Web Browsers OpenFAQ
What web browsers work with the X Window System?
Contributors:
Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer
Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer have pretty much
the same features on all of the operating systems for
which they are available. However, the "application suite"
that is distributed with these products is usually lacking
some of its pieces under one Unix flavor or another.
Netscape Navigator is available for considerably
more flavors of Unix than Microsoft Internet Explorer.
MSIE is currently available only for a handful of the
major commercial Unix releases, and is not available
for Linux as of December 1997. Netscape is available
for a long list of Unix flavors, both free and commercial.
Still the most popular browser
on the web as of December 1997, Netscape Navigator is
locked in a features and market share race with Microsoft
Internet Explorer. Happily this means that both products
are currently free. In fact, Netscape has recently released
the source code to Navigator through mozilla.org, with a
permissive license.
Both products feature HTML 3.2, Java, JavaScript, various
extensions that may or may not work with other browsers,
and a suite of additional applications for conferencing,
reading newsgroups, receiving and sending email and so on.
At this time, there are no other browsers for the
X Window System that have quite as many features as these
two market leaders. Many of the other browsers for
the X Window System are freeware offerings (some with
a surprisingly good feature set and considerable
grassroots potential). Such browsers will no doubt gain
in popularity if Netscape and MSIE ever cease to
be freely available. The remaining browsers are
products of academia, usually permitting free use.
Arena began life as a "testbed" for the W3 Consortium's
development of new versions of HTML. However, that is
now the role of Amaya.
Arena is now free software, released under the GNU Public
License and maintained by Yggdrasil Computing. Arena
implements "most" of HTML 3.2 and has some support for
style sheets as well.
Amaya is the W3 Consortium's official testbed for new
HTML features. The Amaya web browser supports editing
of HTML as well as browsing. Support for mathematical
constructs as well as cascading style sheets is included.
Probably the leanest, meanest graphical web browser
ever written. Chimera version 1 is stable but too out of
date to be used with most web sites. Chimera version 2
is quite interesting, with support for most of the
HTML constructs available in Netscape 2 (tables, frames,
aligned images and so on), which most web sites are still
compatible with. However Chimera 2 is still in development.
This is a freeware project. Code contributions are welcome.
MMM is a web browser written in the Caml Light programming
language. This browser relies on the Tk toolkit, which
leads to problems in its support for tables. However the
browser does support frames and tables, after a fashion,
and has been kept up to date. Pages can contain applets
written in Caml Light (instead of Java).
Lynx is a text-only but very useful browser. It will
run under XWindows, although it does not respond to window resizing, etc.
See text browsers.
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