TIP: Be aware that there are browsers out there besides Netscape and Internet Explorer, and many of them meet special needs not served by the Big Two. You might want to try some of them to test the cross-browser compatibility of your pages.

Albert

Albert is a full-screen browser for VM/CMS systems with IBM 3270 terminals. It hasn't been updated since 1995.

Alis Tango

Alis Tango is especially designed for users who need to use non-English languages. It has comprehensive support of multiple character sets, including better support than other browsers for the latest internationalization-related HTML, HTTP, and Unicode standards. While the mainstream browsers are gradually improving their internationalization support, Tango was there a long time ago. You can download a free demo version that expires in 30 days; after that you have to pay for it.

Interestingly, Alis Tango is one of the few browsers I've encountered so far that support the <Q> tag from the HTML 4.0 specs, which indicates a quotation and should normally result in quotation marks being added (the advantage over just typing the " character being that a system can use proprietary "smart-quote" characters if available, as well as allowing indexers, abstracters, and other specialized user agents to take appropriate action based on the logical concept that the contents are a quotation).

Amaya

Amaya was created by the W3 Consortium, the makers of the official HTML specs, as a "testbed" for advanced functionality they're working on developing standards for. It superceded their earlier testbed browser, Arena. It's not intended as a practical browser for end-users, and is full of bugs and flaws. For instance, when I tried an earlier version on a number of sites (including ones that validated fully under HTML 4.0) there were quite a few bizarre mis-renderings, like table cells that overlayed one on top of another and graphics that displayed in weird colors unlike those used by the designer. And it even hung my system once. More recently, when I tried a newer version, it didn't do the "grosser" things the earlier one did, though it still had a few problems. Don't expect to be able to use this as your primary browser, but it can be interesting for trying out W3C's new markup ideas; for instance, the latest version supports the proposed MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) which has a set of tags for marking up equations.

You can obtain Amaya (for various platforms including Windows 95, NT, and Unix) at:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

America Online

You've probably got a whole heap of their disks and CD-ROMs by now. The TV cartoon Futurama even joked about a big part of the future's garbage asteroid being made up of them. And for years, these ubiquitous disks contained a "Brand X Browser," as early AOL Web support was done via their own proprietary (and rather crappy) browser. They've since switched to a version of MSIE (adapted to do some AOL proprietary stuff like compress graphics in a way that sometimes screws them up, and use AOL's cache to not always show the current version of sites). Presumably, now that AOL has purchased Netscape, they'll eventually use some version of that browser instead, but for now they don't want to break a deal with Microsoft that has them included on the Windows desktop.

Read about AOL, and download their software if you somehow avoided getting their disk, at:
http://www.aol.com/

AMSD Ariadna

ANT Fresco

Part of the ANT Internet Suite, ANT Fresco is a browser for the Acorn RISC platform, a popular computer in Britain. It claims to support HTML 3.2 plus some "Netscape extensions."

Arachne

Users of MS- or PC-DOS-based systems (non-Windows) have a graphical browser, too. It even works on the older, slower PCs and obsolete graphic cards which aren't supported by the current-day "mainstream" browsers. Arachne is available free from:
http://home.arachne.cz/

ArcWeb

ArcWeb is a browser for the Acorn RISC OS. It's not being actively developed any more.

Arena

Arena was an early W3C testbed browser. It hasn't been updated by W3C lately, as the W3C has switched their testbed efforts to their newer browser, Amaya. However, an independent developer, Yggdrasil, took over development of Arena, and released a few more beta versions, but doesn't seem to be developing it any more these days.

AvantGo

AvantGo is a company specializing in porting data between "PalmPilot"-style pocket computers and larger computers. They offer a free subscription service that provides "channels" of Web sites optimized for pocket computers that can be downloaded from your desktop computer using software they provide, and also provide the means of surfing the Web on your PalmPilot if it's got a modem. Their software manages to accomodate regular Web sites on such small computers through special options, but does better with sites optimized specifically for the service. Also available is open-source code for pocket-computer interfacing using protocols they're trying to make into a standard.

AWeb

BeConn

BeConn used to be an independent browser, supporting most HTML constructs but sometimes a bit quirky (e.g., not centering some things that are tagged as centered). It used the bizarre user-agent string "Sax Webster Sax Webster." But it doesn't seem to be supported any more, since I can't find a mention of it on the company's site.

BrookesTalk

BrookesTalk is a speaking browser, produced by a British college. Unfortunately, its creators show a high degree of cluelessness about Web accessibility, even as they're supposedly creating programs to aid in it. The page to download their browser uses a registration form that requires JavaScript, which isn't even supported by their own browser. Actually, it didn't work on my browser, either; it kept telling me my surname was invalid. Finally, I viewed the source and found the direct address to the downloadable file, embedded in the JavaScript (another reason not to use JavaScript; a server-side script is not only more browser-accessible, it's more secure against people evading your requirements). After finally managing to get their program, I found it to be a poor-quality speaking browser; it didn't even use ALT text of images. Also, while loading a page, it would say things like "Retrieved 78K of 74K" while giving the status of the load; obviously, its math was a little off. You also need to download a couple of files from Microsoft's site to use it; these files say they're intended for developer use, not as consumer products.

