ICab can build a list of the links present in a page. Click on the icon to bring up a list of validation results - handy for Web designers who are testing their pages.
The state of the icon indicates a page’s HTML validity. To the right of iCab’s Address field is an intriguing smiley-face icon whose expression changes from happy to sad, depending on the page you’re on. Mozilla and Netscape also lost our favor because they had an especially irritating window behavior: when you create a new window, there is a few-second pause during which any part of an address you type is lost. The problem here is that if no window is currently open and the pop-up menu is set to Current Navigator Window, your request will be ignored. But in addition to an address field, the box contains a pop-up menu that controls whether the new URL is loaded in the existing browser window or a new one. Someone who doesn’t know the 1-L shortcut in Mozilla and Netscape (we discovered it by accident) can use Open Web Location (1-shift-L) to activate an Aquafied drop-down dialog box. Opera and iCab display an annoying floating dialog box. (But you can do this in Mozilla and Netscape only by pressing 1-L no menu item exists for this basic shortcut.) If no window is open in IE, Navigator, or OmniWeb, the browser creates a new one with the field selected. And in every browser but iCab and Opera, invoking this command highlights the Address field in the current window so you can type a new URL. In some browsers, performing these actions is a breeze in others, it’s needlessly complicated.Įach program has a command - for example, Open URL - that lets you specify a new Web address. These programs are called “browsers” for a reason: accessing the Web involves opening and closing windows, entering URLs, clicking on links, and other-wise meandering from one online location to another. In fact, Opera includes a great feature that takes advantage of XHTML: a button on the Address Bar lets you toggle between Document mode, which displays all page and text formatting, and User mode, which simplifies the page to just its structure. We were glad to see that none of the browsers sputtered on The Web Standards Project’s page (the only one in our tests that uses XHTML), aside from the CSS-related issues mentioned earlier. It provides better access to people with disabilities (who may be using text-reading devices, for example) and those running text-only browsers. XHTML is a happy blend of structure and appearance. Web design has traditionally focused on appearance, but HTML was conceived of as a structural language, meaning that an author marks up a page based on its content - for example, a paragraph here, a heading there - instead of using formatting tags to design the page. The Web Standards Project page uses XHTML, the W3C’s recommended successor to HTML. Navigator, IE, Mozilla, and Netscape rendered the page correctly. iCab didn’t display the positioning correctly, either.
OmniWeb displayed the fonts correctly but misunderstood the code that dictated the position of the elements, so navigation elements were pushed off the left edge of the screen and the horizontal divider image was crammed against the top of the window (see “Nonstandard Support in OmniWeb”). Opera didn’t pick up the font (defined in a linked style sheet as Trebuchet MS) of the navigation links or the sidebar to the right of the main text. However, Opera didn’t fall too far behind the rest of the pack. Opera bills itself as “the fastest browser on earth,” but it eked out a winning score for only one site, the Web Standards Project. We attribute the snappier load times of Navigator, Mozilla, and Netscape to the Gecko rendering engine (see “Mozilla at Heart”). Mozilla and Netscape were slow when launching, drawing new windows, and even bringing up the programs’ preferences, but their final scores remained competitive, especially against IE.
Navigator, which clocked the best times for three of the five sites, averaged faster marks than IE on every page except Adobe’s. The results of real-world tests were surprising. (We also ran the browsers through Macworld Lab’s Speedmark browser test to judge how each browser performed without the unpredictable overhead of the Internet.) For a look at all the numbers, see “Speed Tests: Real World and Macworld.” We loaded each site in each browser on a 400MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 with 768MB of RAM and OS X 10.2 installed. Other considerations include the speed of the Web server and its connection, the amount of data on the page, how quickly a browser can interpret incoming data, and the speed of your Mac. Of course, your Internet connection’s bandwidth affects how fast a Web page loads. It’s difficult to accurately judge a browser’s speed.