Dan's Web Tips:

"Brand-X" Browsers -- Alphabetical List: H-N

HandWeb

HandWeb is a browser for the PalmPilot series of handheld computers. It can be used in text-only or graphical mode, but the display is heavily limited by the small size of these units.

I don't know if it's available any more; the site I used to link to has turned into one of those sucky pseudo-portals that sprout up like mushrooms at the URLs of no-longer-active sites (and common misspellings of others' URLs).

Harmony

Harmony is a browser for the Hyper-G hypermedia system, which is an attempt to expand on the Web protocols to create a richer structure.

More info is at these sites:
http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/doc/hyper-g-abs.html http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/Electronic/documnts/demos/ka_bdy.htm

HighWire

HighWire is a browser for the Atari computer series, designed to work under both MiNT and MagiC, supporting both STiK and MiNTnet API. (That's what it says in its Web site; I'm not familiar enough with Atari computers to know what any of that means.)

See its official Web site:
http://highwire.atari-users.net/

Hiptop

The Hiptop is a handheld wireless unit that supports Web browsing and e-mail as well as serving as a cellular phone. I'm not sure what browser engine it uses (is it adapted from something else or completely original to it?), but it's a fully graphical browser. Some Web developer comments indicate that it's got some glitches in its handling of stylesheets. Its user agent string mentions AvantGo, but it seems to work differently from that... so is it really adapted from the AvantGo browser engine, or is it just faking it as yet another attempt to fool browser sniffers?

More info (unfortunately mostly marketing crud rather than solid specs) is at:
http://www.danger.com/

Home Page Reader

This talking Web browser, designed for the blind and visually impaired, was released by IBM in both English and Japanese versions. It was a commercial product, priced at $149, but there was a free evaluation version available for download. Actually, it's not quite a stand-alone browser itself; for the early versions, you needed to have Netscape, while for newer ones it uses MSIE. It apparently uses the external browser to retrieve the pages, though Home Page Reader does its own audio rendering from the HTML logic rather than simply reading off the screen displayed by the other browser. An effect of this is that Home Page Reader will show up in webmasters' logs as Netscape (for old versions) or MSIE (for new ones) when tallying browser statistics, making it impossible to gauge the amount of use of this product. I don't know why IBM couldn't either invent or license a page-retrieval engine of their own (perhaps built out of the open-source Mozilla code) in order to make their product fully stand-alone, save their blind users the hassle of installing a visual browser, and be able to use a user-agent identifier of IBM's own devising to show up in webmaster statistics.

It is now discontinued. Window-Eyes is an alternative (apparently the recommended one). Some other accessibility resources: [1], [2], [3]

HotJava

This browser was originally created by Sun to demonstrate what Java applets can do in Web sites, before the major browsers added Java functionality. They've continued to develop and improve it, and it now works better than the rather buggy early versions did. While there's no real reason to prefer it as a consumer browser, Sun's main thrust is to promote a "component" version of HotJava to license to developers wishing to embed Web browser functionality into their products. If this catches on, it could result in browsers descended from HotJava being in wide use, making it important for Web developers to check the compatibility of their sites with this browser. One product using such an embedded HotJava browser is HyperDAAC, which uses it as its documentation and help reader.

An interesting note is that, while HotJava obviously supports Java (this was the main purpose for which the browser was created), early versions did not support JavaScript, which is a totally different language. The large number of people who fail to understand the distinction between these two languages were likely to be confused by the fact that HotJava did not work correctly in sites that depend on JavaScript. In some cases, Java-based sites use JavaScript commands to launch the Java applets, which would make these fail as well, to the consternation of users who say "I thought this browser was made to run Java!" However, with version 3.0, JavaScript support was added to HotJava, so this problem no longer exists.

The French telecommunications company Alcatel has announced a line of phones with built in Web browsers, called WebTouch, which use HotJava as their browser under a Java-based operating system.

You can obtain HotJava at:
http://java.sun.com/products/hotjava/
and the developer component version at:
http://java.sun.com/products/hotjava/bean/

IBM Web Browser

IBM called their own browser for the OS/2 system "IBM Web Browser"... real original name!