BrowseX

BrowseX is an open-source, cross-platform browser written in the TCL language. Versions for Unix and Windows are available.

Cello

Cello was one of a bunch of browsers created by academics in the early, pre-commercial days of the Web, and it was popular for a while. It hasn't been updated since 1994, though, so it is now a historical footnote.

Cendis

The Cendis product line from Global Converging Technologies consists of a group of cordless phones and touch screens that can disseminate information throughout your home or business, including Web pages, which can apparently be displayed both on graphical LCD screens and on the tiny text screens of phone receivers. These systems are Windows CE based.

I don't know exactly what sorts of browsers are used on those phone screens, but they might have trouble displaying Global Converging Technologies' own site, which is designed in a rather accessibility-hostile manner, full of large blocks of text stored as images with little or no ALT text. This seems distressingly common in the sites of firms that are supposedly leading the way to greater Web accessibility via embedded browsers in telephones, palmtop computers, appliances, etc. You'd think those companies would go out of their way to make their own sites in a way that works in the sorts of devices they're promoting, but sometimes I find those sites to be especially bad at accessibility concerns.

CERN Line-Mode Browser

The CERN line-mode browser was one of the first Web browsers ever created, from the physics research lab that originated the Web. When CERN got out of the "Web business," its further development shifted to the W3 Consortium, so it's sometimes also known as the "W3C Line-Mode Browser," or sometimes simply as "WWW" (its original name, back when it was one of only two browsers in existence, the other one being "WorldWideWeb" for the NEXT computer).

This browser is sometimes still used on systems accessed via text-mode terminals of some public libraries, at least the ones which haven't upgraded to a more advanced text browser like Lynx. The version I tried at a library recently was pretty backward; it didn't recognize many character entities (like  ), didn't properly collapse excess whitespace in the HTML code, and had no support for tables or frames (which Lynx at least recognizes enough to allow documents to be readable, though not fully rendering them). So libraries are best off switching to Lynx for their text terminals.

Practically all libraries these days have fully-graphical computers for Web browsing using "mainstream" browsers, so what's the point of using the text-mode terminals anyway? Quite simply, the graphical systems are so popular these days that there are often lines, waiting lists, pre-registration requirements, and time limits on them, while the text terminals, mostly used for accessing the library's card catalog, are open and available. So the text Web access, little-known to the public, can be useful for looking up a quick fact on the Web, at least if the site you're looking for is text-browser-accessible.

At your library, look for a menu item like "Gateway Access" or "Network Access", and find the "World Wide Web" option.

Charlotte

If, by some chance, you're using a VM-CMS mainframe computer, you can browse the Web through its text-mode terminals using the Charlotte browser, a text browser that has some support for tables and frames. It's apparently since been adapted into the commercial product Enterprise View.

Chimera

Crystal Atari Browser (CAB)

CAB is a browser for the Atari ST series of computers. Yes, there are actually still people out there using these, though I haven't heard much about them in years.

CyberDog

CyberDog is an Internet suite developed by Apple to showcase their OpenDoc system. Some Mac users like it a lot; when I last checked the browser ratings at deja.com, it was the top-rated browser of all.

Device Mosaic

Spyglass has created this browser especially for embedding in devices such as set-top TV boxes, telephones, etc. Its envisioned uses go beyond the Web to other places where some sort of interactivity is needed without a full-fledged computer, such as pay-per-view program selection in a cable-company converter.

DocZilla

DocZilla (formerly MultiDocZilla) is a browser being created using the open-source Mozilla (Netscape) source code by an independent developer, and will support a much wider range of data formats than normal browsers, including full-fledged SGML and 50 different graphic formats.

DreamPassport

DreamPassport is the browser that comes with the Japanese version of the Sega Dreamcast game unit, released in late 1998. However, the much-hyped American release on 9/9/99 used a different browser, from PlanetWeb. I don't know much about the DreamPassport browser.

Draconis

Emacs-W3

The Emacs text editor has been popular with some users of Unix and some other operating systems for decades (I used it on a DEC-20 mainframe back in the '80s). To be precise, Emacs (short for Editing Macros) actually began in the '70s as a set of command macros for TECO, an even older and highly cryptic editor. Because of this structure, its functionality can be further extended by adding more macros, and somebody has come up with a set of extensions that turns Emacs into a full-fledged text-mode Web browser.

