browser : Java Glossary

Best Browsers

best browsers

Please select one of these modern browsers to download and install free.
Click the corresponding browser icon to download the latest free browser software, or click the browser name for more information.
	Firefox	59.0.2	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE (Java Runtime Environment). No longer suppoorts Java Applets. Most widely supported next to IE. Many add-ins. Very fast rendering. Weak on table rendering. Best for printing. Fairly slow to start up. Often stalls on first page from a new site. Must hit reload. 9% market share. Firefox properly balances two-column layouts. None of the other browsers do. Firefox displays SSL certificates.
	Google Chrome	53.0.2785.92	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. Dropped support for Java Applets. Good for YouTube. Frequently automatically updated. Has no edit source button. Slow starting when it fiddles with a proxy. Poor downloading — it hides the fact it is doing so in the bottom left corner. Often downloads without you asking. Handles foreign language sites particularly well since it integrates with Google Translate by automatically translating. Best for interacting with Google. BrowserMark rates this as the fastest browser. Good for ecommerce. Can’t print white writing on a black background. 53% market share.
	IE11	11.0.9600.17501	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. Now works with Java Applets. Some websites will work with no other browser, though many work on everything but this eccentric browser. 10% market share.
	SeaMonkey	2.49.2	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. Similar to Firefox, with integrated Email. No longer supports Java Applets.
	Safari	5.1.7	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. For both Macs and PCs. No longer supports Java. Apple has dropped support for the PC version. Freezes. Simple and stripped down. 12% market share.
	Avant	2018:1	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. It is a fast browser, especially at starting up. Has problems with JavaScript. Excellent at rendering and printing tables. It uses the Firefox or Chrome rendering engine. In theory it should handle Java, but I can’t get it to work.
	Opera	48.0.2685.52	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. It no longer its own rendering engine, which was its main advantage. It uses Chrome. It no longer supports Java Applets.No longer lets you configure your own editor. No bookmarks. Implements SPDY for faster communication. In Turbo mode, caches pages in encrypted compressed form. 6% market share.
	Edge	25.10586.0.0	with the Java 1.8.0_131 JRE. Stripped down browser without features. It does not support Java or any other plug-in.
	Oracle’s Java	1.8.0_131	JRE

Terminology

Performance

• Buy more RAM.
• Tweak/tune/configure/adjust your TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) connection. This will speed up all your Internet connections and downloads, not just the ones you do with your browser, perhaps by as much as 100 times. Try any or all of these tuning tools to see which works best for you: QuickDNS, TCP Optimizer or TweakMaster.
• If you use Firefox or IE, consider installing the Google Accelerator.

Detecting Which Browser

Browser Bugs

There is no common format for bookmarks. You can import/export bookmarks only between a fairly small subset of all browsers. Reinstalling losses you bookmarks. Switching browsers loses your bookmarks. OS (Operating System) crashes lose your bookmarks. The best stratgy is to maintain your bookmarks as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) files. Then they will work for any browser, and they are easy to back up. You can also maintain them with bulk search/replace tools and link checkers.

Opera: ignores <col format settings for table columns. Ignores CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) max-width property. Does not support CSS overflow to permit scrolling tables. Can’t access a printer to print a selection in Vista.

Firefox: Does not display borders on Applets. Ignores <col class and alignment settings for table columns.

Mozilla: Does not display borders on Applets.

SeaMonkey: draws boxes needlessly around links that consist of an image plus text.

Internet Explorer: does not render *.png image files with transparent backgrounds properly. In the latest update of IE (Internet Explorer), it won’t render Applets unless you click on them. This makes Applets like CurrCon which displays all the prices on a page in your local currency useless. This is just another part of Microsoft’s dirty war against Java.

Report bugs to the vendors in their support forums. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Officially, browsers are not supposed to support <col class= command out of some idiotic prissiness. Some browsers support it anyway out of common sense.

Those browsers marked with an x all have a bug. They will not render <col class="xxxx">s correctly. The ones with a tick render it correctly. The Opera people say this is a feature not a bug. The language lawyers claim the W3 spec says that the browser is supposed to ignore the color attribute from the <col class. Logically, I think the <col styles should apply to the entire column, but not to <th rows. In addition Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari and Flock also ignore the <col align attribute. Opera and IE render it properly.

