

    by Griim ( 8798 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @11:53AM (#1368786) Homepage
    In the last part of the second half of the review, he states:

    Mozilla is looking particularly exciting, although it has a foot-print that may be simply too large for some users.

    Is this true? I haven't tried Mozilla in some time (although I will once it's in official beta), but I thought the point to Mozilla is that it was going to have a *smaller* footprint than, say, Netscape.

  • Re:StarOffice (Score:3)

    by crush ( 19364 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @11:07AM (#1368787)
    ugh. Takes over entire desktop, crashes more than Netscape. ugly. It's an example of one of the horrible multi-functional applications that do many things imperfectly. Sort of like the way Netscape has developed actually.

  • Question (Score:3)

    by YoJ ( 20860 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @01:00PM (#1368788) Journal
    Can someone answer me this question please? I really want to know. Why don't people make browsers for Windows that are as good as IE by using the "built-in" routines that are "part of the OS"? Why can't Netscape use the IE routines (since they are part of the OS and are freely available) and then add cool stuff on top of that? I know that Gecko is competing with the rendering engine of IE, but in the meantime until Mozilla is finished why not embrace and extend IE?

    -Nathan Whitehead

  • Keyboard vs mouse - that old thing again? (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @04:43PM (#1368789) Homepage Journal
    The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse...

    Oh, come on. That old argument again? One might as well say that a screw driver in inherently faster then a hammer.

    Go to a page with dozens of links on it [slashdot.org], pick a link at random, and compare the navigation between Lynx and Navigator:

    Navigator
    1. Point with a minor wrist movement.
    2. Click once.

    Lynx
    1. Down arrow.
    2. Down arrow.
    3. Down arrow.
    ... [edited for brevity] ...
    31. Down arrow.
    32. Down arrow.
    33. Press [ENTER].

    Even if you turn on the link numbers, I find a simple point-and-click is just as fast as entering in a two or three digit number and pressing [ENTER]. Not to mention a lot easier. To say nothing of those interfaces which cannot easily be accomplished in text mode [mapquest.com].

    Since I'm here, let me also say...

    1. download - hit d, Enter.

    Click.

    2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter

    [ALT]+[S]. Two in Navigator compared to three for Lynx. :)

    3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter

    [ALT]+[K]. Again, Navigator wins.

    4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter

    Press. Point. Release.

    show source - \

    [ALT]+[U]. Lynx wins by a mere keypress here.

    6. Next page - space

    Ditto.

    revious page - b

    [PGUP]

    first page ctrl-A
    last page ctrl-E

    Here you score a few points. These two work flawlessly with [CTRL]+[HOME] and [CTRL]+[END] under Windoze. For some reason known only to Netscape, Navigator on Linux ignores those keystrokes. Grrrrr.

    reload is ctrl-R

    [ALT]+[R] here, close enough.

    redraw is ctrl-L

    Not applicable. :)

    quit is Q

    [ALT]+[Q] to quit Navigator. I usually have it open all the time, so I don't do it much.

    What's the keystroke to open a new window in Lynx? Oh yes, I forgot -- Lynx limits you to one window at a time. :) Which, for me, is unaccaptable. I middle-click as often as I left-click, sometimes. I usually have no less then four browser windows open at once. More then ten is not uncommon. (And, no, running multiple instances of Lynx in an xterm is not the same thing.)

    I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slow down to reach for a mouse every now and then.

    Well, here's a tip -- stop using that screw driver to hammer in nails. Put one hand on the mouse, and keep it there. :) Keep your other hand over the keyboard. Ta-da!

    Lynx is a fine browser, and has a lot of things going for it, but let's not by silly, here.

  • 'Tis not the browser -- 'tis the ISVs (Score:3)

    by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @04:57PM (#1368790) Homepage Journal
    The thing that keeps me using IE is the fact that can go to a page that has a Flash object on it and IE will say "You don't have Flash, do you want it installed?" and it automagically does so if I say yes.

    This is, in no way, shape, or form, a browser issue. This is an issue with ISV (Independent Software Vendor) support. ISVs are not supporting Linux, so you don't get your plugin.

