Web Browsers OpenFAQ

What browsers are available for modern Windows systems?

Contributors:

Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer

Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer have pretty much the same features on all of the operating systems for which they are available. Still the most popular browser on the web as of December 1999, Microsoft Internet Explorer is locked in a features and market share race with Netscape Communicator. Happily this means that both products are currently free. Both products feature HTML 3.2, Java, JavaScript, various extensions that may or may not work with other browsers, and a suite of additional applications for conferencing, reading newsgroups, receiving and sending email and so on.

The current version of Internet Explorer is 5.0 and the current version of Netscape Communicator is 4.7

At this time, there are no other browsers for Windows that have quite as many features as these two market leaders. However, Opera comes close, using far fewer resources, as does Mozilla.

Microsoft's Website

Netscape's Website

Opera

A web browser that requires very few resources and delivers most of what the major browsers deliver.

Another recent addition is NeoPlanet which is a relatively small download (1.2M). It is actually an add-on to IE (3.02 and above) but makes browsing much easier, especially for beginners. It comes preconfigured with over 1000 bookmarks organized into "channels" (NOT like Active Channels, just an organizational metaphor). It also includes an integrated mail client and a modem speed booster. Interestingly, it also allows you to change the look of the browser to something completely unlike regular Windows.

See web browsers for older windows systems for more information.

Lynx32

Lynx32 is just like its Unix and DOS counterparts. It is a console application and uses the Windows 9x/NT TCP stack.

Grail

Grail is a web browser written in the Python programming language. Grail supports full HTML 2.0, including images, forms and imagemaps, and many HTML 3.2 features. It uses asynchronous document transfer, supports printing and saving documents, searching, bookmarks, history, and more. It also supports frames, client-side imagemaps, file upload in forms, support for JPEG, TIFF and XBM images, image printing, and tables (within the limitations of the Tk toolkit). Pages can contain applets written in Python (instead of Java).

Mozilla

Mozilla is a browser that evolved after Netscape released the source code to the public in 1998. Mozilla contains the Gecko rendering engine, and is completely modular, with optional mail and news functionality. Mozilla is under heavy development at the time of writing (End of January 2000), with the alpha release only just out and beta due in March. It Support for standards currently includes: HTML 4.0, CSS1, XML1 and DOM1. Mozilla is "skinnable" as the UI is in XUL. Javascript is supported, and Java support may be added by installing JRE 1.3.0 and a plugin. Also supports Mac, BeOS, Unix, OS/2, Solaris and others.

"What happened to all the other browsers?"

Do you know of other browsers for Windows that are available and useful? Sign up as an author and edit this entry! You're welcome to do so.

Previous | Next | Table of Contents