Last version: 3.5 d

One of the last releases was in 2006 year.

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Technorati Tags: browsers, Off by One

Last version: 0.9.12

Home page: kmeleon.sourceforge.net

OS           Size
Windows     5.7 MB    

It’s enough good browser, fast, with greate number of settings and functions. Based on Mozilla runner.

The navigation is realized with the help of insets, i.e. in main window it could be several web-pages, and you may switch between them, as in Opera, K-Meleon and Mozilla Firefox.

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Stay more detail on some iseful functions of K-meleon:

• Undo last closed – open last closed page – useful, if you accidentally closed inset.
• There is ability of fast switch between proxy servers.
• K-meleon understands mouse gestures. Such function is in Opera browser. For example, user press right button of mouse and move the mouse to the left, then browser return to page back. If mouse moving to the right, then to one page forward. Such mouse gestures you could retarget if you want.
• Build into RSS client.
• K-meleon hold the ability to switch between users profiles, i.e. between different configurations, that is too comfortable.
• Approval of scins.
• K-meleon could working with groups – groups of links. For example, saving current pages to one group and then quickly open them. It’s necessary in order to do not waste the time to opening several pages manully, if you often working with this pages.
• Very convenient function is Hot Keys – opening fixed page by clicking on fixed combination of keys. You may fixed only 9 hot keys.
• There is interesting searching of text, you could set word or several words and browser illuminate them on the web-page. Of course, there is also standart search of words when words searching one by one on whole web-page.

    
And now let’s consider some settings of K-meleon browser. K-meleon very pliably sets, that’s why let’s consider some the most interesting browser’s settings.

• Edit mime types – edit files’ types, which you need to open by outward programms.
• Downloads of images – you could load images only from current site, all images or not at all to load them.
• Set cache in memory and cache of disk area.
• For users who loves deeply and subtly set programms – exists an ability of manually set the configuration file.

Some shortcomings:

• Do not shown the status of the page loading.
• You couldn’t switch the coding by right button, only through the menu view.
• There is now download manager.
• For changing the skin of browser you should to rerun the browser.
• You couldn’t to download cache images.

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Technorati Tags: browsers, K-meleon, Mozilla Firefox

Last version: 0.5 pre.

Home page: www.flock.com

OS                      Size
Windows            8 MB
Mac OS X            10.5 MB
Linux                  9.5 MB

It’s a good browser. The author was the one of developers of Mozilla Firefox and some years worked in OpenSource sphere (free source code). Browser is in developmental stage now, but nevertheless there are a host of functions. In this description it will viewing the most important of them.

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It is significant most of all nice interface and ap of skins, that’s why it will pleasantly to work with this browser. Flock approves interface Drag&Dock, that’s why you may easy and comfortably to setup the toolbar, only to move necessary button to necessary place. And that’s all!

Some shortcomings:

• there is no ability to load ca h images;
•  you may not to change coding by right button, only with the help of menu View.

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Technorati Tags: Flock, Mozilla Firefox

Interview With Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer

Written by Richard MacManus 

In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla’s new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla – such as Weave and Ubiquity – fit into the big picture. In this post we’ll focus on the near future of Firefox.

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Firefox vs Chrome

Chris Beard and I first discussed what Mozilla is doing to keep Firefox, its flagship product, competitive in the latest generation of the ‘browser wars’. Google, whose headquarters are just up the road from Mozilla and who I also visited on the same day, upped the ante in the browser industry in September last year when it launched a brand new browser called Chrome. Not only that, but Google went out of its way to claim that Chrome represents the next generation of browsers, because (according to Google) it is much better than existing browsers at managing the increasingly sophisticated web apps we see on the Web nowadays.

Beard noticeably bristled at the suggestion that Chrome performs better with heavy duty web apps. He noted that Firefox is also working hard to make highly interactive web apps run smoothly. Regarding Google’s claim that Chrome’s isolated tab processes mean a more stable browser, Beard replied that Firefox too is very stable and that it doesn’t crash much these days. And to be fair, in this author’s experience the latest production versions of Firefox have indeed performed much better than they used to. I still get the odd browser crash though.

What’s the Vision for Firefox?

But arguments about browser stability aren’t going to differentiate the two browsers, Firefox and Chrome, in the eyes of the general public. So I asked Chris Beard to explain Mozilla’s vision for the future of Firefox. Beard replied that the vision for Firefox is to help users navigate and manage an increasingly complex world. Beard likened this concept to intelligent agents; and he also used the term ‘trusted assistant’. Beard told me that the browser will be "tied to services" – he mentioned the current activity happening in the Linked Data and Semantic Web communities.

