Wikipedia:Browser notes

Please list the pros and cons of particular browsers for viewing and editing Wikipedia articles. Limit your contributions to practical drawbacks and actual experiences with various browsers in interaction with the Wikipedia.

No browser wars but if you must comment at length, take it to the Browser notes talk page, please.

Please change the order of the browsers to place the Consensus Best Browser first on the list for each platform and continue in order of preference. Keep comments brief.

The Opera, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla-based browsers support a direct interface to searching in Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Searching for more information.

Browsers on Microsoft Windows

• Mozilla
  • No problems reported.
• Internet Explorer
  • Those who try to type non-Latin1 characters directly into an article are sometimes surprised by IE's attempts to encode the data in a langauge-specific charset instead of Latin1 plus numeric character references. For advice, see Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/South Korea
• Opera
  • Older versions cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Browser page size limits.
• Netscape
  • Very old versions cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Browser page size limits.
• Mozilla Firebird™
  • No problems reported as of ver. 0.5.
• K-Meleon
  • No problems reported as of ver. 0.7.1.

Browsers on Macintosh Systems

OSX

• Internet Explorer
  • No problems reported.
• Netscape
  • Browser search ignores edit window
• Opera
  • Internal buffer sometimes can't handle long pages, mangles them
  • Slow. No auto login between sessions.
• Safari 1.0 beta (v73)
  • No problems reported
• Omniweb
  • Occasionally hangs permanently.
  • Does not wrap text around graphics, except in preview mode.
  • Does not display indented paragraphs separated by blank line correctly, inserts two blank lines.
• Mozilla
  • No problems reported.
• Camino
  • No problems reported.
• iCab
  • No problems reported.

OS9 and earlier

• Internet Explorer
  • 4.5 : logging off from one wiki to another
  • 5.5 : sometimes freeze the edit window
• Netscape
  • 4.5 : overlapping text and quick bar under cologne blue settings, may add weird space in text; some encoding issues
• Mozilla
  • 1.2 : some encoding issues, very slow
• Opera
  • 5.0 : cut long pages in editing mode; encoding issues. Overlapping text and bar in some pages (prefs)
  • 6.0 : add undesirable blank lines, crashes unexpectedly
• iCab
  • Side toolbar appears in wrong location (below any main text).

UNIX/Linux Browsers Most require X-windows. Platform limitations as noted.

• Arena
  • Claims HTML-3 compatability
• Chimera
  • No problems reported.
• CLRMosaic
  • No problems reported.
• HotJava
  • Solaris only.
• Konqueror
  • Problems with tables on pages when sidebar is activated. Left-aligned tables get overwritten by the sidebar.
  • Working on two Wikipedias may result in being logged out of one or both of them.
• Links
  • Text only, but formats well.
  • Login is broken. (Try to check referrer sending and cookie handling. If everything fails try to use eLinks, and check the same settings.)
• Lynx
  • Text only.
  • Logs out after some time. Problems with encodings.
• Netscape
  • No problems reported.
• X-Mosaic
  • No problems reported.
• TKWWW
  • Built-in editor
• ViolaWWW
  • No problems reported.
• Webspace
  • SGI Irix only
• Webview
  • No problems reported.

Browser add-ons & proxies: ad-busters etc

• WebWasher
  • On default settings, disallows access to articles beginning with the word "ad" (ad hoc, ad hominem etc)

See also Wikipedia:Browser page size limits