Web browser

Firefox is the Web browser I recommend for most people. There are dozens of other browsers available; see the Wikipedia articles list of web browsers and comparison of web browsers. I've tried to cover here browsers that historically have had significant usage share, or at least some shot at it, except for Mosaic.*

Lots of folks think their Web browser is the Internet, and who can blame them?

If you've never used anything but Internet Explorer 6, and you're wondering why I'm even writing about other browsers, try my Browser Wars page in this section. You'll find discussion of a famous market-share battle between Netscape Communications and Microsoft which led to a 1998 federal antitrust suit, a history of browsers timeline, a little discussion of browser interface theory, and, I hope, demystification of the word Mozilla and the past and present significance of the Netscape name.

Browsers sometimes come with a suite of accessory programs, including one for sending and receiving email in the original POP-mail client/server fashion (as opposed to browser-based Web-mail).

Whatever Web browser you decide to use, make sure you check out the free Microsoft TrueType Web fonts, which are optimized for online reading: see the Web fonts section of my browser tips page for more details.

* The NCSA Mosaic Web browser pretty much launched the Web for non-programmer use in 1993/94, and briefly had a usage share above 90%, but was quickly replaced by Netscape Navigator. Mosaic 3 is still available, but development stopped in 1997, it's primitive by current standards, and really not significant for users today.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is an open-source freeware Web browser with superior features and functionality. Firefox 2.0 was released 24 October 2006, download size for Windows 5.6MB. There are official builds of Firefox for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, in versions for dozens of languages, and unofficial or "contributed" Firefox builds for other systems including OS/2. Firefox 3.0 is supposed to be on the way, possibly as soon as June 2008.

The Firefox site lists recommendations or awards from Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Associated Press, the Washington Post, PC Magazine, CNET, and Wired. Internet Explorer has been losing market share since the Firefox 1.0 release; Firefox is up to about a 10-12% usage share, depending on whose stats you consult. Among this site's users it usually runs 20-30%, and this seems to be fairly typical of sites with traffic from Web developers.

I suggest dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser, which has a history of security breaches. I recommend instead Mozilla Firefox. (Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, 9/16/04)

If you ever put Firefox on a CD for someone, you should probably include Thunderbird too. If you'd like to fill up that CD more, there's a suggestion section on my page about getting OpenOffice.org, with a list of other software.

If you use Firefox and you also use old-school client/server POP mail for your Internet email (rather than browser-based Web-mail) Mozilla also offers the user-friendly free POP-mail client Thunderbird, which shares the same Website, support, add-ons (extensions and themes) interfaces as Firefox. For more detail about Thunderbird, see my Email clients page in this section.

If you run Windows you'll need to leave Internet Explorer installed even after you install Firefox, I'm afraid. IE is stitched into the Windows OS in several ways, and your organization may not even allow you to switch to a different browser; see my IE section below. You may also need to use IE for readability of some content when consulting the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Interesting Firefox extensions

Firefox and Thunderbird have dozens more extensions available for free download; these are just the ones that interested me.

FlashGot is download manager integration; see my download managers page for more. I used this with Free Download Manager starting in mid-2005, including successful resumed downloads of multiple large files. Recommended for use with download managers other than Free Download Manager.³

Gmail notifier: Gmail's own tray-icon Notifier tells you when you have new mail, but requires Windows 2000/XP or Mac OS X; this Firefox status-bar/toolbar extension runs anywhere Firefox will. But you may not need either notifier: see my Webmail page.

The imagepref extension provided a status-bar check box that toggles image loading. This sort of thing can be good for Web surfing on dialup connections, and HTML previewing for Web publishing. I use it to speed up login to my two Web-mail accounts and MyBookmarks,4 and when starting software downloads from Sourceforge.

Unfortunately imagepref is no longer offered through the regular Firefox extensions site. They now recommend ImgLikeOpera; I tried it, but couldn't get it to work the way I wanted. I want to be able to toggle image loading for local-drive files, so I can check what my pages look like for dialup users with image loading off.

