[EMAIL PROTECTED] suggested:
> You guys both may want to try Opera.
A lot of my paying work involves web research. After Nutscrape
crashed on me one time too many, losing my place among several
open pages, I downloaded Opera.
It's more stable.
When it _does_ crash, it has a "pick up where you left off" feature.
It has additional features I find directly useful in my work.
It has some less-important features that are still a lot of fun.[*]
The first time I clicked on a folder containing 122 bookmarks
and told it "open all items in folder", and it popped up 122
windows at once and filled them without crashing, I sent in my
money for a registered copy. That was version 4.0. I'm using
6.01 now under WinNT and 5.0 under Linux.
For the few pages that have bizarre Opera glitches, I've got
Nutscrape 4.something and Internet Exploder 5 that were on the
Windows boxes when I got 'em, and some version of Nutscrape on
one of my Linux machines. I've left Javascript enabled in one
copy of Netscape for those rare times when I really need to
access a site that requires Javacsript, for a job-related
research task -- any other site that requires Javascript doesn't
get me as a reader.[**] I wind up using Lynx and Links more
often than Netscape or Internet Explorer.
> Opera seems to be the only browser (in recent memory) that does
> actually conform to proper spec laid out by the W3C.
Once I get my Mac working again, I'll be using both Opera and
iCab on it. With iCab, it'll show you a little smiley face if
the page you're looking at actually conforms to the HTML spec,
and for the other 99.5% of the pages out there, it'll tell you
what they did wrong if you want.
As for continuing to use broken browsers for testing your own
pages to see whether they'll work for Most People, well yeah,
that's a really good idea for exactly that: testing. But I got
tired of relying on them to get work other than testing my own
pages done.
I'm sure there are other good browsers out there besides iCab
and Opera. I found a couple that do what I need and stopped
looking.
-- Glenn
[*] Mouse gestures! Wiggle the mouse a particular way, and it
opens the link under the mouse in a new window. Wiggle it a
different way and it does the same thing as clicking the "back"
button, etc. This is cool; this is fun; it amuses me. It's a
_little_ bit useful from an ergonomic standpoint. And yes, it
can be turned off.
[**] I trust Java more than Javascript, because Java, despite
the occasional security hole, is _designed_ to be safe[***]; whereas
Javascript was designed to get around the limitations that
Java's security model imposed. An exploit using Java is a bug;
allowing untrusted code[****] to scribble on your system is a
part of Javascript's design. Though it hasn't been seen much in
the wild _yet_, there's malware in the lab that can erase
Windows and install Linux just from surfing to a website
containing it.[*****]
[***] Standalone Java programs can do all sorts of stuff, but
Java "applets", which are what you can send as part of a web
page, are supposed to be restricted to a "security sandbox":
they get to make whatever mess in a restricted environment that
can't touch the rest of your computer ... or at least that's the
design -- bugs happen.
[****] Exact definition depends on how paranoid^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
careful a sysadmin you are. Strictly, untrusted code is
anything I didn't either write myself or carefully check all the
source code for and then recompile on my own system. More
realistically, software purchased from or downloaded from
sources you trust not to include Trojan horses or back doors and
to be careful enough not to be infected with viri or worms would
be included in the "trusted" category. The program
automatically executed when you visit Joe Random's website is
untrusted code in any case, at least until you walk the code by
hand to check it out.
[*****] Okay, so the user would have to be awfully patient while
this was being done -- the point is that if you can do that with
Javascript, you can do a lot of quicker but serious harm with
malware written in Javascript.
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