Firefox, SeaMonkey and Opera support almost all the HTML5 entities. Chrome and Safari support many of them.

If both cells in the left hand Style Test column are the same colour, then your browser (the one you are using now to view this page) supports <col class=.

If both cells in the right hand Alignment Test column right-align, then your browser supports <col align= correctly.

Dreamweaver lets you apply a css style to all rows individually. Last revised/verified: 2018-05-06

Setting Default Font

• In the Opera Browser, Click Tools ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Advanced ⇒ Web pages and select your basic default fonts, sizes and colours. Click Tools ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Advanced ⇒ Fonts. Pick your default fonts for the various purposes. Also you can set up fonts to use for various international Languages. Use Latin-Extended-A for Esperanto.
• In Firefox, click Tools ⇒ Options ⇒ Content ⇒ Fonts & colours ⇒ Advanced. Set up Turkish and Unicode for Esperanto.
• In Mozilla, Click edit ⇒ preferences ⇒ appearance ⇒ fonts. Set up Turkish and Unicode for Esperanto.
• In SeaMonkey, click Edit ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Appearance ⇒ Fonts.
• In Internet Explorer Click Tools ⇒ Internet Options ⇒ General ⇒ Fonts. Select your fonts for the various character encodings. If at first you don’t succeed, try some different fonts. I did get it to work eventually.

Rant

If HTML were a compact, preparsed binary format, that would eliminate nearly all of the malformed HTML in the universe. That would also mean it would be much likely if a document were tested on only one browser, it would render properly on all of them, or at least most of them. As a side effect it would download twice as fast and render more quickly.

Engaging the Java Console in Your Browser

If you are in a browser you have to enable to console before you can see it. Avant and Chrome do not support Java, or more precisely, their support does not work. Safari does support the Java console. Browsers no longer have menu-items to engage and disengage the console. You do it in the Java Control Panel.

Windows: Engaging the Console

1. On Vista, W2008, W7-32, W7-64, W8-32, W8-64, W2012, W10-32 and W10-64, click Programs.
2. Double click Java.
3. Click Advanced.
4. Click + Java console.
5. Click Show Console.
6. Click OK.
7. Click File.
8. Click Close.

Mac OS Leopard Engaging the Console

In Mac OS Leopard, you also have to enable the console on the Java Preferences Application.

1. Applications
2. Utilities
3. Java Preferences Application.
4. Click Advanced.
5. Click Show Console.
6. Restart your browser.

1. Click Tools.
2. Click Sun Java console.

DOM (Document Object Model)

Browsing Locally From Hard Disk

Why would you want to view a website from your local hard disk?

• You are the author. You want it right here so you can edit it and instantly see the effects.
• If you use the Replicator to maintain a mirror of some website, you can access much faster from local hard disk that from the web.
• You can work without Internet access.
• You can rapidly search the entire local website with standard regex search/replace tools such as Funduc.
• You can back up a permanent copy.

If you want to view *.html files on your local hard disk, an ordinary browser will do. You start your browsing session with a local filename e.g. J:\mindprod\jgloss\jdk.html of a file url e.g. file:///E:/mindprod/jgloss/jgloss.html. From there all the links are relative.

There are a few catches. The website does to work quite the same as it would on the web:

• The browser does not know the mime type of the various files. It has to guess.
• The browser does not know where the root directory of the local website is.
• There must be no absolute (http://) links in the markup or you will go off to the Internet to load the page.
• SSI (Server Side Includes) does not work.
• Ads often disappear (not necessarily a bad thing)
• Sometimes you get long delays while the browser vainly tries to load ads or impression counter micro-images.
• There cannot be any JSP (Java Server Pages) or server-side dynamic content.
• The ./, .././ short cut way of getting to the home page does not work. You have to use ../index.html.

If you want your local copy to behave more realistically as it would on the web, you have to install a static webserver such as Tomcat. It runs on your local PC (Personal Computer) and talks only to you. This fairly complicated, almost identical to configuring and running a server on the web.

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