I-Browse

I-Browse is a browser for the Amiga platform. Its homepage at omnipresence.com didn't seem to be functional when I tried it.

You can download it at: http://browsers.evolt.org/index.cfm/dir/ibrowse/amiga/
Some plug-ins for it are available at: http://www.ziplink.net/~wingell/ibrowse/

iCab

iCab is a German browser for the Mac. It's got a pretty good "fan following" among some Mac users. It is apparently based on the CAB browser for the Atari.

Obtain it at: http://www.icab.de/

ICEbrowser

ICEbrowser is a browser implemented entirely in Java. Unfortunately, it has some trouble rendering its maker's own site; that site contains .png graphics and Unicode numeric references to curly-quote characters, neither of which seemed to work in ICEbrowser. (However, the publisher explained that the .png nonsupport was due to an outdated Java virtual machine I was using; if I updated Java, it would work.) Also, its default user-agent string mimics MSIE completely (unlike Opera, which at least includes "Opera" in it after the spoofing stuff), causing it to fly completely below the radar of web statistics complilers, and thus not doing anything to dispel the attitude "Everybody uses MSIE so there's no point in wasting time developing sites to work in anything else." You can, however, use a configuration setting to change to a more honest user agent string.

The intended use of ICEbrowser is to be licensed by makers of products needing an embedded browser.

Obtain a trial version at: http://www.icesoft.com/

Iceweasel

Iceweasel is the browser adapted from Firefox for use as part of the Debian distribution of Linux. The name was adopted for Debian's "forked" version after a clash with Mozilla over their trademark usage guidelines for the Firefox name, which clashed with Debian's policies and free licenses. Similarly, their SeaMonkey adaptation was called Iceape.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded_by_the_Debian_project

iComm

iComm is a graphical browser that works through a plain UNIX shell account, without requiring PPP or SLIP connections like other browsers. It runs on a Windows system, and connects by dialup to a UNIX shell, where it retrieves pages via Lynx (a text-mode browser), including downloading the graphics so it can display the pages in their graphical form. Browsers like iComm and SlipKnot served a useful function in the early days of the Web when many people had shell access but no PPP or SLIP connections. These days, many more people have PPP connections than even know what a shell account is, so iComm's era of usefulness has passed. As far as I know, it hasn't been updated since 1997.

Read about it and obtain it from:
http://www.talentcom.com/icomm/

IndyWiki

With the slogan "Visually browsing Wikipedia!", IndyWiki gives a specialized interface into the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and since it has no address bar to type in any other URLs, it doesn't even let you use it to browse anything else. Its Wikipedia presentation is a little odd, with text, images, and links separated out into different panels of the window instead of being presented in context as they actually occur in the article.

Read about it and obtain it from:
http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/

Interarchy

Interarchy, formerly Anarchie, is a file transfer utility for MacOS that began life as a combined FTP and Archie program, letting the user both search for files and download/upload them. It evolved into a file and site maintenance program that supports a number of protocols including FTP and HTTP. Hence, it is capable of retrieving Web documents, though it's not really intended as a browser for rendering and viewing them. It does have the interesting capability of retrieving a Web page and showing you all the links in it (and nothing else), so you can pick one and go on to the next page and do the same -- seeing none of the actual content, but all of the connections between it. This is an interesting alternative way of seeing the Web.

Read about it at:
http://www.interarchy.com/

i-opener

i-opener is a self-contained Internet appliance to access the Web without any installation of hardware or software required. It has its own built-in browser.

Read about it at: http://www.netpliance.com/

iPhone

iPhone, from InfoGear, was a (non-portable landline) telephone with a built-in screen and keyboard so you could use it to connect to the Internet -- not to be confused with the Apple iPhone which came much later. It's got its own browser built in which claims to support HTML 3.2 with frames. (However, frames weren't actually a part of the HTML 3.2 specs!) Incidentally, isn't it about time some of these Internet appliances tried to support HTML 4.0 instead of 3.2 so they won't be several years behind the times? Anyway, I'm not sure what the market is for such devices; at its $399 price, you can buy lots of brands of cheap PCs that can also access the Internet along with other functions, and are more upgradeable.

