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Mozilla: A new open-source web browser
THIS EDITION of NetSpeak discusses the main features of the new open-source web browser Mozilla.
One of the products that holds a unique position in the cyberworld is the web browser. As it is the major vehicle that lets netizens travel in the Net, developments on this front are generally watched quite keenly.
Current browser scenario
As we all know, the current browser market is dominated by Internet Explorer. Apart from IE, Netscape is the only other browser, which is now used to some extent. There are of course many other browsers and this column has featured some of them like Opera (http://www.opera.com), NetCaptor (http://www.netcaptor.com) and NeoPlanet (http://www.neoplanet.com). Though choices are available for a majority of netizens a web browser means IE and nothing else. But the new entrant into the browser market, the open-source browser Moziila — released for different platforms that include Windows, Mac and Linux — might change all that.
Mozilla
Though Mozilla 1.0 — available at: http://www.mozilla.org/ — was released a few weeks ago, the author did not pay much attention to it, thinking (rather foolishly as it turns out) that was just yet another browser. But, having used it for a while and benefited from some of the features of this free open-source product, I now feel that this is a product that has to be taken seriously. Here is a glance at some of the notable features of Mozilla.
Tabbed browsing
While browsing the web with IE, to view multiple web pages, we need to invoke a new IE window for each web page. The task bar then gets cluttered with innumerable windows. To prevent this type of cluttering, Mozilla supports the tabbed browsing feature that lets you load multiple web pages inside a single window without opening a new browser window each time. To load a web page using this feature, right-click at the link and select the option `Open link in New Tab'. At this point, Mozilla creates a button at the bottom edge of the browser window and then loads the page as a tab inside the current window. The new page can then be viewed by just clicking at the tab. Of course, Opera also has this feature but it is an advertisement supported product, not a free product like Mozilla.
Blocking Pop-up windows
Many sites display windows filled with advertisements — usually called pop-up windows — without the viewer's permissions. Some of them can be quite annoying and might take you to useless sites. Mozilla comes with features that lets you block pop-windows.
To enable this feature, move to the option Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Scripts & Windows and uncheck `Open unrequested windows'.
Web composer and debugging tools
The composer program integrated with Mozilla helps you create web pages quite easily. Another highlight of the product is the DOM Inspector that lets you debug and fix errors in your web pages. An excellent tutorial that discusses the potential of DOM Inspector is available at this link: http://grayrest.com/moz/ evangelism/ tutorials/dominspectortutorial.shtml
Apart from these tools, Mozilla has many valuable features and tools that include the pipelining feature designed to enhance the browsing speed, integrated chat client and so on.
Some disadvantages
Though Mozilla is a very stable browser that loads web pages reasonably quickly and has many useful features as discussed above, it has some shortcomings as well. Some sites, highly tuned to IE, may not load properly in Mozilla. When this author tried to `Sign Up' an account with Hotmail, Mozilla failed to load the page. Another drawback is that some browser `add-ons' like Ucmore (http://ucmore.com/), discussed in this column months ago do not currently support Mozilla. Once Mozilla becomes a mainstream product these disadvantages will certainly fade away.
Perhaps some of you may wonder if Mozilla would also become just another alternative browser, used only by a few web enthusiasts. Though one cannot deny this possibility, at least in the Windows world, the major difference between Mozilla and similar products is that it is an open- source product that has the unconditional support of gifted programmers across the globe. If the growing popularity of Linux and other open-source free software products is an indication, we can safely conclude that Mozilla will in the near future become one of the prominent browsers. One should also note that many Net-based products are being developed using various open source free tools available in the Mozilla toolkit (http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/guide/toolkit.html) and this also will certainly attract more developers to the Mozilla project.
HyperMaker: a web site compiler
You might have created a web site and have it locally stored on your hard disk. Or you might have downloaded a favourite site using a web site copier program like WebCopier http://www.maximumsoft.com/. Would you like to convert the web pages stored in your local machine into stand-alone e-books? For this try out the software, HyperMaker available at: http://bersoft.com/hmhtml/index.htm. The software lets you create an e-book from the html and other files — sound, image, video and so on — files stored in the local directory. To compile the site in an e-book, just provide the necessary inputs like start page location, title and the like. The program will compile all the files in the base directory and all sub directories and create a stand alone e-book file.
J. Murali
(The author can be contacted at murali27@satyam.net.in)
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