A Fun List of Browsers | Hacker News Reader

A Fun List of Browsers

thehistoryoftheweb.com

88 pointsthunderbong41 comments

Nyxt is a new interesting browser. WebKit engine but configured by lisp under the hood, and fully keyboard controllable with emacs, vim, or cua controls.

https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

nice..had an idea of a browser engine powered by a different scripting language like Lisp. Even better, a browser engine that can plug in any language runtime through which web apps can be coded (WebAssembly is working in that direction to provide a single portable runtime I think).

Makes me nostalgic for pentadactyl (the IMHO superior fork of Vimperator- both of which are discontinued)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentadactyl

No Grail? It had Python as a scripting language instead of JavaScript.

http://grail.sourceforge.net/

Not only that, the Python website featured a link to Grail for a long time [1] possibly because it was written by GvR himself as a demo.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970501011626/http://www.python...

A long time ago, an internet friend maintained a list of web browsers and built quite an obscure list.

https://browsers.evolt.org/

Can probably date it based on what's there (e.g., Safari from 2003) and what isn't (Chrome from 2008). It was 23 years ago that we started evolt.org - time flies!

A few more oddballs come to mind:

iCab was a favorite of mine before the switch from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X. I made heavy use of its ability to save offline copies of open web pages (with all embedded resources). http://www.icab.de

OmniWeb, on Mac OS X was very pretty for its time. (It was originally developed on OpenStep.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OmniWeb

NetPositive was bundled with BeOS. I only used it briefly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive

I was going to mention iCab. I’m also reminded of Apple’s CyberDog[0], which did more than just web browsing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

Sometimes I'd like to see an alternate reality in which OpenDoc (and with it Cyberdog) really took off. I really liked the concept, but all the practical uses were really rough around the edges and somewhat slow, just like Cyberdog.

iCab is still available for iOS, and it's a great browser on the iPhone. It does have a lot of features, making it somewhat complicated, though.

And what about Dillo?

https://www.dillo.org/

I remember using this years ago on DamnSmallLinux. Thanks for the nostalgia!

Dillo was forked from Armadillo, which in turn was forked from Gzilla[1]. I handed it over to another developer in 1999[2]. It's interesting to imagine what might have happened if I had kept on it.

[1]: https://www.levien.com/gzilla/

[2]: https://www.levien.com/free/gzilla-tour.html

I didn't know about Dillo's history, thanks for the info!

> InternetWorks > ... But its most distinctive feature — besides tabbed browsing of course — was its Card Catalog. Drawing on a library metaphor, InternetWorks allowed its users to organize bookmarks into different catalogs, by subject or any other hierarchy they wanted to use. Pages could be drag and dropped into any catalog, where they were instantly saved for browsing offline. A one-stop shop for storing bits of your brain.

Yes, please. Make the tabs/bookmarks vertical and hierarchical and you have the breakthrough browser on your hands.

There is 1MB browser called offbyone http://offbyone.com/offbyone/index.htm

Now with tabbed browsing! :)

InternetWorks getting credit for ‘tabs’ here, but looks more like a multi document interface? Which Opera also adopted — before Firefox (Phoenix).

It had actual tabs at the bottom that switched those documents AFAICR

ELinks and Lynx, awesome web browsers for the terminal I still use today. And Amaya, a GUI web browser from the dawn of Internet.

Lynx is great. I still occasionally use it to test sites for accessibility and SEO.

Hv3 -- tiny browser written in Tcl/Tk: https://lwn.net/Articles/311823/

Chimera -- from 1995: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/projects/chimera-www

There's also an euphoric thread on Arch Linux forums around it: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=56814

In the command line world, there are also retawq and netrik. A fun comparison of these and other text browsers by kmandla: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/a-comparison-of-tex...

Also, an even more spartan solution offered by him in that post would be:

    curl kmandla.wordpress.com | dehtml -p -s | less

Line Mode Browser by Tim Berners-Lee and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Mode_Browser

And a really fascinating project is Edbrowse, a line-mode browser-and-beyond, originally written for blind users: http://edbrowse.org/

Oh, and I just came across WebbIE, Windows only, updated in 2018, "lets you browse web pages, search the web, fill in forms, do ecommerce, and use online email, all in a highly-usable text-only display that works with any screenreader.": https://www.webbie.org.uk/webbrowser/index.htm

The last one seems really cool.

What about Arachne, a DOS-browser?

A really liked Galeon, a Gecko-based browser. http://galeon.sourceforge.net/

Interesting list. The early ones are from when software felt like toys compared to today. There was something... insubstantial about some applications in the mid 90s.

I spent years using all the minor browsers made for Linux. Galeon, Konqueror, Epiphany, Firebird/Phoenix, Opera, Mozilla. I think my favorite was Galeon due to the interface being very simple and direct. I also appreciated the very sober interface of Mozilla 1.

Konqueror is still popular on Arch Linux

But unfortunately, the KHTML engine behind it is no longer being developed. Most people use it with the Qt WebEngine backend, which is Chromium-based.

Do you know why they don’t use WebKit or Blink, given their relation to khtml?

KDE seems to be doing great these days in general. I use Windows a lot right now, unfortunately, but if I used Linux more often I’m sure I’d still be using Konqueror.

There is NetSurf too, https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ also !Browse ,Acorn RISC-OS related browser (NetSurf started on RISC-OS IIRC). I remember another one OWB (Amiga/MorphOS)

Often mentioned in comparison with Dillo, which I somehow really love. It is incredibly fast and, with CSS turned off, it renders most pages quite accurately. It's also got a fairly recent DOS port for e.g. FreeDOS people. https://www.dillo.org/

I've never been a Mac user but Camino is looking incredibly familiar to me. There must have been a FF theme back in the day that. The scrollbar I can understand, guess it's just cocoa or something, but everything else looks the same.

I remember Camino and the first Firefox for Mac pretty well, and they both looked quite similar. Which is probably another reason why Camino, the wonderful brother, got forgotten.

Myself as well. I'm almost certain I've seen those toolbar icons in an early Firefox theme.

A while I tried to use both Arena and Chimera (a Athena widgets based browser, IIRC) mostly, but even then I was forced to use Netscape (3 or 4) for a lot of pages.

I heard of most of them. Maybe I'm just old?

Notable absentee from this list is the DOS browser Arachne

Anyone remember Sun's HotJava browser? Is it still around?

Thought of it yesterday! I used it in the mid 90s when I gave about every software I could find a chance. I only remember it being awfully slow, but I did not care to much as our families 28.8 modem was slow as well :)

iBrowse and AWeb?

No HotJava?

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