Anyway, you can read about this iPhone at:
http://www.streettech.com/archives_gadget/iPhone.html

Iron

Iron (also known as "SRWare Iron") is a third-party adaptation of the Google Chrome browser with some of the "features" which are regarded by critics as privacy-violating taken out.

Read about it and download it at: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

KeyWeb

KeyWeb is the browser for the BrailleNote computer, which is apparently a portable computer intended to be used by blind people... or a "portable notetaker" as it's referred to at some points in the manufacturer's site. Unfortunately, the site isn't all that clear about exactly what their product is, how it works, what operating system it runs, or any other "tech specs". You can fill out a form to request an in-home demonstration by one of their salespeople; that seems to be the only way to get to see (or experience with other senses) what these products really are.

I have a report from a user that this in fact runs under Windows CE, and KeyWeb is actually just an accessible version of MSIE. So it's not a true alternative browser, though it's an alternative interface into the browsing experience.

Sketchy information on the KeyWeb browser is at:
http://www.pulsedata.com/handlers/display.cfm/4,420,18,24,html

KFM

KDE (The K Desktop Environment) is a freeware, open-source Unix graphical desktop environment. It came originally with the KFM graphical browser, but Konqueror is the new successor.

Read about it and download it at:
http://www.kde.org/

Klondike

Klondike is a solitaire card game... No, that's the wrong Klondike. Actually, this Klondike is a WML browser (to browse pages designed for cell phones), but designed with a user interface resembling normal Web browsers, rather than simulating that of a cell phone.

Obtain it at:
http://www.apachesoftware.com/Browser.html

K-Meleon

K-Meleon is a Mozilla-based browser for Windows that aims to be faster and leaner than other browsers (including "normal" Mozilla builds) by Keeping it Simple, Stupid... it avoids the bloat by not adding features beyond the minimal needed for browser functionality.

Read about it at:
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Konqueror

Konqueror is the new browser for the KDE Unix graphical desktop environment.

Read about it and download it at:
http://www.konqueror.org/

KioskBrowser

KioskBrowser is a browser intended for use in kiosks, which runs under the KDE Unix graphical environment (where projects for it do tend to start with the letter "K"). It is an open-source project which can be found at Sourceforge.

Read about it and download it at:
http://kioskbrowser.sourceforge.net/

Kirix Strata

Kirix Strata is a Mozilla/Gecko-based browser that includes built-in spreadsheet-like support for viewing comma-separated data.

Read about it and download it at:
http://www.kirix.com/

LedSign

LedSign isn't really a browser, but it's a user agent program that takes news items from the Web and puts them up on a BetaBrite LED sign (which can be purchased at Sam's Club).

Find it at:
http://www.remote-control.net/software/ledsign/

L-H HTML Viewer

L-H HTML Viewer is an offline viewer of HTML for PC/MS-DOS. It's not really a browser since it doesn't connect directly to the Internet, but it does let you view HTML files if you obtain them somehow. (The download site for it that I used to link to doesn't seem to be up any more.)

Liberate Technologies

Liberate Technologies develops browsers for such things as TV set-top boxes. I believe they're the successor to Navio, a Netscape offshoot that was developing such things, since the Navio site redirects to theirs. I don't know if Netscape still owns any part of it after the various mergers, acquisitions, and deals that have gone on since it started.

See their site at:
http://www.liberate.com/

Links

Links is a text-mode browser for Unix and OS/2. Its name is an obvious takeoff on Lynx, and it's rather similar in concept, except that it attempts to lay out tables. A "fork" of Links produced the ELinks browser.

Obtain it at:
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/

LodgeNet Internet

LodgeNet is a company that is setting up hotels with in-room Internet service via TV sets. I don't know the details of how their browser works, but it's likely to be similar to WebTV, since it shares the same inherent limitations of the TV as an Internet access device, including the lower-resolution screen and clumsy input devices. Their site says their browser "supports standard HTML," but will it support all the nonstandard HTML that some authors are using?

