10 Oddly Useful Specialty Web Browsers 72
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner looks beyond Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE to uncover 10 alternative browsers that offer specialized advantages for 3-D searching, social networking, easy scriptability, powerful page manipulation, and the like. Each provides a targeted browsing environment, enabling users to browse Web tables into spreadsheets, browse leaner, browser in text, browse socially, browse musically, or browse smarter on the Mac. 'A purist might object that these hybrids are not much different from a standard browser with extra plug-ins. There's some truth to this, but not always — some of the unique capabilities can only be done deep inside the software. In any case, the job of parsing the terms and creating an exact definition of the Web browser isn't as much fun as embracing the idea that there are dozens of alternatives.'"
They forgot Pivot! (Score:1, Interesting)
http://getpivot.com/ [getpivot.com]
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Troll?
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The same argument should work for Office 97 but lot of people still use it as 'it ain't broke'.
As for software becoming unsupported, there are plenty of companies that don't bother with windows updates as they are unrequired for day to day use. I regularly see XP installs which have not connected to MS since installation a few years ago.
Sitting behind an effective firewall and with fully managed local security policies, there is little risk in having an out of date installation.
Browsing in spreadsheets is not new (Score:1, Insightful)
You've always been able to load a URL into a spreadsheet...
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You've always been able to load a URL into a spreadsheet...
I must have missed that feature while playing around with Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc back in the 80s.
Re:Browsing in spreadsheets is not new (Score:5, Funny)
You've always been able to load a URL into a spreadsheet...
I must have missed that feature while playing around with Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc back in the 80s.
I think it was alt-shift-F3 + ctrl-shift-u + ctrl-alt-insert + ctrl-alt-shift-sys_request ... or something like that.
Re:Browsing in spreadsheets is not new (Score:5, Funny)
no no no , thats a special move in emacs that gives your cursor a rocket launcher
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One page (Score:5, Informative)
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...and the example for Lynx shows it looking at Slashdot [infoworld.com]
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>>>Lynx shows it looking at Slashdot
Familiar sight. I use Links at work. Makes the boss think I'm looking at some boring text-only code, rather than the web.
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And he had to SSH to another machine (look at the title bar) to run it and nab the screenshot because OS X doesn't ship with Lynx or Links. I generally don't miss it much but it's occasionally handy, especially the 'dump' option to render HTML as plain text.
How about a "Facebook Firewall" browser? (Score:3, Interesting)
A browser that is specifically set up to completely firewall websites from each other?
Re:How about a "Facebook Firewall" browser? (Score:4, Informative)
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I put 127.0.0.1 facebook.com (and for www.facebook.com) and it's amazing how much my Back browser button gets messed up because almost every link on numerous websites foward to facebook.
Re:How about a "Facebook Firewall" browser? (Score:5, Informative)
It used to, but it doesn't any more. Now you have to, at minimum, block static.ak.connect.facebook.com as well. I've installed AdBlockPro today to take care of it in a more sweeping way.
But I think David Emery was wanting a generalisation and just used Facebook as an example. I don't know how well common sites would work with external content blocked - whitelisting would be necessary at least for things like jquery.
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The Ghostery [ghostery.com] addon also blocks Facebook and most other tracking. IME, has worked invisibly; it's never stopped a webpage from working normally.
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If the reviews are to be believed, Ghostery has been sold to an advertising company and may be functioning as spyware
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9609 [mozilla.org]
From the Ghostery/Better Advertising Privacy Policy- "We collect user traffic patterns"; "we track click-through information, including IP addresses"; "We may place a text file called a 'cookie' in the browser files of your computer."; "We may provide personal information to or permit access to personal information by our vendors and service
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There's the RequestPolicy [mozilla.org] extension for Firefox (and perhaps other Gecko-based browsers). This allows you to browse websites without third-party domains loading scripts, images and other media onto the page.
The upside to this is that you'll no longer be followed by social networking websites wherever you go. The downside is that you'll have to spend time changing the settings for some websites to work, as even CSS will be blocked when hosted on a different domain - the eternal vigilance problem.
You can also
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CSSEdit (Score:3, Interesting)
I use CSSEdit [macrabbit.com] all the time. Its core is a Webkit browser that shows a live preview of CSS changes you make. It's great for AJAX-y, DHTML-y dynamically driven sites that don't always have HTML "pages" to debug.
It's a bit like the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, but a standalone browser / app for OS X focused solely on CSS and, IMHO, a bit easier to use.
No connection to the company. Just a very satisfied user.
Dillo (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Dillo (Score:5, Informative)
Of course you can just wget something and even make scripts to only get the text out of it, but then you'd just be "reading" the internet, which isn't enough for some things. Dillo is a much more advanced Links.
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Does Dillo work on Windows NT 5 or 6? (XP or Vista or Seven) I'd like to try it, but it appears it does not work.
