It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that Electrasoft must answer on a daily basis. A company that specializes in Web browsers, network utilities, and 90's era web design, they are among a dying breed for sure. We couldn't resist taking their shareware web browser for a spin, if nothing else for the sake of nostalgia.The install program is a humble 300 kilobyte download, and installs in mere seconds. With another nod to old school internet culture, the installer is powered by the classic Winzip self extractor. Once installed, 32bit web browser delivers on its promises: it is indeed quite fast, and loads quickly. It seemed to render everything just as you would expect, and even supported flash out of the box. It's hard to say it it uses its own custom rendering engine or not, but it reports as Mozilla 1.6 to browser agent finding scripts.
While we can't see any use for this program in the mainstream, it might be a welcome addition to the many Pentium based Windows 98 machines that still hum away in some homes. It is fast, small code done right. It is available for $20 from the company's ordering page.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-06-2008 @ 5:31PM
velocitystrike said...
I fail to understand charging for this.
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5-06-2008 @ 9:08PM
mikedee said...
Open source Dillo is free and lightweight.
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5-06-2008 @ 11:56PM
CT A said...
OMG No.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:27PM
alienvenom said...
I'm sorry, I refuse to buy software from a company whose website was written in what looks like "Claris Home Page". It doesn't say that it is, and lacks a "generator" meta tag (probably because the HTML editor that they use doesn't support meta tags) but it sure as hell looks like it came out of something like Claris Home Page or the like.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:55PM
Acariquara said...
Well, it's not code done right.
In fact, it's snake oil. Simple. It's a VC++ wrapper to the WebBrowser ActiveX control... Could be done in Visual Basic for all it's worth, and (surprise!) requires that Internet Explorer 5.5+ is installed. In fact, I wen to grc.com and tried to get the browser headers from there. It identifies itself as...
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Not surprisingly, IE7 is installed on my XP SP3 machine.
I rest my case.
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5-07-2008 @ 4:55PM
Ian Dumych said...
Wow, that's really amusing. That confirms a sneaking suspicion I had, then. When I tested it, I ran it in WINE. It must have used the Mozilla active X control, and so I was just using Gecko! Wow.
5-16-2008 @ 11:54AM
matthew said...
shit
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