Add-ons are a huge part of the current Firefox experience and Chris Beard said that some of those add-ons will become more integrated into the core browser. While that isn’t a new trend, I noted that it sounds similar to what Flock has done. Flock is a browser built on the Mozilla platform that integrated many social web elements into the browsing experience (Flickr, YouTube, etc). I suggested that Firefox may want to offer bundles of add-ons, so that users don’t have to go hunting around for various individual add-ons. Beard said that yes, this is in the works. He said that users will be able to create add-on "lists" and offer them as a single click to other users – much like Amazon’s wish lists. However he noted that there are usability issues to overcome, because some add-ons aren’t necessarily compatible with others. He said that currently Firefox has around 8000 add-ons and that we can expect this bundling feature to come out in the next couple of months.

As for other upcoming changes to Firefox, Beard told me that many aspects of the current Firefox experience could be in the cloud – for example bookmarks and the "Awesome Bar" (Mozilla’s term for its adaptive learning URL bar). Beard said that portability of the user experience is important in this era of the Web and so they’ll be looking to offer certain functionality and data in the cloud.

Another part of Mozilla’s strategy for Firefox going forward is to integrate aspects from some of its associated products, such as Ubiquity (an experimental Firefox add-on that gives your browser a context sensitive command-line – see ReadWriteWeb’s most recent write-up) and its sync product Weave (our write-up). Beard told me that all Mozilla products are designed to be extended, but this may include making them part of the core Firefox browser. Ubiquity, for example, may end up being baked into Firefox in the future.

In my next post, we’ll explore Mozilla’s strategy for Fennec (its new mobile browser) and we’ll look at recent developments in other Mozilla products such as Ubiquity and Weave.

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Technorati Tags: browsers, Chrome, Fennec, Firefox, Google, Mozilla

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla’s Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

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Origins

The truth is they never did have total dominance, but at times they have come very close. Microsoft actually entered the Browser Battle quite late on. Infact a man named Neil Larson is credited to be one of the originators of internet browsers, when in 1977 he created a program – The TRS-80 – that allowed browsing between ’sites’ via hypertext jumps. This was a DOS program and the basis of much to come. Slowly other browsers powered by DOS and inspired by the TRS 80 were developed. Unfortunately they were often constricted by the limitations of the still fairly young internet itself.

In 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel created a simple, fast browser called Hytelnet, which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogues of over five thousand libraries around the world – an exhilarating taste of what the internet, and web browsers, would soon be able to offer.

In 1989 the original World Wide Web was born. Using a NeXTcube computer, Tim Berners-Lee created a web browser that would change how people used the internet forever. He called his browser the WorldWideWeb(WWW), which is still likely to sound familiar to internet users today. It was a windowed browser capable of displaying simple style sheet, capable of editing sites and able to download and open any file type supported by the NeXTcube.

In 1993 the first popular graphical browser was released. Its name was Mosaic and it was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Mosaic could be run on both Unix, and very importantly, on the highly popular Microsoft Windows operating system (incidentally it could also be used on Amiga and Apple computers). It was the first browser on Windows that could display graphics/pictures on a page where there was also textual content. It is often cited as being responsible for triggering the internet boom due to it making the internet bearable for the masses. (It should be noted that the web browser Cello was the first browser to be used on Windows – but it was non graphical and made very little impact compared to Mosaic).

The Browser Wars – Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer

Mosaic’s decline began almost as soon as Netscape Navigator was released (1994). Netscape Navigator was a browser created by Marc Andreessen, one of the men behind Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was unrivalled in terms of features and usability at the time. For example, one major change from previous browsers was that it allowed surfers to see parts of a website before the whole site was downloaded. This meant that people did not have to wait for minutes simply to see if the site they were loading was the actual one the were after, whilst also allowing them to read information on the site as the rest of it downloaded. By 1996 Netscape had almost 90% market dominance, as shown below.

Market Share Comparisons of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer from 1996 to 1998

                                         Netscape                           IE

In these two years Netscape clearly dominated the internet browser market, but a new browser named Internet Explorer was quickly gaining ground on it.

Microsoft released their own browser (ironically based on the earlier Mosaic browser which was created by one of the men now running Netscape), clearly worried about Netscape’s dominance. It was not so much the worry that it would have a 100% market share of internet browsers on their Windows operating system, but more the worry that browsers would soon be capable of running all types programs on them. That would mean foregoing the need for an actual operating system, or at the most only a very basic one would be needed. This in turn would mean Netscape would soon be able to dictate terms to Microsoft, and Microsoft were not going to let that happen easily. Thus in August 1995, Internet Explorer was released.

