Contrary to popular belief, when it comes to web browsers there are alternatives to Microsoft's ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape Navigator.
The most popular of the alternatives, Mozilla, Opera and OmniWeb, have been steadily gaining a foothold, albeit a small one compared to IE's near monopoly of the market.
As web browsers go, Mozilla (which is free and open source)
is up there with the best of them but it has been criticised for being slow and eating up precious disc space with features the vast majority of us would never use. With these criticisms in mind, yet another web browser is being designed, an offshoot of Mozilla called Phoenix.
Phoenix has been designed as a small, fast web browser stripped bare of other features -
it doesn't handle email, newsgroups or chat, just the web. Like Mozilla, Phoenix is being built entirely by volunteers and enthusiasts. It has reached version 0.4 and, although it is not finished, expectations are high for the final product.
Unlike other browsers, Phoenix is cross-platform. The same downloadable file is designed to run on various computer systems, including Windows and Linux. Mac users have not been catered for because there is already a separate Mozilla-based Mac browser, Chimera, for them.
Phoenix is a 7Mb download, which shouldn't take too long, even using a old-fashioned modem, and installation is a breeze. Once it's up and running, you should find the fetching and rendering of web pages is fast and reliable, although, as with most early versions of software, it can crash more often than you would like.
Phoenix is nowhere near being a complete replacement for your default web browser just yet but progress on it has been swift and impressive. If you've been looking for a smaller, leaner web browser, you should certainly watch out for future developments.
Things are complicated by online banks, retailers and utilities making life difficult for alternative browsers. Many of these sites are IE or Netscape only and, although Opera and Mozilla use what is called "user agent spoofing" to impersonate the big two, sometimes this just isn't enough.
There's a list of browser baddies available on The Register's site, which is worth scanning before you take the dive into the alternatives. But free software abounds and the non-Explorer options are worth exploring or at least browsing.
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