Imagepref is incompatible with Firefox 2.0 as is, but there's a simple hack, which worked for me. I present it here in the exact same wording that used to be on the Firefox extensions site.

NOTES
1. A site has to have a favicon before Firefox or any other browser can display it. Examples with favicons: Google, Yahoo, craigslist, Wikipedia.
2. Alternate styles in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used just for esthetics, or are also designed to eventually support special formatting for assistive technologies and for alternate media types such as print, handheld, projection, and Web on TV.
3. Free Download Manager (FDM) now comes with its own Firefox plugin; you no longer need the FlashGot extension to use FDM with Firefox. See the FDM section of my download managers page for details.
4. You pretty much have to turn image loading back on once you're logged in to MyBookmarks, because of the little images it uses to show the tree structure of the bookmark folders. Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are functional with images off.

Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey

Mozilla Suite was the original line of development of open source Mozilla browsers. The suite included the Mozilla Navigator browser, based on the same Gecko layout engine as Firefox and Netscape 6.0+, a POP-mail and newsgroups client, an address book with available Palm sync, the IRC chat client ChatZilla, and the user-friendly HTML editor Mozilla Composer. Mozilla Suite was deemphasized at Mozilla in early 2005 in favor of concentrating on the separate Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client.

Mozilla Suite morphed into SeaMonkey, which is being developed and maintained by volunteers. SeaMonkey 1.0 was released 30 January 2006, and included all the stuff that was in Mozilla Suite, with some interface tweaks; there have been other releases since then. A seamonkey is a kind of tiny shrimp sometimes sold by mailorder and kept in jars as a curiosity, and yes, I think the name is goofy too.

SeaMonkey makes an interesting alternative to Firefox/Thunderbird, with the interface differences and the fact that it's an integrated Internet suite rather than a standalone browser and mail client. SeaMonkey has a Component Bar on the left side of the status bar, with mini-icons to launch the browser, the mail/news client, Composer, Address Book, and ChatZilla. Any page displayed in the browser can be opened in Composer for editing by doing File, Edit.

You can install both Firefox and SeaMonkey if you like, and use either browser at will, although reportedly there can be problems on Linux if you start one of the two browsers while the other is already running.

Netscape Navigator

The Netscape browser through v4.x was central to the explosion of popular interest in the Web during 1994-1999. Its usage share peaked around 1996 at 80-90%.

There's still something called Netscape Navigator available for download today. What's left of Netscape Communications has been an AOL subsidiary since 1999, although you can't tell that from the site before you download and install Netscape.

Netscape 5 was never generally available: it was cancelled in 1999 when Netscape switched code bases from "Netscape Classic" (4.x and previous) to the open-source Gecko layout engine used in Netscape 6+.

What's been known as "Netscape Navigator" since Netscape 6.0 in late 2000 has been based on the open-source Gecko layout engine now developed by mozilla.org. If you get Netscape Navigator now, what you'll really have is Mozilla Firefox underneath, with different gingerbread on the outside. Netscape 6+ has had a generally declining trend in usage share and appears to have been below 3% and dropping globally since 2004.

Since Netscape 6+ and Mozilla Firefox are based on the same Gecko layout engine, if you're testing Web pages with Firefox you probably don't need Netscape, unless you are really a stickler.

Opera

Opera 9.0 was released 20 June 2006. Opera has been a readily available alternative since 1999 at least.

Opera's developers have consistently pursued two values to which other browser developers have paid less attention at times. One is Web standards compliance; the other is keeping the browser small and efficient, both with your system resources and with download time. Opera 9's download file is only 4MB (look for the "classic installer" download). Because Opera is relatively fast and small it can be a good choice for older slower hardware.

