Surfing the Web with Linux

A review of the major browsers available for Linux

June 24, 2002

Way back in the Spring of 1998, when I installed Linux for the first time, there was, for all practical purposes, only one browser that you could use to surf the Internet. That was Netscape. There also were a couple of unfinished browser projects around. Arena was one of those. It was another browser with a graphical user interface. They stopped their work, ironically, in March of 1998. They must have realized that I had shown up on the Linux scene and wanted to spite me. There was also Lynx, a text mode browser. Ever tried surfing the Internet with a text mode browser? It's a lot like painting a whole house with the tiny brush they give you in a paint-by-the-numbers set. For someone migrating from that other platform, the Internet viewing landscape looked bleak.

But luckily, 5 years later, we have a virtual cornucopia of browsers to choose from that run on our favorite operating system. I'm going to give my opinion as to how these stack up, what to expect from them, whether there is a steep or relatively flat learning curve to get them to give you an optimum web surfing experience and what their relative strengths and weaknesses (ie. my pet peeves) are.

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