Five lesser-known browsers
| Rudolph Muller | August 16, 2010 | No comments |
Rudolph Muller
Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...
| Full Profile |
We all know Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. But have you heard of these browsers?
We’ve all heard of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari. But have you heard of IceCat, Maxathon or NetSurf? There are literally hundreds of different web browsers available to users. We look at some of the lesser-known browsers available.
SeaMonkey is the Netscape Communicator of today’s Firefox world. Built mostly by the same people that created Firefox, SeaMonkey is an all-in-one web tool that does more than just browse the web. It includes a web browser, an email client, an IRC tool as well as a WYSIWYG HTML editor. It also includes a newsgroup reader for those that still remember them. Because much of the code is shared with the Firefox browser there are many add-ons available that can be used with SeaMonkey’s Navigator browser which also supports tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and other common Firefox tools. SeaMonkey runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
Another variation on the Firefox theme, IceCat is the Free Software Foundation-endorsed version of Mozilla’s browser. In most parts it looks like just another Firefox version. The difference is that IceCat is free of any proprietary software, so it doesn’t require any non-free plugins to work. In addition IceCat is super-focused on privacy and blocks sites that use zero-sized images to track users without their knowledge as well as warning users when URLs are rewritten to track them. The more fuller-featured version of IceCat is GNUzilla, an equally-free version of the Mozilla suite. IceCat runs on Linux machines.
Amaya is the W3 Consortium’s free web editor and browser. Originally started in the mid-90s, Amaya is meant to be a test-bed browser for trying out new technologies on the web. Amaya provides both a browser and an HTML editor in the same package. As a tool for testing new technologies for the web, Amaya is not the most glamorous of browsers and not really aimed at end-users but it implements web standards very strictly and is one way of testing web sites effectively. Naturally Amaya is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X machines.
Want a little customisability? Maxthon is a Windows browser that can be customised in more ways than you can imagine. From re-arranging the interface to customising security settings, Maxthon is made for being tailor-made to your habits. Maxthon also has a good handful of add-ons available, supports tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking. Maxthon is not a completely new browser but is instead built around the Internet Explorer engine, with added features. Maxthon is very popular in China but hasn’t caught on as much outside of that country.
A browser for Linux, RISC OS and Unix fans, NetSurf is small and efficient. NetSurf is not the most feature-rich browser available but if it’s compact you want, compact is what you get. It’s also ideal for situations where you don’t have gigabytes of memory to allocate to browsing the web. NetSurf’s compact nature comes from its history as an embedded browser for the likes of PDAs, set-top boxes and other appliances. NetSurf also doesn’t do things like tabbed browsing
Internet browser discussion << comments and views
Poor PC sales weigh down Microsoft profit
Microsoft Corp is starting the new year much as it did the one just ended – grappling with weak computer sales tearing a hole in its core Windows business
New iPhone app lets users follow roaming great white sharks
The great white shark is lurking in cyberspace, in the form of an iPhone application launched this week that allows users to track a dozen of the predators as they roam around the Pacific Ocean.