It's got a few problems. When I tried to view the characters & fonts page from this site, it refused to display it because some of the Unicode characters embedded in it weren't to its liking (although they're perfectly legal characters). Refusing to show a page at all if it doesn't like one character in it is rather a bad attitude for a browser to show. Also, Emacs-W3's style of attempting to render table layouts and colors in text mode, in some cases, produces less readable output than Lynx's style of ignoring almost all of this presentationalist stuff.

Blind or visually-impaired people may also want to obtain EMACSpeak, to turn it into a speaking browser.

Embrowser

Lineo (formerly Caldera Thin Clients) has created Embrowser as a browser designed to be embedded in products such as TV set-top boxes.

Enterprise View

Enterprise View is another browser for VM/CMS mainframes with 3270 terminals. It's apparently adapted from Charlotte.

Gzilla

HandWeb

HandWeb is a browser for the PalmPilot series of handheld computers. It can be used in text-only or graphical mode, but the display is heavily limited by the small size of these units.

Home Page Reader

This talking Web browser, designed for the blind and visually impaired, was recently released by IBM in both English and Japanese versions. It's a commercial product, priced at $149, but there's a free evaluation version available for download. Actually, it's not quite a stand-alone browser itself; you need to have Netscape, which it apparently uses to retrieve the pages, though Home Page Reader does its own audio rendering from the HTML logic rather than simply reading off the screen displayed by Netscape. An effect of the use of Netscape is that Home Page Reader will show up in webmasters' logs as Netscape when tallying browser statistics, making it impossible to gauge the amount of use of this product. I don't know why IBM couldn't either invent or license a page-retrieval engine of their own (perhaps built out of the open-source Mozilla code) in order to make their product fully stand-alone, save their blind users the hassle of installing a visual product like Netscape, and be able to use a user-agent identifier of IBM's own devising to show up in webmaster statistics.

HotJava

This browser was originally created by Sun to demonstrate what Java applets can do in Web sites, before the major browsers added Java functionality. They've continued to develop and improve it, and it now works better than the rather buggy early versions did. While there's no real reason to prefer it as a consumer browser over the "big two," Sun's main thrust is to promote a "component" version of HotJava to license to developers wishing to embed Web browser functionality into their products. If this catches on, it could result in browsers descended from HotJava being in wide use, making it important for Web developers to check the compatibility of their sites with this browser.

An interesting note is that, while HotJava obviously supports Java (this was the main purpose for which the browser was created), early versions did not support JavaScript, which is a totally different language. The large number of people who fail to understand the distinction between these two languages were likely to be confused by the fact that HotJava did not work correctly in sites that depend on JavaScript. In some cases, Java-based sites use JavaScript commands to launch the Java applets, which would make these fail as well, to the consternation of users who say "I thought this browser was made to run Java!" However, with version 3.0, JavaScript support was added to HotJava, so this problem no longer exists.

The French telecommunications company Alcatel has announced an upcoming line of phones with built in Web browsers, called WebTouch, which use HotJava as their browser under a Java-based operating system.

iCab

iCab is a German browser for the Mac. It's got a pretty good "fan following" among some Mac users. It is apparently based on the CAB browser for the Atari.

ICE

iComm

iComm is a graphical browser that works through a plain UNIX shell account, without requiring PPP or SLIP connections like other browsers. It runs on a Windows system, and connects by dialup to a UNIX shell, where it retrieves pages via Lynx (a text-mode browser), including downloading the graphics so it can display the pages in their graphical form. Browsers like iComm and SlipKnot served a useful function in the early days of the Web when many people had shell access but no PPP or SLIP connections. These days, many more people have PPP connections than even know what a shell account is, so iComm's era of usefulness has passed. As far as I know, it hasn't been updated since 1997.

i-opener

i-opener is a self-contained Internet appliance to access the Web without any installation of hardware or software required. It has its own built-in browser.

iPhone

iPhone, from InfoGear, is a telephone with a built-in screen and keyboard so you can use it to connect to the Internet. It's got its own browser built in which claims to support HTML 3.2 with frames. (However, frames weren't actually a part of the HTML 3.2 specs!) Incidentally, isn't it about time some of these Internet appliances tried to support HTML 4.0 instead of 3.2 so they won't be several years behind the times? Anyway, I'm not sure what the market is for such devices; at its $399 price, you can buy lots of brands of cheap PCs that can also access the Internet along with other functions, and are more upgradeable.

KFM

KDE (The K Desktop Environment) is a freeware, open-source Unix graphical desktop environment. It came originally with the KFM graphical browser, but Konqueror is the new successor.

Konqueror

L-H HTML Viewer

L-H HTML Viewer is an offline viewer of HTML for PC/MS-DOS. It's not really a browser since it doesn't connect directly to the Internet, but it does let you view HTML files if you obtain them somehow.

Liberate Technologies

Liberate Technologies develops browsers for such things as TV set-top boxes. I believe they're the successor to Navio, a Netscape offshoot that was developing such things, since the Navio site redirects to theirs. I don't know if Netscape still owns any part of it after the various mergers, acquisitions, and deals that have gone on since it started.

