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Internet Browser -- Browzar v1.2.0.0 Beta.

Browzar has been causing a bit of a stir in the computer community recently, so I thought I would give it a try, to see what all the fuss is about.

It is an Internet Explorer shell, which means that it uses the internal works of IE, so its security level is only the same as IE. However it is designed to surf the internet, without leaving any traces of the sites you have visited.
This could be useful, if using a computer that belongs to someone else and you want, for example, to check your web mail account, but don't want to leave possibly confidential details on the computers hard drive.

Browzar is a small 264k download and comes in a smart silver, or black livery. There is no installer and no additional files are saved to your computer, just click it to run and to uninstall simply delete the download.
You can also run it from a floppy, CD, or usb drive.
No temporary internet files, cookies, or history are saved and auto complete isn't used.

Browzar is very simple to use, you cannot set the homepage, instead it starts at the "Ask" search engine. There are no favorites either, you must type any sites you wish to visit into the address bar. If you used it regulary, it would be useful, to create a web page with your favorites on it and upload it to your web space, or keep it with Browzar, on a floppy, or CD, etc.
As Browzar uses the IE engine, pages load at the same speed as IE, but as nothing is saved to the cache, revisiting a site requires that the entire page is reloaded.

There has been some speculation that not all the surfing data is deleted, but in my, admittedly simple tests, I could find no trace of my surfing. So unless you work for MI5, it should be secure enough.
There have also been some accusations that the program is adware, because the search engine that it uses as a homepage, features sponsored links. While this is true, the sponsored links are highlighted and only slightly more intrusive than Google sponsored links. You do not have to use the "Ask" search engine (I always use Google myself).

The only thing I noticed, that could be irritating, is that new windows always open at 800*600, great for me, but could be a pain if you are running at a higher resolution and have to keep clicking the maximize button.

The developers of Browzar are working on a password protected tool, which will allow you to use your own homepage and favorites, this will improve the usefulness of the program.
Overall, Browzar is a nice looking and easy to use browser, but due to the limitations that not saving any data imposes, you are unlikely to use it for everyday use, but it will prove useful in some situations, where altering the main browser settings, or installing cleaner software, isn't possible.

Freeware -- Download size 264k -- Minimum Req Win 98se and IE v5.5
Note: Browzar is still in Beta development, so you may encounter a few bugs.

http://www.browzar.com/index.html

K-Meleon v0.9.13 -- Internet browser.

K-Meleon is an open-source browser that uses the same rendering engine as Firefox and Mozilla, but is intended to be faster and lighter on resources.
K-Meleon does suffer from the slow initial program loading that plagues Firefox, but it does come with an optional loader program, that can start with Windows and partially load the program. You can then start the browser instantly, by clicking on the System Tray icon.

As standard, K-Meleon gives a larger page viewing area than IE, Opera, or Firefox, even when the tabs bar is activated. Without the tabs bar, the viewing area is greater than any other browser I have tried.
The tabs (or layers as the developers of K-Meleon call them for some strange reason) are implemented well and can be closed with either a double click, or a by clicking the middle mouse button.

The toolbar is not very configurable, you can slide buttons back and forth, but that seems to be about it, there is a text configuration file, where I believe you can make alterations, but I had no success with it and it will be too geeky for most people.

I was able to import my Internet Explorer favorites, but not my Opera bookmarks, which was a nuisance.
The program comes with very good advert and popup blockers and you can easily control whether, or not, certain elements of pages, such as JavaScript are loaded.
I did have some problems installing Macromedia Flash, it is supposed to install automatically, after you have downloaded and run the Flash exe, but I had to copy the files to the plugin directory manually, from the Windows system32 folder.

As a basic browser K-Meleon is pretty good, it has a good viewing area, easy to use toolbar and tabs, displays most pages well, is at least as fast as the other popular browsers and seems very stable, not crashing or freezing once, while I poked and prodded it.
Some of the option and configuration settings seem rather unfinished and the help file is somewhat vague in places. But if all you want is a simple browser, without lots of bells and whistles K-Meleon could be a good choice.

