Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The world of Linux browsers

I've been using live-CD Linuxes for about a month now, and that means a bunch of new browsers. Besides Firefox, I've used SeaMonkey, a Mozilla offshoot that looks a lot like Netscape Communicator, and Konqueror, which doubles as a file manager in KDE-desktop Linux systems.
This is my first day using SeaMonkey with Blogger, and it's about 95 percent there. I got a warning that Blogger might not save my post, but it did, although it took an extra minute or two.

And when doing HTML links (at least you CAN do them), I get a funny "paste me here" kind of graphic after I hit the chain-link icon. I have to click away from the window to get rid of it, or risk pasting the very icon from the blogger program in my text window ... and sometimes my cursor itself disappears in the SeaMonkey window. But it does work. And I love Netscape 4.8 for the Mac, so it's nice to have a fast version of that venerable platform. For the moment, I've given up on downloading POP mail and prefer to use Web interfaces for Yahoo! Mail and the like, so the mail component isn't that important to me. but as browsers, both SeaMonkey and Konqueror are pretty nice.

Another great, even-smaller browser is Dillo, which doesn't really play well with CSS-heavy pages, but is so damn light on the system that it's a pleasure to run.

Dillo and Konqueror are Linux-only, but SeaMonkey is available for Linux, Windows and OS X, so you owe it to yourself to download and try. It's a great alternative to Firefox, and it loads way, way faster.