🚀 go-pugleaf

        For what its worth, here is my grading of the current Amiga WWW
web browsers as of April 1 1996.  These grades are my impressions using
these Browsers on an A4000, 2M chip, 16M fast while running
Enforcer-Quiet.  All cashes in RAM:T/  Your milage may vary.

-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
    Browser Report Card      |             |             |             |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
    Function                 |  AMosaic 2  |  IBrowse 5  |  AWeb 1.0   |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  General Stability          |     C-      |      D-     |      D+     |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Netscape Page Compat       |     D       |      B-     |      C-     |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Telnet                     |     ?       |      ?      |      ?      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Gopher                     |     B       |      F      |      C-     |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  FTP                        |     B       |      F      |      F      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  MLink Compat               |     C       |      D      |      C+     |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  LARGE GRAPHICS             |     D       |      D      |      D      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  ZGIF Compat                |     C       |      C      |      F      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  AREXX Functions            |     B       |      F      |      D      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Forms Support              |     C       |      C      |      C      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Professionalism            |     C       |      C      |      B      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Future Support Potential   |     F       |      C      |      C      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
     Total Score             |   20.67     |   13.33     |     16      |
-----------------------------|-------------|-------------|-------------|
  Average Grade              |     C       |     D       |     D+      |
_____________________________|_____________|_____________|_____________|

        Discussion:

General Stability.  The recent upgrades of MUI (3.3) have made AMosaic 2.0
pre-release 3 quite stable in my system.  Both IBrowse 5 and AWeb 1.0 had
serious problems as originally released last month.  The new image-decoder
has made IBrowse 5 usable again.  And the corrected IFF logo fixed the
problem with AWeb.

Netscape Page Compatibility.  AMosaic is showing its age with some of the
new Netscape features cropping up.  Many pages are "sprouting" Java script
text that IBrowse and AWeb properly ignore.  Aweb appears to be safely
ignoring Netscape features and IBrowse appears to be rendering them.

Telnet.  I haven't used this feature to any extent.

Gopher.  I was never able to make gopher connections with the AmiTCP
version of AMosaic 2 via MLink.  I just received a cryptic message like
"could not make the connection non-blocking."  However the AS225 version
had no problem making these gopher connections.  AWeb works almost as well
but I have observed problems at some sites.

FTP.  The AS225 version of AMosaic also appears to work well with anonymous
FTP connections.

MLink and Amosaic.  AMosaic seems to use MLink (perhaps AmiTCP as well) in
single channel mode.  MLink shows one client as long as AMosaic is running.


MLink and IBrowse.  IBrowse appears to open up multiple internet channels
so that several components of a display can be acquired from the web at the
same time.  I have noticed that whenever IBrowse fails to decode an image,
it also fails to close the dead channel for that image.  Thus after failing
to decode a number of images, MLink shows a like number of dead clients. 
This may be a problem with AmiTCP as well.

MLink and AWeb.  I was surprised to see that when ever AWeb finished
rendering a screen that the MLink client count went to zero.  Not one
client, zero clients.  I have run AWeb with the max connections set to 8
with no apparent problems with MLink.  The only time I get dead clients
with AWeb is when quitting the program while it's still trying to get data
from a remote host.

Large Graphics.  All of these programs do not appear to reserve enough
chip memory to display large graphics like the 800x800 pixel mesoscale
weather forecast images from the University of Washington.  Netscape will
display these images on a PC.

ZGIF Support.  It appears that AWeb is the only program that has a problem
with the ZGIF datatype.  Both Amosaic and IBrowse recommend the use of
this datatype.

ARexx Support.  AMosaic has a relatively complete ARexx command set in
place.  With AMosaic, it is possible to have a menu selected ARexx macro
function get the current screen HTML as a plain text file and call a vocal
text reader program (address command) to read that file aloud.

Forms Support.  All of these programs appear to provide a reasonable level
of forms support.

Professionalism.  On the whole, though Spartan, AWeb appears to me to be a
more professionally produced program.  The non-use of MUI is one of the
factors that contributes to that impression.  I believe that MUI can be a
valuable tool for the casual or amateur programmer (which most Amiga
programmers are these days), but I do not believe professional programmers
-- intending to make serious money from their work -- normally would put
their success at the mercy of an external partially-developed third party
software product, like MUI (IMHO).

Future Support.  I see no evidence of (or motivation for) any future
release of AMosaic.  This still is a possibility, however, as long as the
beta version remains public.  The FAQ says that AMosaic can't be sold given
the cost of the NCSA license to do so.  [I don't know if they could give
away a functional bare-bones NCSA code version and sell an Amiga enhancer
patch kit.]  Both IBrowse and AWeb appear to be in continuing development.

        I wish to thank the many people who have worked hard to produce
these programs.  I hope you find these comments useful.  Please feel free
to correct any errors I may have made.

                              <>MLB<>