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Please note that the following section is very outdated and was last updated
in 1997. This section is being kept here for historical purposes only. All
major distributions of Linux come with Netscape and Lynx. These are the two
most popular browsers for the Linux Operating System. If you do not have
these browsers installed currently please go to their respective sections
for download information.
The following chapter is dedicated to the setting up web browsers.
Please feel free to contact me, if your favorite web browser is not
mentioned here. In this version of the document only a few of the browsers
have there own section, but I tried to include all of them (all I could
find) in the overview section. In the future those browsers that deserve
there own section will have it.
The overview section is designed to help you decide which browser to use,
and give you basic information on each browser. The detail section is
designed to help you install, configure, and maintain the browser.
However I use Lynx when I don't feel like firing up the
X-windows/Netscape monster.
-
Navigator/Communicator
Netscape Navigator
is the only Linux browser mentioned here, which is capable of
advanced HTML features. Some of these features are frames, Java, Javascript,
automatic update, and layers. It also has news and mail capability. But it is a resource hog;
it takes up lots of CPU time and memory. It also sets up a separate cache
for each user wasting disk space.
Netscape is currently an OpenSource product and can be downloaded from
ftp.netscape.com=>. <tag><ref id= name="Lynx"> Lynx is the one of the smallest web
browsers. It is the king of text based
browsers. It's free and the source code is available under the GNU public
license. It's text based, but it has many special features. Lynx now
supports tables, color (via curses) and frames.
Note on frame support for lynx:
The frame support for lynx is limited, it will notice the frames and show
the title of the frames for your to select as hot links. Since, frame titles
are usually very undescriptive for coding simplicity this can be confusing.
- Kfm
Kfm is part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE). KDE is a system
that runs on top of X-windows. It gives you many features like drag an
drop, sounds, a trashcan and a unified look and feel. Kfm is the K File Manager, but
it is also a web browser. It is very usable as a web browser and it supports frames, tables, ftp
downloads, looking into tar files, and more. The current release of KDE is
1.1.1 with 1.1.2 very near by. Kfm can be used without KDE, but you still need the librarys that
come with KDE. For more information about KDE and Kfm visit the KDE website
at
http://www.kde.org.
-
Emacs
Emacs is the one program that does everything. It is a word processor,
news reader, mail reader, and web browser. It has a steep learning curve at
first, because you have to learn what all the keys do. The X-windows version
is easier to use, because most of the functions are on menus.
Another drawback is that it's mostly text based. (It can display graphics if
you are running it under X-windows). It is also free, and the source code
is available under the GNU public license.
- NCSA Mosaic
Mosaic is an X-windows browser developed by the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
NCSA spent four years on the project and has now moved on to other things.
Again, Mosaic is no longer supported. However since the source is free for
non-commercial use it might make an interesting project for someone who
wants to develop a new browser.
- Amaya
Amaya is the X-windows concept browser for the W3C for HTML 3.2.
Therefore it supports all the HTML 3.2 standards. It also supports some of
the features of HTML 4.0. It supports tables, forms, client side image
maps, put publishing, gifs, jpegs, and png graphics. It is both a browser and
authoring tool. The latest public release is 1.0 beta. Version 1.1 beta
is in internal testing and is due out soon. For more information visit the
Amaya web site at
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/.
It can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.w3.org/pub/Amaya-LINUX-ELF-1.0b.tar.gz.
- Qweb
Qweb is yet another basic X-windows browser. It supports
tables, forms, and server site image maps. The latest version is 1.3. For
more information visit the Qweb website at
http://sunsite.auc.dk/qweb/
The source is available from
http://sunsite.auc.dk/qweb/qweb-1.3.tar.gz
The binaries are available in a Red Hat RPM from
http://sunsite.auc.dk/qweb/qweb-1.3-1.i386.rpm
It is the reccomendation of this author that users of web browsers use
either Netscape 4.x, Lynx or Netscape 5.xAlpha. They are the only one
currently available for Linux that support most features. Personally I
suggest Netscape5.xAlpha, even though it is Alpha Software it is quite
stable and frankly implements the standards better than the 4.x versions do.
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