Top 10 specialty Web browsers you may have missed
These oddly useful alternative browsers offer such advantages as 3-D searching, social networking, easy scriptability, and powerful page manipulation
By Peter Wayner
Contributing writer, InfoWorld |
Specialty Web browsers: Browse leaner with Dillo
Are all of the AJAX calls and fancy JavaScript features dragging down the performance of your PC? Do you need to tap your heels while the information swirls around your screen in a tedious, HTML5-choreographed dance? Fret no more. Dillo is here for you -- if you use Linux or if you are ready to compile the C code for yourself.
Dillo hearkens back to the era of "Dragnet" when Jack Webb wanted just the facts. JavaScript tags get ignored and the information just appears. This lightens the load so much that you can browse the Internet faster on a 486 than you can with a modern computer that never has enough RAM to hold all of that semi-compiled JavaScript code.
It's hard to use Dillo without a compiler, but that just makes it a bit more obscure and gives the user even more of a reason to adopt an air of superiority. Where mere mortals need to keep buying faster processors with more cores, you're able to live simply with the 486 that your grandfather passed along to your father who passed it along to you.
Specialty Web browsers: Browse in text with Lynx
Lynx works with a command line, and that alone is a miracle. All of the text and the links are arranged in the ASCII terminal window in some reasonable approximation of what a real browser would do. The images are just marked with the alternative text if there is any. (Someday someone will pass the images through an ASCII art filter, but that would be more cool than useful.)
The main reason people use Lynx is to download software while logged in remotely to a computer. People maintaining servers remotely swear by it.