Opera is highly customizable including skins, and has tabbed browsing, automatic popup blocking, good CSS support, and support for alternate styles. Opera 7/8/9 has a handy toolbar feature for turning off image loading for faster browsing on dialup. Opera has search in the toolbar, and you can add search engines, similar to Firefox. New Opera 9, among other new features, introduces widgets, small Web applications on your Desktop, such as games and newsfeeds. Opera is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

On Windows, Opera 7/8's default source code viewer is WordPad; Opera 9 includes its own native source code viewer/editor with syntax highlighting, which by default comes up as a browser tab. You can also specify any editor you want (Tools, Preferences, Advanced, Programs) which is nice for Web development. To open a page for editing, you can just display it in Opera and do View, Source (or press Control-F3). I've never understood why other browsers don't do this, at least as an option.

Another Opera feature that can be useful for Web developers is View, Zoom, also available on the View toolbar. I'm sure this was originally designed with user accessibility in mind, but you can also use it to quickly model what a page would look like for someone with a bigger monitor or higher screen resolution. Try Zoom factors in the 60-90% range. You can also use keypad +/- to zoom in 10% increments, and keypad * (asterisk) to reset to 100%. This type of zooming is expected to be supported in Mozilla Firefox 3.

In spite of its many fine qualities Opera appears never to have had a global usage share greater than 2%. This may actually be in part a consequence of its user interface innovations, and perhaps a perceived dark horse status. It's worth noting that the Opera code base and layout engine have always been independent of those of Internet Explorer and the Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox family. If you're writing Web code, it might therefore be worthwhile looking at your pages in Opera occasionally, in spite of the low usage share.

Opera always comes with POP-mail capability, but a new database-driven mail client called M2 was introduced with Opera version 7, and I've heard complaints about it. Your mileage may vary. Opera plus Mozilla Thunderbird, or Opera plus the free Web-mail service of your choice would be reasonable alternatives for fans of the Opera browser.

Opera announced in 2005 that for Opera 8.50+ they were dropping the ad banner and licensing fee* in favor of free browser downloads and income from search revenues including their deal with Google. Two weeks later they announced Opera downloads had quadrupled over previous versions. You can download past versions of Opera for reference and testing at the official Opera Archives or at Mark Schenk's Opera version history page. OldVersion.com also has old Opera versions, as well as IE and Firefox.

* Opera 5.0+ could be run in an advertising-supported free mode, or you could pay US$39 and get rid of the small ad banner. Earlier Opera versions had no ads but required registration after a trial period.

Internet Explorer

You can also stick with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE or MSIE) for your Web browsing, if you so desire, or perhaps are being required to as a condition of employment. On a new Windows PC you'll already have IE available, along with Outlook Express, native Internet connection support, and character-mode (DOS-window) ftp and telnet utilities.

IE, Outlook, and Windows have a long history of Internet security problems, the official fixes for which may work out better on an all-Microsoft PC system than otherwise. I find IE's menu structure a bit annoying; significant features often are buried several layers down. Later builds of MSIE 6.0 apparently have some partially effective popup blocking. IE6 has come to be universally reviled by Web designers for supporting CSS just well enough to cause major headaches, compared to Opera and Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape.

Even if you designate Firefox or Opera or Netscape as your system default Web browser, if you're running Windows I'm afraid you won't be able to remove IE. Back in 1997/98 when Microsoft was trying to justify IE as part of the operating system—rather than an application, which is how people actually use Web browsers to this day—they invented a number of ways to stitch IE into Windows. For example, all Help windows in Windows now are actually displayed by IE, and font sizes in Help are therefore controlled from IE. Also, beginning with IE4 and Windows 98, through IE6, Internet Explorer is the Windows operating system's basic shell, or interface. All "Windows Explorer" and folder windows are really IE under the hood, despite what you'll find under "Help, About."

IE's global usage share has probably been above 80% since 2000, appears to have peaked around 95% in 2002/03, and has been declining somewhat since the release of the Mozilla/Firefox browsers.

