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.

Microsoft's Web Site

Netscape's Web Site

The mozilla.org Web Site

Arena

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

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.

Chimera

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

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

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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