The Mac Night Owl, Gene
Steinberg, has posted a couple of columns recently about his Web
browser preferences. I find that people's taste in browsers tends to be
idiosyncratic, and since 90-odd percent of Internet users choose - or
more likely use by default - Microsoft's mediocre Internet
Explorer, I guess there's no accounting for taste. Here are a
few observations on my taste in browsers.
Personally, I pretty much ignore Internet explorer. I have it on my
hard drive, residue of the Mac OS default install, but I all but never
use it. I have iCab selected as by
default browser in my Internet preferences, and there are a half-dozen
or so other browsers I would start up before resorting to IE.
Like Gene Steinberg, I am smitten with the Open Source Chimera browser
in OS X, which is lean, fast, very attractive, and supports tabbed
browsing, which is the greatest browsing innovation in years. Chimera
still has several shortcomings and missing features, but the speed will
blow you away.
Unfortunately, when you save a Web page as plain text with Chimera,
something I do a lot for research or later reading, it includes the
HTML tags and ignores line breaks, which makes the resulting jumble of
text pretty useless, so I can't use Chimera for a lot of my browsing
needs.
As you might have guessed from my making it the default, the browser
I most often turn to in both OS 9 and OS X when I need to get
serious work done is iCab. This little German browser isn't the
fastest, and it still has problems with some pages that demand
JavaScript support, etc., but its stability, dependability, and solid
basic feature set makes it the one I used most for Google searches,
general research, posting articles to Applelinks, and
software downloads.
I like iCab's Download Manager better than any other browser's
download support, and I just generally like the way iCab works. As a
practical, workhorse browser, iCab suits me best, and it has the
advantage of supporting OS X, PowerPC Classic, and even 68K
Classic, as well as being the smallest full-featured browser available.
Unfortunately, no tabbed browsing yet.
The other browser I use a lot in both OS X and OS 9 it is
Mozilla, which would
likely be my choice for an all-round, Jack of all trades browser if I
was obliged to settle for just one. Mozilla is also very fast - even
slightly faster than Chimera (at least on my dial up connection) in
some timed tests that I ran, although for some reason, Chimera feels
faster. Mozilla also supports tabbed browsing, works on my banking
websites, handles downloads satisfactorily, saves plain text properly,
and is quite stable and dependable.
If one is so inclined, it also includes a Messenger email client and
a Composer HTML authoring module. Its main deficiency is that it is
huge, making it a formidable download over dial up connections.
Unhappily, the Mozilla folks have announced that they will not be
developing any more dedicated Classic versions of Mozilla, so the
current version 1.2.1 is the last of the Mohicans for OS 9. [Sign
the Mozilla for Mac
OS Classic petition if you'd like to see this changed. dk]
Until the recent release of Netscape
7.0.1, most of what I just said about Mozilla could be applied
to Netscape as well. Mozilla forms the base for Netscape 6 and later. I
found Netscape 7.0 a very decent browser can both OS X and
OS 9. However, I've been extremely disappointed with the 7.0.1
build, which is both buggy and ponderously slow. I suggest sticking
with Mozilla, which seamlessly uses the same user configuration,
bookmarks, etc., as Netscape.
There is also still old Netscape
4.8, a Classic Mac OS only browser, which I still use on my 200
MHz Umax S900 for the occasional
pages that iCab can't handle. It really feels like a dinosaur browser
these days, but it is reasonably capable, and at least it launches
quickly.
As for other browsers, in OS X there is the Cocoa-based OmniWeb,
which is the prettiest browser available - and which works very well,
too, although it's not as fast as Chimera and Mozilla. OmniWeb has a
following of tenaciously loyal fans, and it's worth checking out to see
if you're potentially one of them.
Except for Internet Explorer, I have to say that my least favorite
browser is Opera, which has
some interesting features and is very customizable, but which has never
clicked with me. However, some folks profess to really like Opera, and
as with OmniWeb, it's worth checking this browser out to see if it
appeals to you.
