[geeks] Web Browsers that Don't Suck

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

Are there any web browsers[1] that suck substantially less than the rest?
I don't mean this as a snobbish rhetorical question, either.  I really
-want- a web browser that doesn't suck (horribly), and I don't want to
have to put it on my list of projects that I intend to code[2] sometime
before the heat-death of the universe.

Netscape 4.79 has annoying bug under IRIX where if you click "Back" too
many times, the browser will refuse to load any pages, and will stay
resident in memory until kill-9ed, even if all the windows are closed.  I
bump into this daily, sometimes hourly--if I'm browing a lot of technical
documentation.

Mozilla 0.9.9, while faster than previous milestones, still feels like
trying to run while waist-deep in tar[4].  Never mind that I've just
somehow triggered a but in -it- that prevents loading any more pages.  
Just like Netscape 4.79, it'll just spin and throb, but not go anywhere.

Konqueror kicks ass, but requires KDE, which does not build under IRIX (at
least, for values of KDE >= 2.0).  It also annoying spawns a separate
process for each window, possibly causing it to eat up even more memory
than Mozilla.

IE, for all its faults, actually runs pretty well under Solaris, but isn't
available for IRIX.  I've asked a member of the dev-team, but they don't
see any reason to port, since they've abandoned the Motif/X11 port,
anyway.

HotJava isn't really all -that- bad.  It certainly isn't any slower than
Mozilla, but it does eat up an entire CPU.  But, all that's irrelevant, as
it promptly coredumps with SGI's JVM.

Opera is really what I want, but there's no IRIX compile.  Phooey.

*sigh*  From what I'm seeing, the story is the same on AIX, *BSD, and (for
the most part) HP-UX.  According to browser-makers, if it isn't Linux or
Solaris, it isn't Unix.

--Jonathan
[1] Other than Lynx, of course.
[2] I need a 8-5 job[3] without 60 hours of overtime weekly so that I can
    actually have the time and energy to code all the crap I want to, and
    still have the money to pay bills
[3] Shit, right now, even another experience like working at
    $previousOrkPlace would be preferable to landing maybe one little
    network contract every couple of weeks.
[4] Come -on-.  Other than JavaShit and plug-ins, how much compuration
    does it require to open a telnet connection to port 80, issue a
    handful of commands, parse the output, and draw the result in a
    window?