You may find you need to use IE for readability of some content when you consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base. Standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Opera, which work great everywhere else, sometimes have problems with Microsoft's pages. One also occasionally finds local-interest Web sites with IE-specific coding.

Internet Explorer typically installs from the CD as part of Windows, of course. Software that requires a certain IE build often includes it on the distribution CD. If you ever do an Internet-based install or upgrade of IE, be aware that what you initially download is just an installer, and it then downloads the main part of IE online during the "install" process, which for IE6 can be 75MB. I hear IE7 is even bigger.

Sillydog.org has a Switch Guide page with user-friendly details on switching from MSIE to other browsers, mostly focused on switching to Netscape, Firefox, or Mozilla Suite. Much of what they say applies to Opera as well, allowing for Opera's different names for things. There was also a Dec 2004 Browser Wars article in PC World magazine comparing IE6 with the available alternatives.

In general Internet Explorer on Windows will not tolerate any other versions of itself on the same PC, at least not without heroic intervention such as multiple-boot configurations, virtual machine emulators, or propeller-head tweaking of IE install files. This is a significant obstacle for Web designers. Since IE6 has been around in various builds since October 2001, that would be the most important IE version to use for site testing. For more on this issue see the testing with browsers section of my Web content for business people page, including the interesting BrowserCam testing resource.

* It's especially interesting in this context that Internet Explorer 7 will again be a standalone application which does not act as the Windows shell.

IE7

Internet Explorer 7 was released in October 2006, about a week before the release of Firefox 2.0. IE7 comes with Windows Vista, and is available for download for WinXP SP2+. I've seen IE7 running on WinXP at Fedex Kinko's.

Microsoft has been saying IE7 is supposed to be much better than IE6 at CSS standards compliance; I haven't had much chance to play with it much yet, but it does look better. IE7 is at least handling the CSS-based hovered-link highlighting used on this site correctly, unlike IE6. I did see an issue where IE7 still doesn't seem to handle column group formats in tables as well as Firefox.

Based on Google Analytics results for this site, IE7 does seem to be replacing IE6 fairly rapidly, at least as such things go for the typically stodgy or hidebound Microsoft-only users.

Minimum system requirements comparison
	Mozilla Firefox 2.0	IE7
Processor	233 MHz	233 MHz
RAM	64 MB	87 MB (on WinXP)
Disk space	50 MB	? (lots)
OS	Win98, Mac OS X 10.2.x, or Linux kernel 2.2.14	WinXP SP2 or later

Mac browsers

Safari is a Web browser from Apple for Mac OS X. In terms of claimed features it seems very comparable to Mozilla Firefox or Opera. Safari on OS X became the biggest usage share after MSIE and Mozilla Firefox, at a few percent. Macs started out running Netscape Navigator, then shipped with versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer for years; Safari is the first Web browser developed by Apple.

With Firefox, IE7, Opera, and now Safari for PC and Mac, we now have four independent groups of developers competing on innovation in Web browsers for mainstream Windows users (or five if you count SeaMonkey). This is a big improvement over the five years or so when many people were stuck with IE6.

As of June 2007, Safari 3 beta is also available for Windows XP and Vista. Faster page loading is claimed relative to other PC browsers. There are also supposed to be significant user interface innovations, including bookmarks management and an improvement to the Back-button function called SnapBack. Post-Windows-beta Safari usage share has still been in the few-percent range; it will be interesting to see what happens when the Windows release version comes out.

Camino is a Web browser from Mozilla.org for Mac OS X only, based on the same open-source Gecko layout engine used by Mozilla Firefox.

If you need a graphical browser for Mac System 9 and older, iCab may be the only one currently maintained.

Of course, there are cross-platform Mac-friendly versions of Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The last access I had to a Mac running OS X, or any Mac for that matter, was 2001-2003, on lab systems we had while I was doing MS Project and Excel support.