Macintosh has iCab, Windows has OffByOne, Linux has Dillo and BeOS has NetOptimist. These are home brewed, coded-from-scratch web browsers. NetOptimist was created to replace NetPositive (a Netscape 2+ compliant browser which is still the default BeOS web browser) and add more capabilities like Javascript and CSS. There is still lots of work to be done, so the main developer, Stephane Fritsch, asks for more developers to join him. Stephane has also made a preliminary port of the browser to Solaris/X11. Check out the screenshots at the SourceForge NetOptimist web site and download version Preview 14 from BeBits.
New Version of NetOptimist Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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umm, it seems like it would amke more sense to wait untill the browser is furter along in development to port it… right now they should be concentration on the BeOS version, IMOP…
That is one viewpoint, but another is that it is better to go multi-platform early in the development process to keep your code as platform independent as feasible…
Was a Netscape 2.x compliant browser the best that BeOS had? How far along is/was Opera for BeOS ?
Opera 3 (BeOS) was HTML 4 compliant. Bezilla would be the best if it were working (It wasn’t the last time I checked).
Matt,
Bezilla works in BeOS, though very slow, I think it runs much faster now. The last time i tried was back in november. It was very nice to have for when you hit a java heavy page, it could handle most. Also i found lots of websites that just would not work in anything else. I love net+ but it just isn’t up to date
quite well now, it’s even usable (although it hangs up after few pages, if i don’t wait until they’re fully downloaded). Mozilla on BeOS5d1 works even better (i think that driver/media server is much faster there than on BeOS r5.03) – it’s as fast as on windoze.
Bezilla is very fast now (if you tried the november build, you´ll be amazed).
In someways Bezilla is even faster than InternetExplorer (Rendering pages at sourceforge for example).
I like the idea to duplicate Net+ and keep it opensource, but for now, Bezilla is the best browser, and iI think it will be that in the future too. (If you dont want a *BIG* browser then use the small ones (net+ and Netopt)
Opera is very unstable. If you left us for the bad browsers.. then come back and try mozilla (Bezilla) and NetOptimist, you´ll be amazed what happend to speed issue in bezilla.
/Konrad
What happend to the Unix version of NetOptimist?
Quote from the old homepage (http://sfritsch.free.fr/beos/NetOptimist/):
“NetOptimist is a simple browser for BeOS and Unix. It can render simple html pages and display images with the BeOS Translation Kit or ImageMagick.”
I’m stupid. I can’t read. Punch me.
Take a look at the screenshots, on one of them there are BeOS symlinks named; start BeIA windowed and start BeIA fullscreen.
I believe the Dano release has those symlinks also (but not the actual BeIA)
Happy Being
P.S. I think the new ‘Stripzilla with SSL is curently in the lead!
that’s a little joke from the guy who took the screenshots 🙂
I hate to sound like some pessimistic, nit-picking asshole, but Dillo is no where near in the same category as iCab. Is this NetOptimist browser closer to which one? Dillo does almost nothing, as far as features, while iCab does pretty much anything you’d need in a browser, including JavaScript, Java, and SSL. It just happens to be a tiny fraction of the size (1.7 MB) of fat cats like IE and Mozilla.
Of course and Dillo and NetOptimist and OffByOne are not as advanced as iCab. However, they are “the others” compared to well known browsers, and they are all written from scratch, sharing no code from the “big” ones. I include them in the same article with this mindset.
gfx: No, if he has the BeOS R5.1d0 release (i.e. the one before Dano) then he has Wagner included. You can kind of use Wagner as a Browser I guess (Wagner is what Opera 4.0 sort of became under BeIA with MANY changes etc.)