In addition to these, each browser was subjected to Robin's HTML 4.0 Conformance Test, on which the 'HTML testing' results in part 3 are based. O'Grady's PowerPage (now part of Go2Mac).My typical day includes browsing the following sites, all on my IE 5 toolbar: In order to determine if any of the new challengers are viable replacements for IE 5, they have to handle my normal browsing load at least as efficiently as IE 5 does. To get a feel for how the browsers would fare on an older PowerPC, I also tested them on my Workgroup Server 9150/120 with 200 MB RAM, running Mac OS 9.1. I've run Netscape 6.2, Opera 5.0, iCab Preview 2.6, IE 5.1, and Mozilla 0.9.7 through their paces on my main Mac, a PowerBook G3/266 with 384 MB RAM running Mac OS 9.2.1. (For the curious, Netscape 4.x would have finished dead last, by a long shot.) Additionally, Microsoft have updated IE 5 to 5.1, which was a major step forward, if Microsoft are to be believed.īut which of these browsers is the best, and are any of them viable replacements for IE 5, which has emerged as the de facto standard on the Mac? Because of this, I have specifically excluded the 4.x versions of Navigator and Communicator from this roundup. With the recent releases of Opera 5.0 final and iCab Preview 2.6, as well as Netscape 6.2 and Mozilla 0.9.7, it's Netscape Communicator that is no longer a viable player. For over a year now, Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape Communicator (4.5-4.7x) have been the only real viable players for PowerPC-based Macs. The Classic Mac OS has long been saddled with a dearth of good Web browser choices. I'll try to keep this reasonably up-to-date, but a) no guarantees and b) CodeBitch, over at MacEdition, has a pretty good handle on things from an HTML standards perspective, which is most of what's changed since this was written.

Rated 'Best of Mac Daniel' (top 15 most-read columns) from six months after its publication until it was pulled from the site. Originally published in January 2002 as a series of four Mac Daniel columns for Low End Mac. The Great Mac OS 9 Web Browser Shootout The Great Mac OS 9 Web Browser Shootout

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