Links

Links is a text-mode browser for Unix and OS/2. Its name is an obvious takeoff on Lynx, and it's rather similar in concept, except that it attempts to lay out tables.

LodgeNet Internet

LodgeNet is a company that is setting up hotels with in-room Internet service via TV sets. I don't know the details of how their browser works, but it's likely to be similar to WebTV, since it shares the same inherent limitations of the TV as an Internet access device, including the lower-resolution screen and clumsy input devices. Their site says their browser "supports standard HTML," but will it support all the nonstandard HTML that some authors are using?

At one point, their page said they're "powered by Sun Microsystems," so perhaps they've licensed the HotJava browser technology mentioned above.

I'm not sure how many actual hotels are using this service yet. I haven't encountered one yet. A hotel I stayed at recently had a LodgeNet box on the in-room TV, but it was used only for selecting pay-per-view movies, videogames, and hotel bill review, not Internet access.

Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes is a multi-function program that includes a Web browser as one of its components. (You can reconfigure it, however, to use an external browser instead.) When I last checked their site, a beta version was available for download.

Lynx

The text-mode browser Lynx has been around longer than either of the current popular graphical browsers. In fact, its original creators hadn't even heard of the Web when they began developing it; it was designed as a campus information system for the University of Kansas, and originally used systems of hypertext markup and document addressing of the creators' own devising. But when they found out about the World Wide Web project, still in its infancy, they saw the benefit of using consistent standards, and modified their browser to support HTTP, HTML, URLs, and other elements of the Web.

The fact that Lynx is so old and that it's entirely in text mode make most people who have heard of it at all think it's an archaic, primitive browser unworthy of any sort of attention or consideration. However, it still has its fans, and is still being actively developed and refined, with current versions even supporting frames to a fashion (by providing links to each frame), and some rudimentary support for tables (by adding spaces between columns and line breaks between rows, but not attempting to actually lay out the table; this is a subject of great debate between those who want more table support for the purpose of showing tabular data, and those who think it will only cause worse rendering of pages that use tables for graphical layout which ought to be ignored by a text browser).

Text browsers like Lynx share with audio browsers like pwWebSpeak the difficulty of coping with highly-graphical sites not designed with accessibility in mind, but they do decently well in presenting the text content of well-designed sites that use proper ALT text for whatever images they do have. Some users prefer it as a way of quickly getting past the "eye-candy" and into the actual content of sites. And it's still the only practical means of accessing the Web if you're stuck on a text-only Unix shell account, which was a common situation just a couple of years ago, and might still be the case in remote parts of the world with limited bandwidth and primitive computer hardware.

For most users, a graphical browser is the preferred choice over a text browser. But if you're a Web developer, it's a good idea to take an occasional look at your sites in Lynx, to get an idea not only of what text-mode and speech-browser users will experience, but also what search engine indexers will probably see of your site (like Lynx, they ignore graphics, applets, and other non-text content).

Versions of Lynx can be downloaded free for various Unix versions, as well as for DOS and Windows 95, at:
http://lynx.browser.org/

MacWeb

MacWeb is a browser for the Macintosh by TradeWave Corp, which no longer supports it.

Mathbrowser

Mathbrowser is designed to browse both normal HTML documents and documents in some specialized formats designed to represent mathematical expressions. Newer versions are simply "MSIE skins" with no independent HTML rendering engine, but older versions (the only ones that work in Windows 3.1) had their own (primitive) HTML engine.

The old Mathbrowser apparently sends no "user agent string," or a completely empty string, so it'll come up empty to browser detectors or sites tracking browser statistics.

MMM

Mnemonic

Mnemonic is a project to build a free, extensible browser. Presently, they're only working in Unix platforms.

Mosaic

Mosaic was a pioneering browser, the one which first introduced inline images, bringing about the era of the graphical Web, and rapidly becoming the most popular browser of its era. Some of the creators of the original Mosaic went on to become the founders of Netscape, which rapidly took over Mosaic's position as the top browser. After they left, a group at the University of Illinois (where Mosaic was first created) continued to release new versions for a while, but eventually gave up because the Web world had passed them by. Version 3.0 is still available from their site, and supports some standards-compliant features, like use of LINK tags to provide a site-specific navigation bar, which the "mainstream" browsers have yet to do. Despite this, Mosaic is of mostly historical interest due to the lack of continuing development.

Mozilla

The Mozilla project was launched by Netscape when they released the unfinished source code to their upcoming 5.0 browser as open source for any developer who wished to work on. Various test versions of browsers compiled from these sources can be found online. These are not official Netscape releases, but some parts of them will probably find their way into Netscape in the future; for instance, Netscape has announced that their Communicator 5.0 will include the "Gecko" layout engine being developed under the Mozilla project. Other divergent browsers have been spawned from this open-source project, such as DocZilla, being created by a different company using the Mozilla sources in conjunction with other technologies. Thus, Mozilla straddles the line between mainstream "Big Two" browsers and "Brand X".

