Evan Kleiman's column on the best
browser for recent Macs made interesting reading, although I found
some of his conclusions puzzling and substantially different dissonant
with my own experience.
Netscape 6.2
First, Netscape 6 PR1, Evan? I make that four (or is it five?)
Netscape 6 releases out of date. PR1 was indeed truly awful, but
comparing it to Internet Explorer 5 is hardly fair ball, let alone
relevant.
The just-released Netscape
6.2, and the current Mozilla
0.9.5 (Netscape 6 is based on Mozilla 0.9.4) still have of few
rough edges to iron out, but they are as stable as the Rock of
Gibraltar - on my PowerBook anyway.
I have been using Mozilla daily since the 0.9.2 release back in May,
and it has never crashed or locked up on me yet. Internet Explorer 5,
before I banished it from my hard drive last fall, was a relative
crashorama, and my overall system stability improved remarkably when I
mucked all the Microsoft shared library junk out of my System
Folder.
I will concede that Internet Explorer 5 is, in terms of features and
capabilities, probably the most comprehensively complete browser
available for the Mac OS right now - if you can tolerate its bugginess,
instability, and don't object to using Microsoft software, which I
do.
However, I have never missed IE since purging it, and I never liked
using it even when I had it installed.
iCab 2.6
iCab is my browser of choice for
most things, although I do hope they get JavaScript fully implemented
soon, as lately I have been running into more and more websites that
won't respond to iCab. In such cases, I just switch to Mozilla, and I
have not yet encountered any site where one or the other of these
browsers couldn't do the job. Since they are both free, there's no
reason not to have one of each.
If push came to shove, and neither Netscape 6/Mozilla or iCab was
available, I would still use Netscape 4.7.8 (which Evan didn't mention
at all in this article), in preference to IE on the basis of its
performance and smooth refinement alone. However, Netscape 6/Mozilla
are now at a level of development where they can displace classic
Netscape if you have the hardware capacity to run them properly. I
still recommend Netscape 4.7.8 to folks with less powerful Macs, along
with iCab.
Opera
Another browser Evan didn't mention is Opera, which is beginning to shape up in
its Mac version to be a very satisfactory alternative to Internet
Explorer. I just downloaded the latest Preview 4 version of Opera. The
Preview 3 build was still a bit too crash-prone for my liking, although
it has lots of cool features and is quite fast.
Bottom line, Internet Explorer, which Evan recommends as the best
choice, is a passably decent browser, but I'm convinced that
Netscape/Mozilla is now a viable, fast, and stable alternative, and
used in tandem with iCab, there is virtually nothing on the Web that
you won't be able to handle.
For general-purpose browsing, I personally prefer the speedy and
quick iCab which (like IE) can save Web pages as Web archives or plain
text, has an excellent Download Manager, and handles history and its
hotlist better than any browser, IMHO.
And Opera is showing plenty of promise.
