Web Browsers and the NetWinder

The biggest limitation of the NetWinder desktop is the lack of a good graphical web browser.

BrowserVersion TestedURL
Lynx2.8.3dev.22 http://lynx.browser.org
Mosaic2.7b5 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/
mMosaic3.7.2 http://perso.enst.fr/~dauphin/mMosaic/
kfm1.1.2 http://www.kde.org
Amaya3.2.1 http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
W3 (emacs)4.0pre.46 http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/docs.html
MozillaM14 http://mozilla.org
Zen0.0.3 http://www.nocrew.org/software/zen/
Dillo0.6.1 http://dillo.sourceforge.net/

Lynx | Mosaic | mMosaic | kfm | Amaya | W3 (emacs) | Mozilla | Zen | Dillo

The Browsers

Lynx

If you do not need a graphical browser, you need look no farther than Lynx. Not only is a full featured, it comes installed on the NetWinder.

Mosaic

Mosaic is the original graphic web browser. Development stopped on Mosaic in 1996. It does not display tables correctly, it also does not support java or javascript. It also does not compile on the NetWinder. If you want to run Mosaic, I strongly recommend mMosaic. If you have a really good reason to use Mosaic, here is the patch.

mMosaic

mMosaic (the m stands for multicast) is a derivative of NCSA Mosaic that is still actively worked on. It has been improving by leaps and bounds.

As of 3.4.6, mMosaic compiles on the NetWinder, just use the linux makefile.

  make -f Makefile.Linux.Mandrake6.1
    

KDE File Manager (kfm)

The KDE file manager can also browse the web. It seems to be fairly full-featured and is 1/2 the size of Netscape.

A minimal kfm distribution requires the following packages:

  1. kdesupport
  2. kdelibs
  3. kdebase
Which can be downloaded from Ralph's ftp area.

You do not need to be running KDE window manager to run kfm.

Amaya

Amaya is W3C's browser and test platform. It has support for HTML 4.0. It was an easy port, just one patch to the config.sub file.

While Amaya ran, it seemed slow. It also didn't display pages well. For example, freshmeat smeared badly. I didn't look into whether this is an arm problem or a generic Amaya problem. It also can't display frames. However, it is work-in-progress and will get better.

Note: By default, double-click on the URLs!

W3 (emacs)

W3 is a web browser written in elisp that runs under emacs or XEmacs. The main problem is that it is slow. Of course you are already running XEmacs, aren't you ;-)

Mozilla

Rod Stewart has got Mozilla running on the 'Winder! It crashes often, but it does run. You can get rpms from Rod's NetWinder ftp site.

Zen

I have been using this web browser with the gtk interface to look at the output from polygraph. It compiles out of the box on the NetWinder.

Dillo

Dillo is another web browser in the development stages. It is based on the GTK toolkit and is extremely fast.

Eric GAUDET writes:
Hi,
While browsing randomly the web, I found your page about web browsers, talking about dillo.
I'd like to inform you that the last version of dillo is 0.6.0 and that tables are now supported. Dillo is now fairly stable. It's a very active project and the number of features grow in each new version, and the size of the program stays around 200kb, which is often a sign of very healthy code.

Compiles out of the box for the NetWinder.



Sean MacLennan
Last modified: Fri Oct 26 23:51:04 EDT 2001


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