Thursday, May 28, 1998

Need a browser? You have good choices beyond the big two

By WALTER S. MOSSBERG / The Wall Street Journal

(c) 1998, Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

If you're sick of the browser war, and the two main combatants -- Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- there's hope. Without much publicity, some alternative Web browsers have begun to appear.

Three new browsers are making a splash -- Opera, NeoPlanet and Surf Monkey. These products, mainly distributed via downloads from the Web, are aimed at users looking for something different from what Microsoft and Netscape have to offer. I have been trying out all three in recent days.

The best known of the three is Opera, which has gained a cult following because of its small demands for hard-disk space and memory. It is less than half the size of a typical installation of Navigator or Internet Explorer and supposedly will even run on a prehistoric 386 PC.

Built from scratch by a Norwegian company, Opera Software, the Opera browser is shareware; it can be downloaded at www.operasoftware.com. You get to use it free of charge for 30 days. Then you have to pay $35 for further use.

Opera version 3.2.1 lacks many of the bells and whistles of the two main contenders, such as customizable toolbar icons to represent your favorite sites. Its built-in e-mail function works only for sending, not receiving, mail, and it doesn't support either Java or ActiveX, rival programming features used on an increasing number of Web sites. And so far, it only runs on Windows.

But Opera appeals to some users for more than just its leanness. It sports a very basic interface, with lists of favorite sites displayed on the left and Web pages shown to the right. Most importantly, it can simultaneously download and display multiple Web pages in multiple adjoining windows. This feature overtaxed my poor brain, but I suspect it will appeal to techies.

Alas, one of the Opera cult's main claims, that the program works faster than Navigator or Internet Explorer, didn't hold up in my tests. While Opera did launch quickly, it merely matched Internet Explorer and was two seconds slower than Navigator. And I generally found it loaded Web pages in about the same time taken by the market leaders. I think many of these claims are based on the fact that Opera makes it easy to turn off slow-loading graphics, but Microsoft and Netscape also include such an option, though they bury it.

The other two alternate browsers, NeoPlanet and Surf Monkey, are actually shells that use the guts of Internet Explorer to do the heavy lifting of loading and interpreting Web pages. But that's not a bad thing. Despite its rigid insistence on maintaining the look and feel of Windows, Microsoft allows third-party companies to completely replace Internet Explorer's normal interface with their own designs.

NeoPlanet is free and is even smaller than Opera, under 800 kilobytes in size and downloadable from www.neoplanet.com, though you must have Internet Explorer 3.0 or 4.0. To me, it features a much slicker interface than Opera.

The main feature is a well-designed list of "channels" running down the side of the screen. These aren't to be confused with the useless, marketing-oriented channels offered by Microsoft. Instead, they are groups of preselected Web sites, about 500 in all, separated into logical categories -- news, sports, health, local sites, etc. You can easily create your own channels, or add or delete sites form the existing ones.

Once you open a channel, you get icons at the top of the screen representing all of the various sites in that grouping, and can easily hop back and forth among them with a few mouse clicks. NeoPlanet is a product of Bigfoot, a Web directory service based in New York City, which hopes to sell it to Internet providers as an opening screen and to make money from ads and promotion of other sites.

Surf Monkey is a much larger and more elaborate shell for Internet Explorer 4.0, which is aimed at creating a total Web-browsing environment for preteenagers. It automatically blocks Web pages about sex and other inappropriate topics, and even eradicates profane words.

The program also will only allow kids to send and receive e-mail from a list of other Surf Monkey users approved by a parent. If e-mail from a stranger comes in, it must be opened by a parent, using a special parental password, before the kid can see it. Chat rooms are also monitored and restricted to Surf Monkey users, and parents can turn off the chat function entirely.

But the program isn't all about limits and barriers. It takes over the whole screen with a rocket-ship motif. Web pages are displayed in the middle, with lists of favorite sites and so forth in colorful panels on the side. A quirky animated monkey pops up in various places and speaks to the kids. Chats are conducted in a comic-book style, with kids assuming the form of cartoon characters and their remarks displayed as speech bubbles. And if a kid dislikes a Web page, or is tired of it, he can blow it up with a ray gun or splatter it with slime.

MediaLive, the Silicon Valley company that developed Surf Monkey with Japan's video-game giant Bandai, offers the software free of charge at www.surfmonkey.com, but charges $30 a year to join as a Surf Monkey member. Without a membership, you can only visit 50 preselected Web sites, and are limited in other ways. The download is huge -- about 13 megabytes -- so Surf Monkey will also be available on CD-ROM when it's formally released in June.

Each of these products is worth a try if you're tired of the battling big boys of browsing.