Free (Open Source) -- Download size 5Mb

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Opera Browser v8.51.

This is my personal choice of browser, it claims to be the fastest browser on Earth and I would agree, it is consistently rated the most secure of all the main browsers and it has a lot of excellent features as standard, including a reliable download manager.

Opera is a tabbed browser and the tab control is very good, with a close button on each tab, tabs can also be dragged and dropped to change their order.

The appearance of Opera can be altered with a variety of skins and the toolbars can be configured to a tremendous degree, although it can be a bit of a fiddle getting them just how you want.

Opera comes with some unusual features:

Mouse Gestures, which allow you to control some aspects of browsing, by moving your mouse a certain way, I must admit I found it irritating and turned it off.

Voice, this allows browsing via spoken commands and allows Opera to read web pages to you, but it does require a large additional download and I have not tried it.

Fit to Width, this feature reduces a wide page in width, to correctly fit your browser window, it doesn't always work, but when it does it is pretty good, saving a lot of scrolling. (Although if web designers created their pages correctly we wouldn't need it.)

Opera also supports RSS Newsfeeds to bring you news headlines from selected sites, an IRC chat program and a reasonable built in email program, although I prefer Outlook Express.

There are a few negatives. The help file is online, which is very annoying if you don't have an always on connection, also in my opinion the help file is not as good as it should be. Secondly if saving a web page only the text is saved, which can be rather a nuisance.

In conclusion, Opera provides a very well featured and fast browser, but it will need some configuring to set the toolbars etc and you will need to spend a little while reading the help file, to get the most out of the program. If you should have a problem you can't resolve, there is a very active community forum.

Freeware -- Download size 3.7Mb -- Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

http://www.opera.com/

Note: Opera is no longer advert supported and is totally freeware.

Firefox Browser v1.5.

Internet Explorer has had a serious contender for its crown in the last year or so, with the appearance of Firefox. Firefox has become very popular with the computing media and benefited greatly from lots of free publicity, with a large number of people giving it a test drive.

The download is a reasonable 5Mb and installation is painless. Setting up of the toolbars etc to suit your preferences is simple and the help file is excellent, your IE or Netscape bookmarks (Favorites) can be imported with no problems and the bookmark manager is excellent. It is not possible to import Opera bookmarks, which was a bit of a nuisance to me.

Firefox is rather slow to load initially, but once running performance is on a par with IE for loading new pages and significantly faster than IE when loading previously viewed pages, I found it to be a little slower than Opera at loading images.
The popup blocker worked very well, with no popups getting through. 

The standard Firefox skin or theme is quite attractive and although the toolbars are not as configurable as Opera's, they are much easier to customise. There are many different themes available on the Firefox site, that allow you to completely alter the browsers appearance.

Firefox is a tabbed browser, opening new pages in a tab, rather than a new window, if you haven't used tabs before, read the relevant section in the help file, to find the best setup for you.
One serious omission in the tab handling, is the inability to close tabs with a double click, or button, you have to right click and select "close tab". There is a plugin that gives you more control, but at the time of writing it did not yet work with version 1.5.

The security of browsers is often mentioned nowadays and the Firefox reputation for secure browsing has taken a few knocks lately, this is mainly due to it being targeted more by malware writers, as it becomes more popular, but a new Automatic Update feature can download security updates in the background, ensuring you are always as secure as possible.
Another new security feature is the ability to clear as much or as little of your browsing history as you wish with just one click.

Firefox has improved greatly since I last tried it. Whereas it used to require several plugins or extensions to make it truly usable, it now works well "straight out of the box".
The help file is greatly improved and explains features very well, this makes the browser easier to set up than either IE or Opera.
Overall a very nice browser, not the fastest, although faster than IE, but very easy to use.

Freeware -- Download size 4.9Mb -- Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Crazy Browser.

If you are looking for an alternative browser to Internet Explorer, but you want to retain all the IE features and your settings, you could try Crazy Browser. It is freeware and although it requires IE 5 or later to be installed, it just uses IE's rendering engine to render the web pages. ( Whatever that means. )
I was initially a bit put off trying the browser because of its name, it sounds a bit dubious, but I was glad I did because its really very good.

