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Date:      Sun, 25 Nov 2001 19:00:46 -0500
From:      Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@CS.WM.EDU>
To:        FreeBSD-Stable <stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: linux-base 6.2 vs  linux-base 7
Message-ID:  <20011125190045.A21651@dali.cs.wm.edu>
In-Reply-To: <20011125233536.A24348@jochem.dyndns.org>; from j.kossen@home.nl on Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 11:35:36PM %2B0100
References:  <3BFF8750.8090109@rain.fr> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0111251826300.1052-100000@prophet.alphaque.com> <20011125211058.A628@jochem.dyndns.org> <20011125213815.GA16500@leviathan.inethouston.net> <20011125230111.A24090@jochem.dyndns.org> <20011125222422.GA17212@leviathan.inethouston.net> <20011125233536.A24348@jochem.dyndns.org>

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On Sun, Nov 25, 2001 at 11:35:36PM +0100, Jochem Kossen wrote:
> linux-netscape-navigator-4.79 and linux-opera-5.05-tp1_2
> 
> If i could get a browser which supports flash and has decent HTML/JavaScript
> support (not like konqueror), i could do without either of those...
> 

Did you ever really try to find it?

Mozilla 0.9.2.1 supports flash/realaudio/java excellently. Mozilla 0.9.5
has fixed, as far as I can see, the last few rendering bugs on several
pages I knew as problematic for previous Mozilla releases. Mozilla 0.9.6
is already out.

Galeon 0.11.3 does all these things (since it's based on Mozilla 0.9.2)
with perhaps more convenient interface for some people. Galeon after
0.12.4 release is Mozilla 0.9.5 compatible. They released 1.0 recently.

Finally, I must defend this "slander" :-) of Konqueror which is also an
excellent browser. It does support HTML and JavaScript quite well. I
knew some pages that looked much better in Konqueror than in Mozilla,
and vice versa. Konqueror 2.2 is almost completely standards compliant
(check CSS webpage at W3C to see what they have to say about it). One
thing though. JavaScript is off by default, while in Mozilla it's on by
default. Let me give you some reasons why one would want to use
Konqueror rather than Mozilla/Galeon etc.

1. Selective control of Java, JavaScript and cookies. Mozilla/Galeon
   have the selective control of cookies only. Java and JavaScript are
   either on or off non-selectively. Galleon at least has a quick menu
   option to switch them on/off which comes in handy if you want to
   enable them for one particular page only. But that can't beat
   Konqueror's per domain selective Allow/Reject policy for all three of
   them. I accept JavaScript from a very few domains only and Java from
   even less.

2. Printing! Try printing anything that is not in Western Latin1
   encoding (ISO8859-1) in Mozilla/Galeon. Have fun watching the look of
   the page on the paper. Konqueror prints perfectly ISO8859-whatever
   and Microsoft encodings (Cyrillic or Latin). It can print PDF
   directly. Unbeatable!

3. Anti-aliasing. AFAIK, Mozilla still doesn't have it.

Let me give you the reasons why you wouldn't want to use Konqueror on
some sites.

1. The plugin support sometimes fails. Reloading the page or clicking
   the link again usually succeeds but it's annoying. Notice, please, that
   some plugins are simply old and work only in Netscape 4.x. Even Mozilla
   can't support them.

2. Yes there are still a few pages Konqueror doesn't render well. I
   often visit nba.com and the front page should have a photo inside the
   central frame to the right of the text (it does in other browsers).
   Konqueror for some reason doesn't show it. It also still misses the
   text justification from the CSS standard. But that's not a big deal.
   As I mentioned there were some pages that Mozilla couldn't show well
   until version 0.9.5 and Konqueror was showing them flawlessly.

3. All these processes running in the background just to start the
   Konqueror. If you are running KDE that's not an issue. But I run a
   simple window manager and these extra processes are just a burden.

Hence, there's no perfect browser. If you want clean reading of the most
pages in nicely anti-aliased fonts (use Microsoft Webfonts TrueType
bundle), complete control of your privacy, and you do not mind all the
extra processes -- use Konqueror.  For the pages that do not render
correctly in Konqueror raise Mozilla or Galeon. 

If you do not mind having JavaScript and/or Java enabled/disabled all
the time and do not care for anti-aliasing use Mozilla or Galeon. 

Print from Konqueror only. :-)

Notice that each one of them can be better choice then Opera for quite a
few sites (e.g. banks) that refuse to work with anything but IE and
Netscape.  Mozilla/Galeon/Konqueror pass as Netscape, Opera gets
refused.

Finally this might not save you the burden of using linuxbase since most
of the plugins (flash 5.0, realplayer 8.0) are available for Linux but
not for *BSD.

Best regards,
-- 
Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@cs.wm.edu>
hleonttp://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/

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