From: Guy Van Sanden
>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On 29/11/2000, 08:20:11, amircea@libertysurf.fr wrote regarding [SLE] The browser misery: <p>> After trying Netscape 6, Opera and Konqueror on some difficult Web
pages I arrive at the conclusion that at present time there is no acceptable browser program for linux users.
I use both Netscape and StarOffice (5.2) as my browsers. And sometimes even the text-based lynx. To this date I have not yet gotten any page I couldn't open in one of these! Be sure to use Netscape 4.76 (or higher), and not the preview version of 6. This has a new and different engine which is good, but not yet finnished, and therefor not entirely compatible. For pages made for Internet Explorer, I usually use StarOffice, as it seems compatible with both IE and Netscape.
Some pages have gotten so complex security features, tuned to
work
with Microsoft Internet Explorer, that only this browser can show them correctly.
Not quite true, the reason is that these pages are usually designed with a MS product, like frontpage or a Java-development program from MS. If you run an frontpage-document through a HTML-checker, you'll be surprised about the number of errors it contains. Especially, when using tables, all the end-tags are left out (like </TABLE>), causing any browser following the W3C standards for HTML and not the MS-standards to stop processing the page. The same goes for the Java-applets. Java (not Javascript, which was created by Netscape, and also 'modified' by MS) was developed by SUN, which made it free to implement, providing you keep to the standards (like implemented in the Sun-Java virtual machine). MS didn't do this (they were once convited by the courts for this), and created the MS virtual machine, as you could guess, not compatible with the original from SUN. BTW, IE is the browser with the most security holes you can find, so I don't thing that the complex security features are the real problem. I don't blame Microsoft for this; it's the people who designed
the pages who are to blame, I guess. Therefore, it is impossible nowadays to surf on the Internet without Windows and the Internet Explorer. I suppose that this is what americans call liberty...
I DO blame MS for this, and often not the creators of these pages. Many companies buy PC's, pre-installed with Windows. Than they take out an Internet-subscription... and what does the CD of most Belgian providers install... guess... Internet Explorer, Frontpage and Outlook. So they make their pages in Frontpage, often not knowing they are limiting themselves to customers that only use IE. If you want to surrender to Bill Gates, nobody is stopping or judging you. But I've always been raised with the idea that freedom is something you don't get gift-wrapped. You fight for it. That's why I use Linux, FreeBSD and in general Open Source software. But, the choice is yours, now that there still is a choice. Kind regards Guy
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