Flock:
It abandoned Mozilla and went to Chromium. Is there still a facebook-friendly browser that uses Mozilla?
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You might like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1833/ [mozilla.org] if you're looking for a mozilla-based addon that's Facebook friendly. It doesn't implement all of the features that Flock has/had, but it does implement the basic social networking aggregation into a sidebar addon for Firefox. :)
What I want is... (Score:1)
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Shameless plug (Score:4, Interesting)
I recommend Mozilla seaMonkey. It has the same core engine as Firefox 4, but with the functionality/appearance of classic Mozilla Netscape, and only half the memory usage of FF (~150,000 vs ~300,000 kilobytes).
Another browser Ive tried is Mozilla Songbird, which is really more of a music player than a browser but it's good for those of us who like noise in our ears all day long.
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P.S.
Forgot about the Mac & Linux. I like Opera which stores its bookmarks online (can access them anywhere, even work). Mozilla Camino is also nice since it uses Mac's built-in tools/appearance.
Lightweight Ubuntu & Puppy Linux use Chromium, which is okay, but I still prefer seaMonkey.
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From the Puppy Linux FAQ:
Q: Why not use Firefox instead of Seamonkey?
A: "Yes, Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email and news client, Sunbird Calendar, and NVU HTML editor are useful programs. The Mozilla/SeaMonkey suite, with all of this functionality, is about 11M compressed, whereas the separate applications are each about 35M compressed. So, the live-CD, instead of being 60M would be 85M and would be too big to run in RAM in a PC with 128M RAM.
"Why are the separate applications so big compared
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I like Opera which stores its bookmarks online (can access them anywhere, even work).
Zat so? I've been using opera for several years, and I've never even suspected that it could do that. Is it documented somewhere? A quick check in in its Preferences stuff on my Mac and linux systems didn't turn up anything that looked relevant. Of course, it could be there, but I just don't recognize whatever words they use.
I've occasionally wondered if there might be some systematic way to learn about software featur
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It was added with Opera 10.5 and is called Opera Link. Other useful features they added recently are Opera Turbo (speeds-up dialup/cellular connections) and Opera Unite (photo and file sharing). I use the Turbo feature a lot, since many hotels only come with slow connections.
http://www.opera.com/link/ [opera.com]
Supposedly Firefox 4 will have the same "store bookmarks online" feature, but I've not tried it.
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Thanks for the pointer (and the keyword); it looks like something worth experimenting with.
(And you didn't even call me an idiot for not knowing it. ;-)
So far, I've put off playing with FF4 due to a shortage of time and a surplus of other things to play with, but I'll probably try it sometime soon.
Lynx? (Score:5, Insightful)
Customizing Lynx colors (Score:2)
FYI: Ubuntu has a dark background, light text Lynx setup by default.
If you prefer black text on white background (as do I), do this:
Copy the lynx.lss file somewhere (like a ~/.lynx dir) /etc/lynx-cur/* .lynx/
cp
Edit the lynx.lss file to comment out the 8th and 9th lines:
normal: normal: lightgray:black
default: normal: white:black
Then run lynx with "lynx -lss lynx.lss" or set LYNX_LSS to your personal lynx.lss file.
Which text mode browser? (Score:2)
I've had occasion to need a text mode browser, and I think I used lynx, but I saw that there are a number of them. I recall looking for a good comparison of the different options, but I couldn't find one. What are they, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
Also check HTMLayout (Score:2)
HTMLayout (http://terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/main.whtm) is not strictly a browser, but rather a toolkit to create UI in HTML+CSS.
they forgot one i know of (Score:3, Interesting)
it uses mozilla's gecko engine, even more bare bones than firefox, a little rough around the edges but overall an ok browser. (windows only)
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I had a lot of problems with website rendering when I tried K-meleon last year.
Also had a tendency to crash, and even though it claims to "use windows standard" components for efficiency, I didn't see it using any less memory than Firefox.
No mention of Links? (Score:2)
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No mention of links, but they do mention its predecessor lynx in the article.
Notepad (Score:3, Funny)
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Notepad is my favorite specialty browser. You name the file (url).txt, and it instantly renders the website as a blank page- think of all the clutter you don't have to deal with! Plus, you can add in whatever text you want- ever wanted to make microsoft.com say "Linux rules!"? Well now you can! I can't imagine how anyone could want anything else.
The first thing people coming from FireFox will notice is the print feature really works!
uzbl?! (Score:2)
I would like to mention elinks. (Score:1)
The forgot uzbl (Score:1)
http://www.uzbl.org/ [uzbl.org]
Conkeror (Score:2, Interesting)
I rarely see anyone mention conkeror, my favourite browser: http://conkeror.org/ [conkeror.org]
It is the only browser I have tried I can comfortably use without a mouse. Once you learn the emacs-like keybindings, browsing with keyboard is really fast.