So what makes it so good?
Well it has almost all the features of IE 6, you will notice many things like the options are taken from IE and your settings and favorites are automatically used with Crazy Browser. The interface is much prettier than in IE and the controls are quite similar and you will be familiar with them in minutes.

The most noticable difference is that this browser uses tabs, so if you choose a site to visit from say your favorites a new tab is opened and you can then just click between web sites. Although in IE you can have several windows open, this tab system is vastly superior and you can instantly see the contents of the tabs you have open. In the advanced options you have a choice of where your tabs appear and how you handle them, you can choose to close the tabs just by double clicking on them.

The browser also has a very effective popup blocker, you don't even see a flicker as it blocks them and it requires no configuration at all.

The controls are mostly familiar, but with the addition of Groups, this is a collection of site addresses that you can open all together, so when you connect to the internet you might normally check your own web site, a news site and the GM forum, well if you put them together in a group you can open them altogether with one mouse click.
The fullscreen system is also much improved over IE being much easier to use.
To the right of the address bar is a button with a drop down menu that utilizes the babel site to translate the current page into a different language, handy if your looking for a piece of software that only seems to be on foreign language sites, although you do have to know what language it is before you can translate it!

So what didn't I like about Crazy Browser, well as I said before, I think the name does it no favours, also I prefer the history options in IE as I like to list my history by site rather than date.

So in summary I feel Crazy Browser is much nicer to use than IE and it seems bug free. The browser does not seem to suffer from the malady some other alternative browsers have, of not displaying some pages very well, it has handled every page I have been to with ease.

Freeware -- Download size 700k -- Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

http://www.crazybrowser.com/

Mozilla Navigator, part of the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite.

With the success of Firefox, the Mozilla Navigator browser has largely been forgotten, but it is still being developed, now as part of the Mozilla Seamonkey suite of internet programs.
Installation is straight forward, with the option to install just the browser, or the complete suite of browser, web page editor, email and chat programs.

Like its newer brother Firefox, Navigator takes a little while to load, but once it gets going it is quite well behaved and stable and the option exists for a quick launch setting, so that it loads quicker.
The interface controls are similar enough to Internet Explorer for a new user to feel at home within minutes and IE favorites are imported automatically.

The help file is pretty good and any omissions are not that important as the controls are fairly intuitive anyway.
The browser is fairly configurable and the various choices and options are clearly described.
One thing I missed was a history button, you can access the history, search and bookmarks (Favorites) through a sidebar which slides out when you click the very narrow bar to the left of the screen, but it is not as user friendly as a button. 

The second thing I was a bit disappointed by was that the browser seemed a bit slow at displaying pages, the text would come up quickly but the pictures were rather slow to appear. Swapping on the same connection to Opera browser the speed was restored, so I can only put it down to perhaps the large size of the program making it sluggish.

Navigator is a tabbed browser, meaning that instead of opening separate windows, a new tab can be opened in the same window, displaying its tab at the top of the page. I personally prefer tabbed browsers and would rather use Navigator than Internet Explorer for this reason.

One of Navigators best features was its download manager, it is one of the best I have seen, the download was rock steady and the time estimate was accurate to the second, it never changed its mind once about how long the download would take, unlike some other browsers I could mention.
The email program that comes with the Seamonkey suite is very easy to use, with an interface very similar in appearance and capabilities to Outlook Express.

So overall the Navigator browser is certainly worth consideration if you would like an alternative to Internet Explorer, although it does seem rather dated in comparison to Opera and Firefox.
The browser does have some inconsistencies, the odd control that does nothing and help file omissions, but this is probably a legacy of it being open source. With many different people working on their own favorite part of the program there is bound to be the odd forgotten components. 
But if you would like all your internet programs in one integrated package, it could be a good choice.

Freeware -- Download size 12Mb -- Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

Visit the web site at: http://www.mozilla.org/

Or: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Note: Mozilla's Navigator browser also has the Composer feature built in, this allows you to easily create web pages and I have reviewed it on my Page Editors page.

Rob Goldfish Web Site