Re: easiest/best browser?

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord pegasus rutgers edu>]

On Mon, 3 Nov 1997, Ed Lawson wrote:

> Which WWW browser is easy to install and use under Linux (RH 4.2)?

anything that's in RPM format is fairly easy to install. Actually, I found
all the browsers pretty easy to install.

> Are any of the Netscape versions generally recognized as easier and/or less buugy

Netscape 3 is not as reliable as 4 in my experience. But netscape 4 is
more RAM greedy (you'll need some swap, I'm not kidding). Both of these
crashed quite often when I used the older version of X (3.1x) but function
more reliably under XFree86 3.3x. If you don't have XFree86 3.3, I'd
recommend it- it's a bug fix release and seems more reliable than its
predecessors.

Netscape 3 doesn't (reportedly) handle java very well, so you may want to
consider turning java off.

> that others.  Other than Red Baron, what other graphical browsers are available
> and work well?
> 
Grail- simple and very small graphical browser written in python. Rock
solid- I've never crashed it. Very small- only 360k.

Amaya- reasonable graphical browser. However, there are some things it
doesn't handle so well like, nested  tables. But essentially fairly
advanced, supports java +all standard html

Mosaic- unknown quantity- I've never used it.

Arena- It's a piece of junk. Get something else.

Emacs w3- This one crashes whenever I try to load an animated gif. Can
function as a text only browser, but doesn't handle graphics very well.

Lynx- 	You can view the inline images if you run it in X- just press "*"
to enable images, and you can view them just as you can view a link. Lynx
is not graphical, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. The fastest browser
and the only one with a responsive "stop" button.

Chimera- Light on features, buggy, not terribly fast.

My recommendations:

(1)	get grail- it doesn't take much space and it's free. You might
like it.

(2)	Netscape 4 is good if you have a lot of ram and swap and HD space.

(3)	Netscape 3 is a lightweight alternative to Netscape 4

(4)	Amaya is OK. Probably one of the harder to install (still pretty
easy to install though). It's very fussy html-wise- doesn't support any of
the non-standard extensions. If you run it from the command line, type
amaya &2>/dev/null to avoid it filling your term with error messages
(which it spits out when it sees html it doesn't like, ie all the time)

(5)	Never used Red Baron, so I can't comment.


-- Donovan