By 1999 Internet explorer had captured an 89.03% market share, whilst Netscape was down to 10.47%. How could Internet Explorer make this much ground in just two years? Well this was down to two things really. The first, and by far the most important was that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer in with every new copy of Windows, and as Windows was used by about 90% of the computer using population it clearly gave them a huge advantage. Internet Explorer had one other ace it held over Netscape – it was much better. Netscape Navigator was stagnant and had been for some time. The only new features it ever seemed to introduce were often perceived by the public as beneficial for Netscape’s parent company rather than Netscape’s user base. (i.e., features that would help it monopolise the market). Explorer, on the other hand, was given much attention by Microsoft. Regular updates and excellent usability plus a hundred million dollar investment would prove too much for Netscape Explorer.

2000 – 2005

These years were fairly quiet in the Battle of the Browsers. It seemed as if Internet Explorer had won the war and that nobody could even hope to compete with it. In 2002/2003 it had attained about 95% of the market share – about the time of IE 5/6. With over 1000 people working on it and millions of dollars being poured in, few people had the resources to compete. Then again, who wanted to compete? It was clearly a volatile market, and besides that everybody was content with Internet Explorer. Or were they? Some people saw faults with IE – security issues, incompatibility issues or simply bad programming. Not only that, it was being shoved down peoples throats. There was almost no competition to keep it in line or to turn to as an alternative. Something had to change. The only people with the ability and the power to compete with Microsoft took matters into their own hands.

Netscape was now supported by AOL. A few years prior, just after they had lost the Browser Wars to Microsoft, they had released the coding for Netscape into the public domain. This meant anybody could develop their own browser using the Netscape skeleton. And people did. Epiphany, Galeon and Camino, amongst others, were born out of Netscape’s ashes. However the two most popular newcomers were called Mozilla and Firefox.

Mozilla was originally an open sourced project aimed to improve the Netscape browser. Eventually it was released as Netscape Navigator 7 and then 8. Later it was released as Mozilla 1.0.

Mozilla was almost an early version on another open source browser, Firefox. With it being an open source the public were able to contribute to it – adding in what features it needed, the programming it required and the support it deserved. The problems people saw in Internet Explorer were being fixed by members of the open sourced browser community via Firefox. For instance, the many security issues IE 6 had were almost entirely fixed in the very first release of Firefox. Microsoft had another fight on their hands.

2005 – Present

Firefox was the browser that grew and grew in these years. Every year capturing an even larger market share percentage than before. More user friendly than most of its rivals along with high security levels and arguably more intelligent programming helped its popularity. With such a large programming community behind it, updates have always been regular and add on programs/features are often released. It prides itself on being the peoples browser. It currently has a 28.38% market share.

Apple computers have had their own browser since the mid 1990’s – Safari – complete with its own problems, such as (until recently) the inability to run Java scripts. However most Apple users seemed happy with it and a version capable of running on Windows has been released. It has had no major competitor on Apple Macs, and as such has largely been out of the Browser Wars. It currently holds a 2.54% market share and is slowly increasing.

Internet Explorer’s market share has dropped from over 90% to around 75%, and is falling. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft will attempt to regain such a high market share.

Opera currently holds 1.07%.

Mozilla itself only has a 0.6% market share these days.

The Future of Web Browsing

Web browsers come and go. It is the nature of technology (if such a term can be used), to supplant inferior software in very short periods of time. It is almost impossible for a single company to stay ahead of the competition for long. Microsoft have the advantage of being able to release IE with any Windows using PC. That covers over 90% of the market. They also have the advantage of unprecedented resources. They can compete how they wish for as long as they wish. So there is no counting IE out of the future of web browsing.

Safari is in a similar position, being easily the most popular Mac web browser. Its long term survival is dependant upon Apple and the sale of their computers.

These are the only two browsers that are almost guaranteed another five years of life, at least. Firefox may seem like another candidate, but the public is fickle, and one bad release, or if it seriously lags behind the new Internet Explorer 8 for long, could easily see its popularity quickly descend into virtual oblivion.

However, it seems likely community driven browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox, will be the only types of browser capable of competing with the wealthy internet arm of Microsoft in the near future.

As for web browsing itself, will it change any time soon? Well it already has for some online communities. For example, if you want to buy clothes you could try entering an online ‘world’ creating an online virtual You to go from ’shop to shop’ with, looking at products and trying/buying what you see. Some ‘worlds’ allow you to recreate yourself accurately including weight and height and then try on things apparel such as jeans to give you an idea of how you would look in that particular item.

Will ‘worlds’ like this destroy normal web browsers such as IE ? – It seems unlikely. Traditional web browsers provide such freedom and ease of access that it is hard to see any other alternative taking over. However they are part of the new, ‘thinking out of the box’ wave of alternatives that some people will find attractive, and really who knows what the future will bring.

