Alternative Browsers
Posted by: Luke in internet, open source, productivity, software, tags: alternative to internet explorer, browser, browsex, ecmascript, firefox, html, html viewer, html viewer 3, internet explorer, javascript, opera, opera 9.50, tkhtmlI have been a long-time fan of Opera. It is a great alternative to bulkier browsers like Firefox and IE, and happens to be the first browser to have discovered tabbed browsing.
However, I’ve noticed that it is getting bigger, and is closed source besides — so I can’t just hack in and fix whatever problem arises. Last version had a fatal flaw where the Wordpress rich text editor was concerned, so I had to upgrade to the 9.50 beta. Lately I have noticed it tending to hang for a few seconds on certain sites when I have plugins enabled. In any case, the lack of extensibility bothers me a little so I wanted to try something fresh.
So I went out looking for different browsers, preferably something lightweight and open source, yet more graphical than Lynx. I have long been aware of Dillo — which works great provided you have no need for JavaScript or SSL. I wanted something a little more with the times.
Next I tried BrowseX. Aside from the name looking as if it came from the title of a raunchy movie, I was displeased with the number of errors it came with, right out of the box. It was atrocious! It attempted to enable “external” DNS caching — something I never heard of — and kept giving errors until I switched to internal. Furthermore, it popped up an error window when I visited sites with complicated JavaScript — such as Google Maps. Well really, the error wouldn’t appear until I tried to leave.
Finally, I did a search for TKHtml, which is the engine BrowseX was running on. This gave me the wikipedia article which mentioned HTML Viewer 3, which I am using now.
Suddenly it all makes sense! The browser it is most similar to is probably Firefox, But it’s quite a bit smaller and there are admittedly several functions missing.
Setup is a bit complicated. First you have to download the HV3 StarKit. Then you’ll want to run this using TCLKit. I used the latest available for Linux, and have had no problems so far. 
Some things I’m pleased with:
- Can disable images
- Can enable JavaScript (aka ECMA Script)
- Can adjust how it treats CSS
- Has tabbed browsing
- Has a clean look
- Right-click menu is powerful
- Option to open a page with FireFox
Things I don’t like:
- Primitive keyboard support
- Right-side panel for my Wordpress editor is missing
- Preview button is also missing
- The name makes it sound like less than it is!
- Occaisonal error message (the Google Maps one)
The things I don’t like appear to be things that can be cured by some more time and development. In fact, I may jump in and help with this project — I know TCL and some C, and this is a really important piece of software in my opinion.
No related posts.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:44 am - Edit
I hope my criticism of BrowseX wasn’t too strong. I was actually pretty impressed with it. And really, with proper capitalization the name isn’t that weird. (I just hope it doesn’t trip any filters for my site. :-P) It did turn me off a bit getting so many errors, but it actually did work a lot of the time. It’s not as good as HV3, but I think it may be based on an older version of TKHTML, so that’s understandable. I commend the people that have worked hard on all of these projects.