MultiWeb

MultiWeb is a combined graphical and speaking browser, intended for the visually handicapped. If you've got some sight, you can still look at the pictures (and there's a large-print option for viewing the text), but it doubles as an audio browser for the blind. It was developed at a college in Australia, under a government grant, and is free.

NetBox

Netomat

Netomat is one of several "artsy" things (WebStalker is another) that take a totally alternative approach to viewing Internet content (not really "browsing"). In this case, Netomat will grab various text and graphics related to a query from Web sites and bounce it around the screen randomly, screen-saver-style.

NetPositive

NetPositive is the browser that comes with the BeOS operating system. It has partial JavaScript support, but no Java.

NetShark

NetShark is a browser for the Macintosh by InterCon Systems Corporation. I don't know any more about it, and don't have a URL to obtain it.

Net-Tamer

Net-Tamer is a shareware program suite to do PPP-based Internet activity under MS/PC-DOS. It's mostly in text mode, but has a pseudo-graphical browser. When I tried it, most pages came up as totally blank screens (some were blank with a few images in the middle), but perhaps I messed up some configuration.

Newsie

Newsie is a news reader for Atari ST computers, but it also has a text-mode Web browser.

Nokia WAP Toolkit

The Nokia WAP Toolkit is a Windows-based simulation of a WAP-based Internet-enabled cell phone. It can be used to browse WML sites, and is intended for the use of developers interested in providing content for such devices. It comes with documentation (in PDF format) of WML and WMLScript, and can be obtained free by registering on an online form in Nokia's Developer Forum site:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/

Nokia 9000

The Nokia 9000 series of cellular phones fold out into a terminal which can be used for wireless Internet access. Its built-in browser (apparently one created specifically for this application, not a "ported" version of either of the Big Two "mainstream" browsers) is graphical, but with many limitations based on the screen, bandwidth, and input differences from full-sized computers. Many tags and attributes are not supported. Some guidelines on site authoring for compatibility with the Nokia 9000 series are included on their Web site. (However, they're mostly provided as PDF documents, which, as far as I know, aren't accessible on a Nokia 9000!)

Read about it at:
http://www.nokia9000.com/
A "Web-page compatibility self-test" (not very good; it does a very simplistic pattern-matching of your page, finding apparent "unsupported tags" even as substrings of parts of the DOCTYPE declaration) is at:
http://www.nokia9000.com/marketing/web-test.html

OmniWeb

If you've got a NEXTSTEP or Rhapsody system (renamed MacOS X Server now that Apple took them over), you can try out OmniWeb, a browser designed for this platform. (Note that, historically, Tim Berners-Lee's first browser, WorldWideWeb, ran on a NEXT computer.)

Online Anywhere

Online Anywhere isn't really a browser, but it is a company that specializes in making Web content accessible through "unusual" media such as cell-phone displays, TV sets, etc. Details on their site are somewhat sketchy, but it seems like they create proxy servers that filter Web content into forms suitable for different devices, allowing the Web author to specify things like which parts of the page to omit in particular circumstances (maybe using proprietary tags?) letting the same page work differently on different devices. I don't know much more than that.

Their site (with some info and screenshots, but no actual downloadable programs, demo sites, or authoring guides) is at:
http://www.onlineanywhere.com/

Opera

The leading third-party graphical browser is Opera, developed in Norway. Though it costs money and is competing with browsers that are free, it has a number of avid fans due to its much smaller memory and disk space requirements and the presence of configuration options such as the ability to disable sites from spawning new browser windows. The current version (as of this writing) doesn't yet support the new HTML 4.0 constructs, but they're supposed to be working on it.

Oregano

Oregano is a browser developed for set-top boxes, but available also for RISC-OS computers.

Palm Pilot VII

Version "VII" of the popular Palm Pilot line of handheld computers supports wireless Internet access. However, instead of a general-purpose browser, it runs "query applications" which "clip" from selected Web sites, letting users get various items of interest (sports scores, stock quotes, etc.) while skipping the bulky stuff on most Web sites that takes too long to load. Given that their "PalmNet" Internet service charges by the kilobyte for data transfers beyond 50 or 150K per month (depending on which plan you pick), you really do need to "clip" only what you need; many single pages on the Web are bigger than 150K, which would kill your whole month's quota! This "clipping" is probably a faster, more efficient way of getting information from the Web if the information you want happens to be covered by one of the "query applications" you have, but it offers no method of getting to the broader range of Web information that isn't so covered. Hyperlinks to related sites are not supported, since the other sites have no "clipping" program defined. Thus, you lose out on some of the main strengths of the Web.

