About Browsers

There are many browsers out there to choose from.  Some are commercial products, created by large corporations, and some are open source products created by volunteers around the world. The rest fall somewhere in-between.

In the old days (early 1990s) there was Mosaic, and its successor, Netscape.  They were commercial products, well-written to web standards, and used by almost everyone who went on line to explore the internet.  Like most software, they cost money.  Then Microsoft decided that IT wanted to control the browser market, so it created Explorer, and bundled it for free with each and every copy of Windows.  They also made it available for free download.  It’s hard to compete with free, and Netscape soon folded.

Explorer had its problems––it was not very secure, and it was NOT written to web standards.  Microsoft, being a monopoly, felt that the web should be written to Explorer standards instead.  And, as it had captured some 95% of the browser market, this began to happen.

But not everyone was happy with this situation.  There were other commercial browsers out there that had their fans, inexpensive products like Opera that were faster, more secure, and better written than Explorer.  Apple created its own browser, Safari, which ran well on Macs and was web-compliant.  And then there was the open source movement––code writers who banded together to form a more perfect browser.  The built upon the old Nescape platform to create the Mozilla project, which produced Firefox, Camino and other browsers.

Today there are a lot of browsers out there, mostly free, and generally available for most platforms.  They vary in their degree of security (Explorer being the worst) and in their degree of web compliance (Safari and Opera being the best of the more commercial ones). 

The current incarnation of Firefox, version 3, which is an otherwise lovely browser, has a problem with pages created by iWeb2, my previous website building program.  Because Firefox is a collaborative effort, mistakes creep in and no one is really responsible for correcting them.  My pages are web-compliant; the browser, in its current form is NOT.  (Version 2, on the other hand, does strange things to some of my text pages.)  iWeb3 seems to have fixed this problem, and I am in the process of re-uploading my entire site, bit by bit.

If your web browser is causing you problems, either on this site or on others, consider trying a different one.  Click on the icons below to go to the download pages:

    Safari, a free browser for Mac and Windows (Web compliant)

   

 

            Opera, a free browser for Mac, Windows, Linux and other OSs

            (Web compliant)

     iCab, a shareware browser for Mac

    Webkit, an open-source browser for Macs (Web compliant)

   

    Mozilla, a family of web browsers for all platforms (including Firefox,

    Camino, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and Lightning)

Firefox, part of the Mozilla project, it is a free browser for Mac, Windows, and Linux.  Generally secure, but not reliably web-compliant