Browsers That Will Work with HotWired

Their Bugs, Too.

Today's Web browsers have a wide variety of capabilities - and because HotWired makes extensive use of forms and basic user authentication, some browsers are simply unusable on our system. Even some of the browsers that do implement forms and user authentication aren't fully functional at times - and there's no browser that is absolutely bug free. So, to help you get the most out of HotWired, here are the browsers we recommend, the browsers we can't recommend, and their bugs.

About browser crashes: remember that in general, nothing we put in our documents should cause a browser to crash. If the browser you are using crashes while loading a page, please try to the same page again - if it still crashes let us know. Every one of these browsers will crash at some point. Likewise, you should only ever have to type your name and password ONCE when you visit HotWired. Unfortunately, almost all browsers have bugs that cause the user to retype their name and password more than once at the beginning. We hope browser authors will note this bug and fix it.

Recommended Browsers

Mozilla

Released by Mosaic Communications on October 12th, there are free versions available for Unix (SGI, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, AXP), Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows. It is the most stable browser currently available.

Most Recent Version: 0.9 Beta.

Known Bugs:

• Text entry fields sometimes aren't selectable - try resizing the window.
• A small bug in user authentication sometimes causes it to retry loading over and over - if you see it flashing "Contacting Host" in the status field, stop and try getting a different page.
• TABbing through fields sometimes doesn't work.
• No control over font or background color selection.

NCSA Mosaic

Available for many different platforms:

X Windows

SGI, SunOS, DEC, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and many more versions available. The source code is available, so if you have Motif libraries you can compile it for any platform.

Most Recent Version: 2.5.2beta

Known Bugs:

• mailto: URLs unsupported
• Form fields in the SGI version are half as wide as they should be.

MacMosaic

Powermac and 68K versions available.

Most Recent Version: 2.0.0a8

Known Bugs:

• The forms facility has lots of bugs - using " & " in a form just doesn't work. Any posts you submit may get tweaked on final submission - let us know about any cases you see of this, and we'll fix it if we can, but we've already bent over backwards to support forms in this browser.
• Pull-down menus sometimes doesn't work.
• Crashes while trying to stop downloading large documents.
• mailto: URL's unsupported.
• Automatic caching of pages, which is a problem on our site where some pages are changing by the minute.

Lynx

Works for any non-graphical terminal, works best on something with curses support (like vt100).

Most Recent Version: 2.3BETA

Known Bugs:

• TEXTAREA fields only represented by a single line.
• Screen width means problems in some areas, notably Threads.

Spyglass Mosaic

Versions for all three platforms available.

Most Recent Version: 1.0

Known Bugs: NONE

Emacs-W3

Full Web browser written in Emacs elisp - runs on all platforms emacs runs on

Most Recent Version: 2.1

Known Bugs: NONE

Spry's AIR_Mosaic

MS Windows

Most Recent Version: 3.07

Known Bugs: NONE

OmniWeb

NEXTSTEP platforms

Most Recent Version: 0.7.5.3

Known Bugs:

• Requires reauthentication with every new page.

DISrecommended Browsers

Chimera

Requires reauthentication with every page.

Delphi-HTML

No support for user authentication and forms.

MacWeb/WinWeb

No user authentication support.

Netcom's "NetCruiser"

No support for user authentication or forms.

WinMosaic

Works on all Intel-based boxes, OS/2, and Windows NT.

Most Recent Version: 2.0a7

Known Bugs:

• Forms and user authentication do not work together. Period. It's a bug in the mime-typing, we're told. So you can use WinMosaic to view our site, but not participate in the interactive elements.
• Frequently, the first field in a form is lost. This renders WinMosaic all but unusable on HotWired.