Incidentally, like Nokia, the Palm Pilot people have placed some of the tech specs in their Web site in the form of a PDF document, making it inaccessible to the likes of their own handheld devices.

PlanetWeb

PlanetWeb makes browsers to embed in appliances such as videogame units, set-top boxes, telephones, etc. A PlanetWeb browser is used in the American release of the much-hyped Sega Dreamcast video game unit. (The original Japanese release used a browser called DreamPassport.) With the great popularity of Dreamcast right from its 9/9/99 American release, there may be lots of people surfing the net with this browser in the near future.

Prodigy

The original Prodigy online service, since re-dubbed "Prodigy Classic" after the debut of the newer Prodigy Internet, was the first major commercial online service to offer Web access. It did this through a proprietary browser of its own devising, which started out in early 1995 with plain HTML 2.0 support, but gradually added some of the later enhancements such as background graphics and tables. Prodigy Classic has now been terminated because it is technologically outdated (and not Y2K compliant).

See Prodigy's site (which doesn't really mention the "Classic" service any more) at:
http://www.prodigy.com

ProxiWeb

ProxiWeb is a browser for PalmPilots and Windows CE devices. It browses the Web through a proxy server provided (presently free) by the maker of this browser. The proxy "optimizes" the content for pocket computers, and promises a fully-graphical experience. One oddity is that it supports server-side imagemaps but not the client-side variety, even though the latter is much more common these days.

Psion Message Suite

The Psion is a British handheld computer. They have a graphical browser for their Series 5 computer (with a black-and-white screen), and have now released a Series 7 computer with a color screen and Web software included.

pwTelephone

The makers of the speaking browser pwWebSpeak also make a program that connects to a phone line and lets you make Web access available by telephone. Callers navigate Web sites (Internet, intranet, or extranet depending on what you connect the system to) by listening to the browser read the site out loud and by pressing telephone keys. This is similar to the (apparently discontinued) product Web-On-Call.

pwWebSpeak

The blind and visually impaired have often attempted to access the Web using a screen reader on the output of a visual browser (either graphical or text-mode). This is rather imperfect, as it loses a lot of the logical structure of the HTML document. A better option is a speech browser that renders the HTML directly in audible form. pwWebSpeak is such a browser.

The concept of pwWebSpeak is very good. The implementation is adequate, but could be improved; its HTML parser seems to be even more "Tag Soup" than the popular browsers -- rather than generating a logical structure of the document via a rigorous SGML parsing, it simply reacts to the opening and closing tags as they come up. This is acceptable for the simplistic rendering pwWebSpeak currently does (like announcing "Link!" before each link, and announcing the start and end of a table when they occur), but could be troublesome if future versions attempt more sophisticated renderings of entire blocks of content, like using a different volume or tone of voice for blockquotes than for normal text.

QNX Demo

Did you know you can fit all the software you need to access the Web on just one floppy? A company called QNX has done just that, countering the wave of "bloatware" with a fully-graphical browser even smaller than Opera, which, amazingly, fits entirely on a self-booting floppy disk, complete with a custom operating system. You don't even have to have Windows; just boot it on any PC-compatible computer, and dial up to your Internet account with the dialer software that's included.

You can get this "Web Floppy" free; just download a self-executing program at:
http://www.qnx.com/iat/
which you then run with a blank 1.44 MB (3.5" high density) disk in your drive to create the self-booting disk. They're giving this away as a demo of their ability to embed Web functionality in a very small space, something they're hoping to interest the manufacturers of appliances in which they can embed their browser software. Maybe you'll be able to surf the Web in the future from your cellular phone or your clock-radio. Meanwhile, this free demo disk might be of use if you've got a friend with an outdated PC that you're dying to introduce to the Web. Just bring over the disk, boot it, and you're on the net!

Qubit

Qubit is a portable "information appliance" that works like a cordless phone, accessing the Internet through a wireless LAN going to a base station somewhere else in your house that has a modem connection. It has a version of MS Windows built in, and some sort of Web browser -- maybe MSIE, given that it's Windows-based, but the promotional article about it doesn't actually say. But due to the differences in characteristics of this appliance (user interface, amount of memory, etc.) from a normal PC, any browser on it, even if it's adapted from MSIE, is bound to have some differences from the "mainstream" browsers.

Rocket E-Book

This isn't really a browser, since it doesn't connect directly to the Internet, but the Rocket E-Book, a portable electronic "book", does allow you to download HTML or text documents into it for offline browsing. It's designed primarily for the viewing of books stored in their proprietary encrypted HTML-based format with copy-protection to protect authors' rights, but it can also be used to view other text and Web pages. The idea is that you can carry this light, portable reader anywhere you might take a book, and buy new texts for it via Internet download through your PC.

Sensus

The Sensus Internet Browser is a speaking browser (actually an add-on to MSIE) which is available only by mail-order (no demo-version download is available), priced in Danish kroner.