By: Nicholas C Smith

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Technorati Tags: Internet browser, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft Windows, Mosaic, Mozilla's Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Opera, Safari, Web

The web has really changed the way we do things. Remember those paper timetables? No need for them anymore, we simply type in our destination on a box and get a step by step guide for what to do. Finding recipies? No need to look through books any more, just type in a few ingredients on your favourite food site. The examples are countless but there is no time for us to sit back and relax just yet. The web can be improved. We can get more people to publish their stuff online, we can get better tools for finding relevant info, and we can make the information accessible to more people. In this article I’m going to talk a little about each of those three points.

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We need more information

We need more information. People will argue and say “No, there’s enough junk online already” but I don’t care. More information is a good thing. The web is currently not a good representation of the world at large. The is a million technology weblogs and five about shoemaking. Another million sites about how it’s like to be a teenager today and another five about life as an 80 year old. You know what I’m getting at? We need a wider variety of people on the web, not only people that are just like us.

Another thing to remember is that text only is one facet of information. With today’s bandwidth available we can look at live video from all over the world. We can listen to live radio and music just as easy as we read the web. We then have a look at availability. I’d say that at most one out of 1000 people publishing on the web is using something else than text (This site is no exception). I know that there are people out there that have a video camera, that have a microphone, and know how to put it up on the web. But they don’t.

This lack of variety in information is a real problem. It builds barriers towards people we just don’t know anything about and it fools us surfers to believe the world is smaller than it seems. “No, there can’t be any problems with the Chinese government, we would have heard about it!” or what about “Christianity must be the biggest religion, just look at what people are writing most about”.

There are ways the tackle this problem and the concept of blogging is one of them. It makes it easy to almost anyone, anywhere to just start writing in a few minutes. You can be anonymous, you don’t have to tell the truth, there’s no age check and it doesn’t cost you money. This opens up to real diversity on the web. The technology exists, what we need to do is get people online and make them use it. So tell your friends to pick something they love or hate and blog about it. We need more information.

We need relevant information

The next step, after we have gotten a larger and more diversified web, is to start filtering it. I’m not talking censoring here, I mean filtering in the sense to “filter what you want”. This can be tied to a certain task you want to accomplish or it can be a strong interest of yours that you want to follow. It doesn’t matter which, what matters is that there are ways to easily find relevant information.

There are many ways of determining relevancy on the web and the one most successful is linking. Links are like recommendations; anyone that links to a site is telling their readers a certain site is recommended. It’s relevant for the subject at hand and it contains good information. If you are just looking for random information about something looking at a few links might be enough. For example, if Roger Johansson links to something web related I can be pretty sure it’s good.

For more task oriented queries we need something else. If someone is looking for a plane ticket they will probably not know who the authority in that area is. Google is the search engine that has had the greatest success with solving this problem and the solution is simple. Gather the recommendations for as many sites as possible and reply to queries with what most people recommend. Just think about it, if 100 people recommend FlyPlane and 1000 people AirFlight, who would you go for?

In reality it isn’t that simple, but in essence that’s how search engines work. Something that is important to note is that the system encourages people to write good content. Why is that? Simply because good content gets linked to, and more links means it’s probably more relevant. This way Google and all the others are actively encouraging people to improve the web. Good, isn’t it?

Making information accessible

So, we have lots of information from all over the world and we have the tools to find the most relevant info at any point. The last step is actually delivering the information to our users. This is where web standards come to play.

In the early nineties browser makers raced to get the coolest new features included in their browsers. The result was things like blinking text, different methods of representing “layers” and scrolling text. Web developers had a hard time keeping up with browser differences and often you had to construct two or more separate pages to send people to depending on what browser they used.

The W3C acknowledged this and presented a solution. Instead of browsers trying to find the coolest additions, let a standards organization handle the new additions. Let hundreds of people sit together and discuss new ideas long before they are implemented. When everyone has had a chance to say their meaning and problems has been eliminated you release a document presenting the new features together with implementation details. Now the browser makers can race over who supports the most recommended standards instead, and webmasters can just pick a set of standards that is well supported. One way of doing things instead of many incompatible ones.

Right now, the current recommendation is to use the strict versions of HTML of XHTML for structure, CSS for design and Javascript for behaviour. Using those standards means that your site is accessible by more than just the few browsers you have tested with. Both people and automated crawlers that that are after just your content can easily skip your design. People with old browsers will still be able to view your content, even though they don’t see the design the still get the content.

If you adopt the recommendations I mentioned above you have gotten quite far, but there is more. Accessibility is an area in web development that has gotten far too little exposure. It’s focused on making it easier to people with various disabilities, varying from broken arms and color blindness to dyslexia. Previously people cared about old browsers, it’s time for a shift towards caring about people instead. Read up on accessibility, Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Accessibilty is a good start.

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Technorati Tags: blogging, browser, Google, Web, web development, web standards