Browsers
Best viewed with…

… any browser… well, any standards-compliant browser.

I do not use any browser-specific HTML tags. But because these pages comply with current XHTML and CSS standards – that is at least my intent! – they are best viewed with a browser that supports these standards.

I do use special characters – e.g., ’ for an apostrophe – so ditto a browser that displays these properly. I found that older browsers did not recognise the decimal format for these entities, so I’ve used the decimal format, which seems to be more widely supported (my apologies to anyone who’s viewing the source!)

So, you should be able to view these pages quite happily with any browser. However, the layout may be slightly awry on some browsers – say, any originating in Redmond, WA – especially now that I’m using CSS rather than tables to control the layout!

Although (X)HTML and CSS are standards, implementations clearly differ!

My preferred browsers are:

Safari

Safari is Apple’s fast and lean browser for Mac OS X (v10.2) using KHTML, Konqueror’s outstanding rendering engine.

After the announcement at MacWorld (8 January 2003), Apple showed that it was a good open-source citizen: the Safari development team passed all their changes along with a detailed change log to the Konqueror developers and it seems that cooperation between the two teams will continuously improve KHTML.

Safari has steadily improved since its first release and remains my preferred browser.

It offers very good support (inherited from KHTML) for advanced HTML, XHTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and Java, and exploits Mac OS X’s graphics engine (Quartz) to render crisp text and graphics.

It also has a very easy and intuitive iTunes-like interface for managing bookmarks, and a unique SnapBack feature that returns you to the point where you last typed a URL or selected a bookmark.

Like Opera, it has a built-in search-engine window, although only for Google (but who uses anything else!). And it has tabbed browsing – i.e., an option to have web pages displayed in tabbed panels within a single window (rather than having a separate window for each web page).

OmniWeb

The Omni Group’s OmniWeb was the first – and before Safari, the only – browser built specifically – and exclusively – for Mac OS X.

It is very well designed, using Quartz to render crisp text and graphics, and exploiting many features of the Aqua user interface: drawers, sheets, customizable toolbars, and more. It allows you to drag images from web pages directly into a graphics program such as GraphicConverter and it has a source editor rather than a source viewer (useful for making small corrections in pages without having to open the document in BBEdit!).

Omniweb 4.5 uses the same Apple WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks as Safari for rendering web pages.

Mozilla

Mozilla (a.k.a. the Mozilla Suite or the Mozilla Application Suite and codenamed Seamonkey) is a free, cross-platform Internet software suite, whose components include a web browser, an email client, an HTML editor and an IRC client. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation based on the source for their Netscape Communicator, but the Mozilla Foundation now spearheads development.

The name Mozilla had been used internally for the Netscape Navigator web browser from its beginning. It was a contraction of "Mosaic-killer", referring to the hope that the project would unseat Mosaic as the web's most popular browser, along with the name of the fictional monster Godzilla. Externally, the name was used only in the browser's HTTP user-agent string and as the name of the company mascot, which took the form of a cartoon lizard.

Since 1998, when Netscape made the Communicator source code available for open-source development, the name has been used as a generic term referring to browser software developed through the “Mozilla Dot Org” project.

Mozilla has a cross-platform front end (XPFE) described by a mark-up language called XUL (pronounced “zuul” – Ghostbusters, anyone? – and short for “XML-based User-Interface Language”). Window “chrome” is displayed and managed by the same layout engine that manages HTML content in the browser. This approach gives some consistency in Mozilla’s appearance across platforms and makes it very easy to create new “skins”.

Like Safari and Opera, Mozilla provides a tabbed MDI: This is a great boon in Windows where it reduces Taskbar clutter! Like OmniWeb, Mozilla allows you to edit pages, although it doesn’t display HTML entities (like ’) correctly. Unlike OmniWeb’s source editor, Mozilla’s Composer allows you to modify the displayed content, but this can have unpredictable results.

One of the key pieces of software is NGLayout, Mozilla’s next-generation layout engine, which Netscape call Gecko. This has very good standards conformance, including support for CSS1 and much of CSS2. NGLayout is also incorporated in the current AOL-Gateway Netscape browser and a host of others, including Firefox and Camino.

A new development roadmap has been released which marks a change in the future plans for Mozilla. Instead of the current integrated "cross-platform front end" (XPFE) application, Mozilla will become a suite of smaller applications sharing common back-end technology such as the XUL user-interface framework and the Gecko rendering engine. They will continue to work seamlessly with one another, as before, but will be able to integrate better with third-party applications.

[Some text from Wikipedia article “Mozilla”, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.]

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox (originally known as Phoenix and briefly as Mozilla Firebird) is a free cross-platform web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and hundreds of volunteers. With over 5 million downloads in the first 12 days of its release and 10 million in the first month of release, Firefox 1.0 is one of the most-used free, open source applications among home users.

With Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation aims to develop a small, fast, simple, and highly extensible web browser (separate from the larger Mozilla Suite). Firefox has become the main focus of Mozilla development along with the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, and it has replaced the Mozilla Suite as the official browser release of the Mozilla Foundation.

Among Firefox’s popular features are the integrated pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, and an extension mechanism for adding functionality. Although these features have already been available for some time in other browsers such as the Mozilla Suite and Opera, Firefox is the first of these browsers to have achieved large-scale adoption.

[Text from Wikipedia article “Mozilla Firefox”, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.]

Camino

Mozilla.Org’s Camino – or strictly The Camino Project’s Navigator – is a simple, small and fast browser for Mac OS X that has a Cocoa (not XUL) user interface.

(This was called Chimera – its hybrid nature presumably led to this nomenclature – but copyright reasons forced Mozilla.Org to choose a new name early in 2003. It’s a shame they couldn’t find another reptilian one!)

Since it embeds Gecko it shares Mozilla’s CSS support, but is not yet as “well behaved” a Cocoa app as OmniWeb or Safari.

Until Safari came along, it was widely thought that Camino would be Apple’s preferred choice for the new default browser in Mac OS X.

Opera

Opera Software’s Opera is an innovative and elegant browser available for Mac OS X, Windows, and a wide range of other OSes.

Like Safari and Mozilla, Opera offers tabbed browsing – or a multiple document interface (MDI).

A toolbar widget lets you toggle between “user mode” and “author mode”: this is a useful feature for page development, as “author mode” lets you check how a web page renders without its style sheet – just as a user with an older, non-CSS-compliant browser would see it.