Sigtuna

Sigtuna is an adapted and renamed version of the pwWebSpeak speaking browser, distributed by a Japanese organization. Both English and Japanese versions are downloadable free on their site, intended to be used noncommercially by nonprofit organizations and handicapped individuals. Commercial users are supposed to buy pwWebSpeak instead.

Skipper

Skipper is the browser that comes with the NewDeal program suite, a graphical environment intended for lower-powered PCs. It runs under DOS and gives some of the functionality of Windows 95/98 without needing as many resources.

SlipKnot

Like iComm, SlipKnot is a graphical browser that works through a Unix shell account, running on a Windows system and connecting by dialup to a shell account that runs Lynx or CERN Line Mode Browser to retrieve Web documents.

SPIN

Star Office

Star Office is a full set of office programs (word processor, spreadsheet, database, e-mail, etc.), and it includes its own Web browser. The browser seems to support current-day HTML features to about the same extent as the "Big Two" browsers, with the usual minor quirks in layout which are only a problem for authors who insist on everything being planned down to the last pixel. (But it apparently does not support JavaScript.) As a browser, it doesn't really have any features that make people want to ditch the other browsers and use it, but as an integrated set of software it may prove attractive given the price: free for noncommercial users. It's a rather sizable download, though; you'd better have a T1 or leave it downloading all night. A Web editor is also included, and like most WYSIWYG editors it munges your HTML code and introduces erroneous syntax (like leaving out quotes around attributes that require them).

Formerly produced by a company called Star Division, Star Office is now owned by Sun Microsystems.

UdiWWW

UdiWWW is a browser that supports English and German prompts, and has some support for LINK elements. However, it has not been upgraded or maintained lately, so it's no longer a viable entry in the browser market.

UP.Browser

UP.Browser is a browser created by phone.com for use on cell-phones, generally with text-only displays. It's used by Sprint PCS for their wireless portable Internet service. However, it's not an HTML browser; it uses its own "HDML" (Handheld Device Markup Language) format, though it does also support the more standardized WML.

While phone.com has a developer site, you need to fill out a registration form to access it. I was unable to find any sort of "tech-specs" on their HDML language that were accessible without registration, and their site promoted expensive stuff like a $295 tutorial CD-ROM for people interested in learning how to develop content of this format. This is a far cry from the openly documented standards and free on-Web tutorials that HTML has always had. Ironically, one of their developer-oriented documents that is freely readable without registration, a hype document touting the growth of the handheld browser market and claiming to be at the forefront of it, makes reference to the VHS vs. Beta video format wars, and how Beta was technically superior but still lost. It seems to me that HDML is the "Beta" here; it might be superior in some ways for the specific purpose of handheld wireless browsing, but most of the content of the Web is in HTML, not HDML, so the former is the almost certain winner of any format wars to come.

Viola

Viola was one of the early academic browsers that was popular in the pre-commercial days of the Web, and pioneered lots of things including the use of embedded applets (and is presently being cited, by Microsoft of all people, as prior art in a lawsuit challenging somebody else's claim to patent protection of this concept). It was actually a generalized hypertext system to which the Web browser was an addon. I can't find any current Web site about it, so I'm not sure if any version is still available.

VIP Browser

VIP Browser is a speaking browser. I don't know much about it, since there's very little information in the Web site about it, and no demo version is available; you need to pay the price (over $200) for the privilege of getting a copy by snail-mail.

Voyager

Voyager [a different unrelated one]

A company called Nuance has announced the upcoming (in mid-2000) release of a telephone-based voice browser, Voyager. To date, the only information about it is a press release (in marketroid style) that doesn't really make it clear whether this browser will actually allow the transmission and navigation of normal HTML documents by phone, or just documents created in a proprietary voice-specific language of Nuance's devising (which would be yet another attempt to Balkanize the Web into incompatible formats, like the various proprietary languages for palmtop browsing). They mention a "VoxML" language, but don't say clearly whether that's all their browser will support, or if it has some capability of reading out normal HTML too. All of these attempts at proprietary, application-specific, markup languages are being marketed using lots of references to the Web, because that's "hot" and "sexy", but if they offer access only to proprietary sites designed specifically for their application, then they are not truly part of the Web, which is a globally-interlinked information medium intended for universal accessibility.

Wanna-Be

Wanna-Be is a text-only browser for the Macintosh. Kind of like Lynx, I guess. It's a little odd to see a text browser coming out for the platform that pioneered graphical interfaces, but it's got its enthusiasts already, even though it's still in the alpha-test stage. There are people out there who like to get information from the Web without all the overhead and distraction of graphics.

WAR

WAR... What is it good for? Well, in this case, it's good for something to developers of WML sites for cell-phone use. It's one of the developer browsers that simulate phone-based browsers to help site creators test their work, part of the wap.net toolkit.