    Don't complain about the browser -- go gripe to those ISVs. You like their plugins so much, but when you ask them to support your platform of choice, they say, "F**k off". Personally, any company that does that to me, doesn't get my business. Maybe you like being told that, but I don't.

    Blaming this on the browser is like blaming your car maker that the local gas station's service sucks.

    (For the less-informed: Netscape on Linux supports that sort of "You don't have XYZ, but you need it, get it?" dialog, and has for quite some time.)

  • Re:Shortest, most accurate linux web browser revie (Score:3)

    by helix_r ( 134185 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @11:40AM (#1368791)
    Linux will never be the most popular desktop OS until it has the best browser. You cannot underestimate the importance of a good browser. People _buy_ computers so that they can surf the web. Right now the browser situation for linux is deplorable. Did anyone ever stop to wonder how many people bought redhat, and then were turned off to *LINUX* because the ugly fonts and sluggish behavior and constant crashing of Netscape? YES, that DOES happen. If one more geek talks about the merits of lynx as though it is a viable alternative to a graphical browser, I will scream.

  • IE for Linux would be good... (Score:4)

    by Skim123 ( 3322 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @11:07AM (#1368792) Homepage
    I use to use Linux quite a bit, but one thing that really bugged me was its web browser support. Netscape in Linux absolutely is the most offending program I've ever used. It's slow to load, having multiple windows open and downloading content is painful, and too often Netscape will crash, just disappearing from X. Using Netscape in Linux is almost as painful as using Netscape on a Mac.

    Netscape in a Windows environment is easier to use, although I still prefer IE. I know I would boot into Linux much more often if it had a reasonable browser. (end rant)

  • lynx and w3m (Score:4)

    by Rainy ( 17894 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @10:47AM (#1368793)
    Author is quick to dismiss lynx as a browser for text-only terminals. I think he's just plain wrong. Quite a few people assume that lynx is for old 386's that can't handle X + Netscape. Not so. I have p200 64mb ram running X and stand-alone Netscape is perfectly fast and almost never crashes, and yet I choose to use lynx in 99% of cases. The reason is that lynx has a much better UI. First of all, navigation is done with keyboard - which is inherently faster than mouse. Secondly, you can use hjkl vim-style keys to respectively go back/down one link/up one link/follow link. This means you can surf while having your hands on home-row, which is the most reachable and convenient place when it comes to interfacing with the computer. Things that you use all the time while surfing are equally easy:
    1. download - hit d, Enter.
    2. save rendered page to disk - hit p, enter, enter
    3. add current doc to bookmark - a, d, enter
    4. add current link to bookmark file - a, l, enter
    5. show source - \
    6. Next page - space, previous page - b, first page ctrl-A, last page ctrl-E.
    7. You can set option to display a number in front of every link - so that when you want to jump to a certain link in the middle of the page, you simply type in that number and hit enter. Works faster than mouse, to be sure.
    few misc things - reload is ctrl-R, redraw is ctrl-L, quit is Q.
    w3m doesn't display page while loading, and misses some other things like vi style navigation (which can be easily hacked in the code), but can display tables/frames. Note that both have ssl (in lynx you have to apply a patch, that'll take ~5 mins).
    How important is all this? Well, now that I use lynx daily, I *can* use Netscape but it feels like a huge slowdown to reach for a mouse every now and then.

  • Still needs better plugin support (Score:4)

    by Fjord ( 99230 ) on Saturday January 15, 2000 @11:08AM (#1368794) Homepage Journal
    The thing that keeps me using IE is the fact that can go to a page that has a Flash object on it and IE will say "You don't have Flash, do you want it installed?" and it automagically does so if I say yes. And while Linux has Flash, there's no Shockwave for linux (according to macromedia [macromedia.com]). While plug-ins are the main force behind web surfin, a lack of plug-ins still makes web surfing on linux second rate.

  • Have you tried w3m? (Score:5)

    by gregstoll ( 90319 ) <776wripc001.sneakemail@com> on Saturday January 15, 2000 @09:29AM (#1368795) Homepage
    I used to use Lynx for text-based browsing, but now I use w3m [freshmeat.net] - it renders frames in one window, which I don't think Lynx can do, and other neat stuff. Check it out!

    Check out Greg's Bridge Page!

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