The battle of the browsers quickly winds down to a duel between two of the
main contenders. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, these
browsers have the most impact on the web at this time. Right now, Netscape
remains as the leader of the pack, with 75% of the Web using Netscape,
but don't think that the Internet Explorer is down and out,
with 15% of the Web using Internet Explorer, it growing surely and rapidly.
Microsoft, the clone maker, takes what Netscape has to offer and adds to
it significantly.
End User Features |
Web Master Features |
Developer Platforms |
Mail and News
And the Winner is... |
The Future
End User Features
| End User Features
|  |
|
| Navigation
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Low bandwidth support
| Excellent
| Fair
|
| Bookmarks
| Excellent
| Good
|
| Multimedia
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Security
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Download and Installation
| Excellent
| Good
|
- Navigation
- Power, ease of use, and configurability of menus, command buttons, and right-click context menus.
- Low bandwidth support
- Features designed to optimize browsing over slow connections.
- Bookmarks
- The creation, display, management, and updating of bookmarks.
- Multimedia
- Built-in support for audio, video, and VRML files.
- Security
- Ability to support secure transactions on the Web and to verify the
security of downloaded executable code.
Netscape - SSL 3.0, 128-bit RC4 encryption, Digital Certificates.
Internet Explorer - SSL 3.0, 128-bit RC4 encryption, Digital Certificates, Authenticode
- Download and installation
- Packaging of downloadable installation files, the availability of
different downloading option, and the smoothness and flexibility of
the installation process.
Web Master Features
| Web Master Features
| |
|
| Basic HTML
| Excellent
| Excellent
|
| Typography
| Fair
| Excellent
|
| Graphics & Multimedia
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Page Layout
| Fair
| Excellent
|
| Frames Support
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Tables Support
| Fair
| Good
|
| Forms
| Excellent
| Excellent
|
- Basic HTML
- HTML 2.0 compliance plus some HTML 3.2 features, such as subscripts and superscripts.
- Typography
- Support for font specification, type size, line spacing, color, highlighting, and so on.
- Graphics & Multimedia
- Support for various image types, incuding background images, low-resolution image previews, transparent images, and animations.
Support for GIF89a, .au, .aiff, .midi, .wav, .avi, QuickTime, MPEG, ShockWave
- Page Layout
- Formatting of text blocks with margins, indentation, columns, and the like.
- Frames
- Support for standard, borderless, and flating frames, plus control over attributes such as border size and color
- Tables
- Support for tables, table background colors and images, captions and borders, and row and column merging.
- Forms
- Support for all HTML form elements
Developer Platforms
| Developer Platforms
| |
|
| Web Applications
| Excellent
| Excellent
|
| Intranet Applications
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Client-Side Scripting
| Excellent
| Excellent
|
| Programmable Objects
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Browser Extensibility
| Good
| Excellent
|
| Plug-in Support
| Excellent
| Fair
|
| Java Support
| Fair
| Good
|
| ActiveX Support
| None
| Excellent
|
| Cross-Platform Support
| Excellent
| Poor
|
| Security
| Excellent
| Excellent
|
- Web Applications
- Browser as a platform and as a delivery vehicle for publicly accessible sites.
- Intranet Applications
- Comparable rating for complex corporate applications.
- Client-Side Scripting
- Power and quality of the browser's scripting language(s).
Netscape also has Java Script, and Internet Explorer has JScript,
but it doesn't support all functions of Java Script since Netscape did not
make the specs and functions for Java Scripts public.
To make up for this, Microsoft has introduced VBScript, which is based
on its Virtual Basic language.
- Browser Extensibility
- Reflects each browser's overall extension architecture
- Plug-in Support
- Reflects the browser's ability to host plug-ins.
- Java Support
- Describe each one as a Java runtime environment.
Java runs slowly on both platforms, even with the JIT(Just In Time) Java
compiler which is suppose to optimize the Java's performance..
- ActiveX Support
- Describes the broswer as an ActiveX container and server.
ActiveX is a set of technologies created by the Microsoft Corp. that enables
a type of interactive content on World Wide Web sites. With ActiveX,
Web sites come alive using multimedia effects, interactive objects, and
sophisticated applications that create a user experience comparable to
that of a high-quality
- Cross-Platform Support
- Reflects the browser's availability on multiple hardware and OS platforms.
- Security
- Describes the model for protection against malign browser extensions.
Mail and News
| Mail and News
| |
|
| Browser Integration
| Excellent
| Good
|
| Message Management
| Poor
| Fair
|
| Newsgroup Management
| Fair
| Good
|
| Off-line News Reading
| None
| Fair
|
| Rich Messaging
| Fair
| Fair
|
- Browser Integration
- Quality of integration between the mail and news client and the host browser.
- Message management
- Mail package's ability to organize and manage mail and filter messages.
- Newsgroup Management
- Ease with which the news client lets your access, view, and subscribe to newsgroups.
- Off-line News Reading
- Reading newsgroups with out connecting to the Internet.
- Rich Messaging
- Ability to mail package to create and view HTML and other rich-text messages, view complex HTML in-line, and access hyperlinks.
And the Winner is...
The answer is really platform dependent.
If Windows 95 is your only operating system, then stick with Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer is easier to customize, and a bit faster.
Everyone else, to Netscape you go!
The Future
Just when the 3.0 versions are out of their beta versions, both Netscape
and Internet Explorer are releasing their 4.0 versions.
- Netscape Navigator 4.0 (Galileo)
- Real time chat, audio
Additional HTML tags
Additional Java classes and JavaScript enhancements
- Internet Explorer 4.0 (Nashville)
- Unification of browser & desktop
- DirectX controls
- DirectX is a type of API called a hardware abstraction layer
that acts for Windows 95 and various types of hardware. The DirectX
standard includes Direct3D (which speeds up texture mapping and other 3D
graphics processes), DirectSound (for audio cards), DirectDraw
(for vector graphics), DirectVideo (for AVI files and other moving pictures),
and the DirectPlay and DirectInput team (which simultaneously supports sound,
drawing, video, networked gameplay, and joystick standards).
Off-line browsing
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( yulin@cs.buffalo.edu )