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What's with all these new Web Browsers?

Webmaster Spike

I feel like I'm the only person on the Net who hasn't come out with my own version of the perfect Web browser. Hey, even Compuserve is threatening to come out with one! It seems like everyone's convinced, if you're looking for the Holy Grail on the Net, http is the protocol to use.

Right now, I'll just be looking at the browsers for MS-Windows. Why? Because I don't have a Mac, and I still don't even know what exactly X-Windows is. If you're using a shell account and can't run these Winsock compliant applications, check out SlipKnot, our Catch of the Week.

In this roundup I'll be looking at WinWeb, Cello, Netscape, Tapestry and Mosaic. Each of these has a feature or two that the others lack, and they all fall short of being the big breakthrough for one reason or another. Let's face it, the masses hooking up to the Net aren't the tech heads of yesteryear. They're looking for three things: cheap access, easy-to-use software, and the storylines to last week's soaps. These are not the people who will spend three hours trying to figure out how to set up MS-Window's win32 extensions so they can play an MPEG file that looks like crap anyway. It's going to take some work to bring the Web to the multitude. Hey, wouldn't it be ironic if Compuserve came out with this really great Web browser and we all started signing up with them? Yeah, right.

Anyway, here they are. I didn't include testing of telnet and other external applications because, well, I have a life to live. And opening that can of worms would have kept me busy for a week. Besides, that's what God created newsgroups for.

The Anointed Heir

Let's face it, everyone else is going to be measured against the new Netscape Communications Corp.'s Netscape, now in version .9 beta. Netscape excells in speed, both in assembling documents and in scrolling through them. After I had turned off the image dithering, Netscape retrieved pages about 30% faster than the others. To speed browsing even further, it displays a page's text before it has downloaded all the inline images. So, unless a document begins with a large graphic at the top, the user can begin reading before the entire page has arrived.

By using the File|New Window... menu option, you can create a new "instance," or copy, of Netscape. You can have up to four copies running at once. So, if the first site you opened is taking a while to respond, you can start on something else while waiting. This doesn't give you any greater band width, however, so if both documents start coming at once, they'll be doing it at about half speed. Netscape is able to display downloaded images without an external viewer and comes with an improved newsreader. Although it required a few trips to the alt.winsock newsgroup to actually get the newsreader working properly. Netscape also offers easy access to a variety of search engines and help files. And it doesn't require win32. But is getting rid of win32 a good idea?

Netscape comes up short in two departments. First, it has no printing capabilities. The rumor on alt.winsock is that this will be remedied in the 1.0 version. The other big minus is the bookmark system; it's hard to tell where the convoluted programming leaves off and the bugs begin. For some help with Netscape's bookmarks, I again consulted the oracles at alt.winsock.

Netscape's biggest selling point is that it's the only browser able to display this word blinking. If anyone has found other Netscape tricks, let me know! Netscape is available at ftp.mcom.com in versions for the Mac, Unix and MS-Windows.

Last Year's Winner

NCSA's Mosaic is the horse most of us rode into town on. It brought a graphical interface to what was a pretty dull set of protocols. And let's face it: a gif is worth a thousand bytes of ascii. But where does the arrival of Netscape leave Mosaic? Will NCSA continue to support it? And if so, WHY?

Wow! What was it they put in that virtual espresso!

The latest version of Mosaic, 2.0 alpha 7, has one feature that Netscape lacks: printing. Of course, there are some who prefer Mosaic's method of maintaining bookmarks in a user-maintained menu structure. But having looked at the two carefully and having used the latest in software performance measurements, i.e., how many times they crashed, I say Netscape comes out on top. You can find Mosaic at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in Unix, Mac and MS-Windows versions.

An Old Favorite

For some people, Cello was their first browser and they still hold a very sentimental attachment. Now in version 1.01a, Cello was a labor of love by someone who works the Web, Thomas R. Bruce. It has the feel of a piece of software that was made to a particular user's specifications, like much free/shareware that starts out as something for the author and the author alone. The two features that most distinguish Cello from the Mosaic/Netscape family are the ability to display text in color and the manner in which it displays links, in dashed boxes.

I don't mean this to sound so negative. I just don't think it was ever the intention to make something that was marketable. Cello might not have all the features of Netscape, or the speed in moving about a document, but you still have to like it. And you can get it at ftp.law.cornell.edu in the /pub/LII/Cello directory.

The Ultimate in Bookmarks

Tapestry, in version 1.67, comes from Frontier Technologies Corp. and is part of a suite of applications called SuperHighway Access for Windows. Overall, Tapestry works well, though it only seems able to print lists of bookmarks and not documents themselves. Perhaps its biggest failing is not being able to interpret the coding of our home page correctly. OK, we bent the html rules a little. But all the others let us get away with it!

Like Netscape, Tapestry allows you to open more than one document at a time. But where Tapestry really looks good is its handling of bookmarks. Tapestry's "organizer," as its bookmark list is called, is not only easy to use, it comes with some great preloaded bookmarks. Hundreds of sites are listed in twenty-odd categories, including the Best of Web '94 winners. I found some great sites I hadn't heard of before, and I spend a LOT of time looking around.

