Sure, you’ve use Firefox and Internet Explorer. You may have even dabbled in Flock and Opera, or even become a devotee of one of these lesser-known applications. But have you ever browsed the web with Deepnet Explorer? How ’bout SeaMonkey? And when’s the last time you used Netscape? Did you even know that it was still around? And that’s without even mentioning the really obscure browsers, with names like NutScrape, Orca, Salamander, Skipstone, SkyKruzer, Kazehakase, Madfox, Arachne, Charon, Chimera, Dillo, Oregano, and Viola.
Here we’ll review three web browsers that are far from today’s Internet limelight: Deepnet Explorer, Netscape, and SeaMonkey. Because we, too, have to take market share into account somewhat in our coverage, we’ll limit this look for now to browsers that run on Windows. (Some of you in the forum may be able to successfully lobby our Linux guy, Jim Lynch, into reviewing the latest versions of Linux browsers such as Konqueror and Lynx.)
Almost all browsers that run on the Windows platform are based on one of two underlying page-rendering engines: Microsoft’s Trident—the foundation of Internet Explorer, and the Mozilla Foundation’s Gecko—Firefox’s engine. Opera stands out in this crowd by having its own rendering engine, called Presto, which renders pages in a manner that complies the most closely to web standards than the other two engines, as evidenced by the Acid2 test. Of the browsers we review today, Deepnet uses Trident, SeaMonkey uses Gecko, and Netscape uses both.
While we’ll touch on some of the standard browsing issues, we’re more concerned here with the unique features each of these browsers brings to the party. The most prominent for each: Deepnet’s P2P client, Netscape’s dual page rendering engines, and SeaMonkey’s web page editor. Of course, those aren’t the only important features in those browsers; you have to consider things like anti-phishing and RSS, as well.
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