“Like many of us, I’ve spent the majority of my online time in
the last 10 years in Netscape. And like many of us, I’ve developed
impressions of the Web that are often impressions of Netscape
instead. Web sites, ftp sites–all were seen through Netscape’s
eyes. It took the atrocity that is Netscape 6 to finally shake me
awake. Yes, I’d played around a little with alternatives over the
years. There was that ridiculous thing that IBM shipped for awhile
with OS/2. There was the browser built into StarOffice. I tried
browsing with KFM, the KDE-1.x ancestor of Konqueror (a great ftp
client but not a full-featured browser). I even had–still have, in
fact, though it doesn’t work here anymore–QTMozilla, a stunt that
the people at TrollTech did a few years ago, the idea being to port
Netscape Navigator to QT in one man month, an experiment that was
successful. I have and occasionally use Lynx, though it is limited
by its text interface to use only in emergencies where I’ve injured
X and need to find the cure. In the foggy past there was Mosaic,
and Amaya still resides here….”
“Konqueror, as mentioned, is very promising. I’ve built the KDE2
CVS every couple of weeks for more than a year now, and have
watched Konqueror become increasingly capable. (I haven’t been able
to build it for awhile now because the kdelibs build blows up over
a GL issue that popped up last week and that refuses to go away
despite a new build of Mesa. I have no idea what it’s about. I
asked and was told that it was because my Mesa was built using a
different compiler and different glibc than the ones being used to
build KDE2, but that’s not the case.)…”
“Another alternative I’ve grown to like more and more is the
succession of betas of Opera 4.0. Like Konqueror, it is not fully
populated with features yet. It is built against QT, meaning that
it’s nicely at home on a KDE2 desktop. Like Netscape 6, it wants to
“help you” with the left quarter of the screen populated by a
complicated — no, goofy — batch of bookmarks. These are easily
gotten rid of by dragging that frame closed. Unfortunately, they
are the only place I’ve found where one can find one’s existing
Netscape bookmarks. (There’s a workaround: I navigated to my
~/netscape/bookmarks.html in Opera and opened that page — and then
bookmarked it. Now I can go there and simply follow the links. The
bookmarks I wish to keep I can then open and bookmark in Opera.
Getting rid of their bookmark structure and its hundreds of
provided links and imposing mine instead will take a little more
work.) Likewise, there is a line at the bottom of the screen
populated by menus of bookmarks that, too, come with the product. I
guess that there are people who have never been on the Web and need
these to get themselves started, but then again, the rest of us
struggled through somehow. I haven’t figured out how to get rid of
these or, better, to populate them with my own bookmarks, but I
haven’t devoted a lot of time to the effort, either.”