WebCite

WebCite is a speaking browser, but no version is presently available; the Web site says it's "in Beta," but there's no indication of how you might become one of their testers.

Web-On-Call

Web-On-Call isn't a consumer browser, but rather is server software to let a Web site owner make its site available by phone as well as by Internet. You need to have a Sun or Windows NT system permanently connected to the Internet, and the hardware to connect voice and fax modems to it. WebOnCall retrieves the Web site from the Internet and reads it out loud over the phone, with links converted to voice-menu items, and the ability to fill out online forms using the touch-tone keypad. Any text-browser-friendly Web site will work with this software, but they provide authoring guidelines for optimizing a site for telephone use, and there are some special embedded tags (generally implemented using

<A
NAME="command">

) to tell Web-On-Call to ignore parts of a page (such as graphical menus) and to read additional text not shown by normal browsers (through TITLE attributes). Since these anchor tags are legal HTML syntax, the pages can still validate, though the logical structure is a bit goofy; it would have probably been better if they implemented audio stylesheets instead as the method of suggesting particular behavior for different sections of the document.

(This product seems to be discontinued, since the address below now gets you to a corporate site with no mention of Web-On-Call.)

WebPal

WebPal is a TV set-box Web browser, similar to WebTV. I don't know much about it, but some information can be found at:
http://www.gorenfon.com/webpal.html

WebStalker

WebStalker promises to provide "a new way of experiencing the Web." If by this they mean an utterly incomprehensible interface, they're right. Rather than just letting you "browse," WebStalker generates an ever-changing graph of the pages linked to, and the ones they link to, and so on. This would be a neat idea if it actually worked in a manner the user could understand, but it's done in a pretty-much unusable way here. And I couldn't even figure out how to quit the program without pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del.

In keeping with its general attitude of crypticness, WebStalker sends a completely empty user agent identifier string (or doesn't send any user agent string at all; I'm not sure which), and so will show up as "unknown" or "missing" on any site's browser usage statistics.

Read about WebStalker (in a site with a structure and interface about as cryptic as the program itself) and download it at:
http://bak.spc.org/iod/

WebSurfer

WebSurfer is a browser for the Macintosh and Windows by NetManage Inc. I don't know any more about it, and don't have a URL to obtain it.

WebTV

WebTV is one of several competing set-top boxes that let people access the Web without a computer. It's now owned by Microsoft, so I guess it's not technically "Brand X," but it's highly different from "mainstream" browsers due to the limitations of a TV set as a Web display. Now you can see how your site looks in WebTV without buying one of their units yourself; simply download the WebTV Simulator at their developer site. It runs on a standard Windows system and simulates the appearance and functionality of the WebTV browser. Try it out to see what WebTV users are seeing when they go to your sites.

Wensuite

WorldWideWeb

Tim Berners-Lee's original browser for the World Wide Web, at the time he invented it at CERN, was called simply "WorldWideWeb." It ran on the NEXT computer, and was both a browser and HTML editor. The earliest primitive but functional version was working on Tim's NEXT workstation by Christmas, 1990. Later, he renamed it "Nexus" to distinguish it from the Web itself.

W3M

W3M is a text-mode browser for Unix and Windows platforms. Unlike Lynx it attempts to lay out tables. English and Japanese versions are available.

ActiveX is a form of Microsoft-specific proprietary Web content that was Bill Gates' counterattack to Java. So far, it's only worked on Microsoft's own browsers, contributing to the fragmenting of the Web community. However, somebody else has now come out with an alternative ActiveX-compatible browser, called 1X. Like Opera and QNX, they've kept it simple and produced a product taking up relatively little memory and disk space. While I'm glad to see somebody taking steps to make ActiveX a little less proprietary, I still see no reason to use this sort of material in my own Web pages; I'd rather use forms of content with open standards that are supported by a wide range of vendors, so when I use some form of applets and scripting, I'll use Java and JavaScript in preference to Microsoftisms like ActiveX and VBScript, even if other guys do eventually come out with browsers reverse-engineered to support these things. Anyway, Java is designed with more comprehensive security than the rather risky ActiveX. But fans of ActiveX might want to check out the 1X browser, at:
http://www.scitrav.com/1X/

Others

There are yet more browsers out there, and more are popping up all the time. The release of Netscape's source code will probably eventually result in some varieties of Netscape-derived browsers, perhaps designed with users' wants in mind instead of corporate marketing plans. You can find links to some Windows 95 browsers in the TUCOWS site at:
http://tucows.texoma.net/web95.html

A really long list of browsers (even including a few I've missed here; I've got to check them out) is at:
http://www.hoary.org/browse/

And the Big Two too...

Just in case you haven't tried both of the two "mainstream" browsers, here's where to find them:

This page was copied from:

"Brand-X" Browsers: Beyond the Big Two