What I downloaded was a demo version. The documentation says that the examination period will end November 30th. What exactly will happen then, it doesn't say. I will be backing up my hard disk November 29th.

I'm not sure that the attributes of Tapestry provide enough of an edge to overcome the fact that the competition is giving their products away. It's hard to find the point of maximum profit on a supply-demand curve that doesn't really exist. I picked up the demo version of SuperHighway Access, shademo.exe, at ftp.frontiertech.com in the /bbs/demo directory. However, when I tried to verify its location, I couldn't find it. If you're interested, try writing them at superhighway@frontiertech.com and see if it's still available.

That Other MCC

So what's with this WinWeb? WinWeb, version 1.0 alpha 2.1 (this is getting ridiculous!), is a product of Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC). I don't know what happened to the "T." If I were cynical, I'd say they wanted it to look like Mosaic Communications Corp.

When you start WinWeb, it takes you immediately to a place called EINet, which has these neat graphics of the Milky Way and other space scenes. Whenever I've gone there, I feel like Dark Side of the Moon should be playing in the background.

EINet seems to be some kind of commercial enterprise that involves Sprint, among other companies. They do have a very good index of resources and a search engine. Searching the word "pizza" brought up references to a PizzaHut Web site, a dozen gopher documents whose entries all read identically (is it me, or do gopher searches always yield results like that?), and one really cool resource: an obituary database. But this is all reachable without WinWeb. The principal reason for its existence seems to be bringing people to EINet, which is its default home page.

WinWeb otherwise seems to work quickly and does an OK job of printing. But the scrolling is jerky and whenever I try to load a local document off my hard disk, it can't find the graphics. Actually, what it does is perform a seek on my floppy drive for the graphics, which can make for some interesting sound effects. I found WinWeb at ftp.cica.indiana.edu in the winsock directory, but since you've got about one chance in a hundred of actually getting into this site, you might want to try one of the mirror sites, like pdq.coe.montana.edu in the /pub/mirrors/cica/winsock directory.

Netscape, the Price is Right

There you have it. None of them is perfect, but if you could take some of the features of each and reassemble them, you'd have the ultimate browser. In ranking the products, we return to the twin virtues of ease-of-use and performance. And Netscape best delivers on these two fronts. It also offers the best of two worlds: the support of a commercial software package and a freeware price.

Before you go, don't forget to check out the special treat!

: -- Spike Hernandez

Netscape Arcana

Image Dithering

By default, Netscape processes inline images incrementally and with dithering. Dithering is the computer enhancement of images using various algorithms. Under the right circumstances, it can yield big improvements in image quality. However, the price is paid in time. In the case of Netscape's dithering, pages can take up to three times longer to load! What's worse, I could detect no noticeable improvement in image quality.

To turn these features off, go into the netscape.ini file in your Netscape, or Windows directory, and under the heading [Images] change the values of both "Dither=" and "Incremental Display=" to "no". And believe me, you'll be glad you did.

Newsreader

Netscape's newsreader offers a threading option but this and some other features are turned off in the netscape.ini file. This mystery was solved by Albert Wong: "If you go into your netscape.ini file in your Netscape, or Windows directory, in the [Main] section, look for a line called "Fancy News=". Edit that line so it says "Fancy News=yes" and then when you read your news, you will get icons to move among the messages and threads, to post a new post, etc."

Now that you have the news reader working you're bound to come up against this bug: Each time you click on the "go to newsgroups" button Netscape loads this list into memory again. So, if you are jumping about newsgroups, before long you'll have loaded this list several times and eventually you're likely to end up with a crashed news reader. Steinar Carlsen, posting from Oslo, Norway, found a very simple solution to this problem: "When reading news in Netscape beta 0.9, it is very easy to run free of system resources. This seems to be because the Newsgroups list takes up lots of USER space, and the button "go to Newsgroups" will regenerate this list without freeing resources kept by the "old" copy.

"I found a workaround: ONLY use the HISTORY menu option and select "Subscribed Newsgroups" in order to move back to the subscribed list. This (original) list can safely be reloaded without losing resources.

"Netscape seems to free all resources when exited. When subscribing to new newsgroups, the list will be regenerated for each subscribed group. The trick here seems to subscribe to a couple of groups, exit and restart Netscape, then subscribe to some more, etc."

If you want to convert a Trumpet Newsreader file (news.ini) for use as a Netscape newsrc file, use a text editor and perform the following with the global search and replace function.

1. Search: "[space]Y" and Replace with: ":"
2. Search: "[space]N" and Replace with: "!"

Save this as "newsrc" and make sure it's correctly entered on the "News RC=" line of the [Main] section in the netscape.ini file.

Bookmarks

First off, make sure that the "File Location=" entry under the [Bookmark List] heading in the Netscape.ini file has the correct location for the bookmark.htm file. The netscape.ini file itself should be in either the Netscape or the Windows directory.

To move entries under a subheading, you need to first go to the Bookmarks|View Bookmarks menu option. Click on the "Edit" button at the bottom right of the Bookmark List window. This brings up a wider screen that includes a "New Heading" button. Once you've created your new heading, you can place a bookmark already on the list under that heading by using the "Up" and "Down" buttons. Telling Netscape to add new bookmarks under a heading other then the top level does not apparently work.

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