Today I'm going to look at four Mac OS X web browsers: Mozilla 0.9, iCab 2.5.1 (Preview), OmniWeb 4.0, and Internet Explorer 5.1b1 (Preview). Specifically, I want to see if any of these browsers support the web sites that I need to get to. The representative web sites are www.eeconnex.fidelity.com, an https site that we use at work to enter vacation hours and some other things; www.optionslink.com, E*Trade OptionsLink, another https site for looking at my stock options; bug.us.oracle.com, our bug database which uses a fair amount of Javascript; aru.us.oracle.com, the Automated Release Updates application we use for creating patches, it has simple JavaScript and simple Java; and http://ap028sun.us.oracle.com:3000/cgi-bin/f60cgi?config=ccfp1qa, one of our database servers used to run Oracle Applications (heavy Java).

First, a look at the browsers. Mozilla is the Open Source derivative of Netscape Navigator and in fact it's now more like Netscape is a Mozilla derivative. Fizzilla is the Mac OS X compiled version of Mozilla. Mozilla as a whole is still very beta with lots of alpha features. It doesn't support https or Java. But, like Netscape before it, it does render html quite nicely. At least that's my opinion, coming from years of using Netscape. Mozilla also has an email client, a newsreader, and web authoring capabilities, all of it very buggy. If this is ever finished it'll be a great browser.

iCab is a Mac-only web browser made by some guys in Germany. It is light and fast, rendering pages that are acceptably aesthetic. It tries to support web standards, though it does support some Netscape/Microsoft version of tags. iCab has great filtering capabilities for image, script, and applets -- good enough that you can eventually filter out all junk without filtering out much valid data. iCab is the browser I use the most, but its limitations lead me to investigate other browsers. It doesn't support https; Javascript support is spotty, as is Cascading Style Sheets. And it crashes a lot. A whole lot even.

OmniWeb 4 is the final release of one of the better web browsers for Mac OS X. It's the only Cocoa application of the bunch, which it makes its rendered web pages breathtakingly beautiful (unless you're one of those people who doesn't like anti-aliased text). But, like all Cocoa applications, it is a bit slow. OmniWeb supports some image filtering, but it's not customizable, just an on/ off switch -- a reflection of The Omni Group's philosophy of easy-to-use- power-features. OmniWeb is the only shareware browser in the bunch (iCab, when done, will feature shareware and freeware versions), a distinct disadvantage to some people, like myself.

As an aside, now that I'm using Mac OS X I'm throwing away so much software that it makes me shudder. One of the reasons that I don't want to buy more software is that eventually I'm going to end up throwing it away. And unlike other, more material objects, software goes out of style quickly if you try to stay on the cutting edge. New system software breaks a bunch of applications, so you have to upgrade or replace if the software maker won't be providing a new version, which means more money spent. It's a vicious cycle and one that I can't really afford.

Back to the article. Internet Explorer 5.1b1 is a recently released version of the browser everybody loves to hate. It's the official browser of Apple, made by the evil empire. Of the four, IE has the best Java and plug-in support. Just about every web site is tailored to at least look acceptable on IE, and many are made specifically for IE only. Standards compliance has never been much of a Microsoft problem. They tend to obey the letter of a standard, then add a bunch of stuff that makes the standard not work as well as their version of it. Yes, they implement a lot of standards wrong, but that's more lack of care than a corporate conspiracy.

Out of my five test sites, OmniWeb did the poorest, not passing any of the sites. It does support https, but I couldn't get it to do it through our firewall -- a distinct problem with Eeconnex because it refuses connections outside of Oracle IP addresses. OptionsLink should work outside my corporate firewall, but I'm not testing that. OmniWeb really couldn't handle our bug page, getting lots of Javascript errors. Same problem with ARU, and with Oracle Applications it just hung there -- I couldn't tell if it was even loading the applet (which granted is a few dozen megabytes, but it should at least give me an indication that it's doing *something*).

Next worst is Mozilla, which as I mentioned doesn't support https and Java. It handled the bug page just fine, as well as ARU. What I wrote before about it rendering pages well, apparently I was wrong. Still needs some work with some pages. iCab did a little better. Check that, iCab was just as bad as Mozilla. But iCab quits when you try to load an https page. iCab did render the pages more aesthetically pleasing than Mozilla, which tended to make the fonts really large. Oh, I also forgot to mention that Mozilla is a resource hog, taking up 50-60% of the CPU even when it's sitting on a static page.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer did great on my tests. After telling it to use the web proxy for all services, it loaded eeconnex and OptionsLink just fine. No problems with the bug page, though it does render the font a bit large. It did have problems with ARU, not sizing the top frame correctly. But with a bit of a workaround I got ARU to work fine. It actually loaded Oracle Applications and allowed me to log in and choose a responsibility before it hung. That's better than the other three browsers.

So it looks like Internet Explorer is the only usable browser out of the four tested. By usable meaning the only one that I might get away with using exclusively, for having two or three browsers and switching between them is a bit inconvenient. IE doesn't have the features of the other three, but I really need something I can use now. iCab worked very well in Mac OS 9, at least the https support is there (because it uses Apple's URL Access which is not present in Mac OS X). Hopefully that will be fixed and I'll be able to use iCab, but for now it looks like I'll be using Internet Explorer as my day-to-day web browser.