Appendix A. Other Web Browsers

I love Firefox, and I hope I've shown you enough reasons in this book that you now love Firefox too. I also love my dog Libby, but I still have to occasionally spend time away from her; in the same way, I use Firefox for the vast majority of my web-browsing needs, but not exclusively. Sometimes I just want a change of pace, sometimes (increasingly rarely) I run up against a web site that just doesn't work right in Firefox, and sometimes Firefox is acting kinda wonky due to some new extension I've installed or new trick I've tried. During those times, I look to other browsers.

Just say no (when you can)

I still avoid IE like the plague, unless I absolutely must use it. This almost always means just one site: Microsoft's Windows Update, which forces victims to use Internet Explorerthe most insecure major web browser available todayto install security updates on their computers!

In the rest of this appendix, I'll look at some important web browsers that you should know about. Not all of them run on Windows, and this is often a good thing, as it allows them to focus on the strengths of the operating systems on which they've chosen to focus.

I can't cover every browser available today, as that would make this appendix the same length as the rest of the book. The following are some browsers I'm not going to cover. Feel free to check them out if you're interested:

Amaya (http://www.w3.org/Amaya/): An open source browser sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), this is both a web page viewer and a web-authoring tool. It tends to incorporate new web technologies before most other browsers, which is not surprising, since the W3C is the source of the specifications for most of those technologies. Unfortunately, Amaya is an incredibly ugly browser that renders most web pages a bit strangely. As a demonstration tool, it's great; as a daily web browser, forget it.
AOL (http://www.aol.com): The web browser built into the painfully ubiquitous AOL client software is really just Internet Explorera dumbed-down, reduced-functionality Internet Explorer, but IE nonetheless. Yes, even though AOL has owned Netscape for over half a decade, its software still depends on its biggest rival for its web-browsing engine. Amazing...but then, AOL never ceases to amaze.
Avant (http://www.avantbrowser.com): This browser is just a fancy GUI on top of IE. You get all the underlying problems of IElousy security and anemic support for standards, principallywith a pretty shell. Not a big enough improvement to warrant its use, in my opinion.
Epiphany (http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/): In the same way that Avant is just IE with a pretty interface, Epiphany is Gecko, the rendering engine that drives Firefox and Mozilla, with an interface designed for Linux users who use the GNOME GUI. Translation for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux KDE users: if you'd like a totally bare-bones browser with no interesting features, or if you like browsing like it's 1996, you'll love Epiphany.
Galeon (http://galeon.sourceforge.net): See Epiphanythe GNOME team has deprecated development of Galeon in favor of the above browser. Galeon is still under development, but its future is a bit uncertain.
iCab (http://www.icab.de): Although this German-created browser for Mac OS has some interesting features, especially error reporting for incorrectly coded web pages, it's in use by only a tiny fraction of users.
K-Meleon (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net): K-Meleon is Epiphany for Windows users: a bare-bones shell around Gecko. If you want utter simplicity and few features, try out K-Meleon.
Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org): I discussed Mozilla at length in Chapter 1Chapter 1. It's not bad, but it's a big program, with a web browser, email program, address book, web page editor, and more. If you want a complete suite of programs, Mozilla may be perfect for you; if you want a lean, mean, extensible web browser, Firefox is a better choice.
MyIE2, now Maxthon (http://www.maxthon.com): Another IE frontend shell. See Avant.
Netscape Navigator 4 (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/archive47x.jsp): An ancient and awful browserbuggy, unstable, and with very poor support for basic web standards. No one should be using Netscape 4 in this day and age.
Netscape 6 (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/archive60x.jsp): Based on beta versions of Mozilla, this one should be avoided. Besides its bugginess, it's also heavily AOL-ized, with built-in links to AOL, AOL bookmarks, AOL Instant Messenger, and more.
Netscape 7 (http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/): Netscape 7 isn't bad, if you have to use itAOL has removed a lot of the junk that was in the way in previous versions, and also improved the interface. Interestingly, at the time of this writing AOL is working on a new version of Netscape...to be based on Firefox! (See http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article5691.html for details.)

Now that those are out of the way, let's look at some web browsers that are worth your attention. There's a big, beautiful world of web browsers out there, and these are some of the shining lights!