Comparison Screen Grabs Using Different Browsers

Mozilla and Netscape 7 display pretty much the same since they both use the same engine, written for the standards from the ground up. To date, the Gecko based browsers perform CSS positioning best, making it is a joy to use the latest standards, at long last. At present on PCs these require Win 98, 233 MHz Pentium class and 64 MB RAM and Mac OS 8.6 or greater and they do mean 64 MB of RAM.

Internet Explorer 6.0 handles columns pretty well but misreads the order of some things, requiring separate workaround treatment. Opera is a light weight browser which can be used on older smaller computers and flies with newer ones. It is close to achieving the current standards, but does present some challenges for writing Web pages.

The level 4 browsers have limited CSS positioning ability, and read just enough CSS to create mischief. Achieving column layout for them used to be accomplished by using tables, which hampers accessibility for alternative browsers. These screen grabs were taken before a redo with some tricks to make them somewhat obey. These semi-recent browsers are best shelved. Legacy pages still work as intended on them.

Turning off images in Mosaic gives a text-only view with image place markers. Mosaic can display images fine, however. Lynx renders only text. Both browsers present logically formatted text quite usably.

Screen Reader

Another interesting exercise—HEAR a Web page rather than see it. After downloading NLM DocMorph from http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph/default.htm, you can submit a local file and a synthesized female voice reads the text content aloud while each sentence displays in huge font. Hearing a Web page argues persuasively for logically formatted text rather than graphical or plugin (Acrobat, Flash...) presentation. The W3C.org lists 35 different kinds of browsers.

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