At one point, their page said they're "powered by Sun Microsystems," so perhaps they've licensed the HotJava browser technology mentioned above.

I'm not sure how many actual hotels are using this service yet. I haven't encountered one yet. A hotel I stayed at recently had a LodgeNet box on the in-room TV, but it was used only for selecting pay-per-view movies, videogames, and hotel bill review, not Internet access.

Read about it at:
http://www.lodgenet.com/

Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes is a multi-function program that includes a Web browser as one of its components. (You can reconfigure it, however, to use an external browser instead.) When I last checked their site, a beta version was available for download.

The Lotus Notes site is at:
http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/tabs/lotusnotes

Lynx

The text-mode browser Lynx has been around longer than either of the current popular graphical browsers. In fact, its original creators hadn't even heard of the Web when they began developing it; it was designed as a campus information system for the University of Kansas, and originally used systems of hypertext markup and document addressing of the creators' own devising. But when they found out about the World Wide Web project, still in its infancy, they saw the benefit of using consistent standards, and modified their browser to support HTTP, HTML, URLs, and other elements of the Web.

The fact that Lynx is so old and that it's entirely in text mode make most people who have heard of it at all think it's an archaic, primitive browser unworthy of any sort of attention or consideration. However, it still has its fans, and is still being actively developed and refined, with current versions even supporting frames to a fashion (by providing links to each frame), and some rudimentary support for tables (by adding spaces between columns and line breaks between rows, but not attempting to actually lay out the table; this is a subject of great debate between those who want more table support for the purpose of showing tabular data, and those who think it will only cause worse rendering of pages that use tables for graphical layout which ought to be ignored by a text browser).

Text browsers like Lynx share with audio browsers like pwWebSpeak the difficulty of coping with highly-graphical sites not designed with accessibility in mind, but they do decently well in presenting the text content of well-designed sites that use proper ALT text for whatever images they do have. Some users prefer it as a way of quickly getting past the "eye-candy" and into the actual content of sites. And it's still the only practical means of accessing the Web if you're stuck on a text-only Unix shell account, which was a common situation just a couple of years ago, and might still be the case in remote parts of the world with limited bandwidth and primitive computer hardware.

For most users, a graphical browser is the preferred choice over a text browser. But if you're a Web developer, it's a good idea to take an occasional look at your sites in Lynx, to get an idea not only of what text-mode and speech-browser users will experience, but also what search engine indexers will probably see of your site (like Lynx, they ignore graphics, applets, and other non-text content).

Supposedly, somebody was arrested in early 2005 for using Lynx to access a tsunami donation site; apparently, the stupid and ignorant system administrators at British Telecom mistook it for a hacking attempt.

Versions of Lynx can be downloaded free for various Unix versions, as well as for DOS and Windows 95, at:
http://lynx.browser.org/
Some historical info about the early Lynx is at:
http://www.ku.edu/~grobe/early-lynx.html

MacWeb

MacWeb is a browser for the Macintosh by TradeWave Corp, which no longer supports it.

Download links (FTP):
68k version: ftp://homer.cc.utexas.edu/microlib/mac/internet/world_wide_web/browsers/macweb-111E-68x.hqx
PowerPC version: ftp://homer.cc.utexas.edu/microlib/mac/internet/world_wide_web/browsers/macweb-111E-ppc.hqx

Maelstrom

Project Maelstrom has developed a browser to natively browse the high-privacy BitTorrent sites (distributed through an anonymous, encrypted network via an ever changing array of peer-to-peer nodes) as well as normal websites. It seems to be an adapted version of Chrome.

Info and download:
http://project-maelstrom.bittorrent.com/

ManyOne

Launched with a great deal of hype about how it's a fantastic new way to access the Internet (its marketing sounds like something out of the long-gone dot-com-hysteria era), ManyOne is a Mozilla-based program that combines Web browsing with a Flash-animation-based "3D experience".

Read about it and download it at:
http://www.manyone.net/homesite/

Mathbrowser

Mathbrowser is designed to browse both normal HTML documents and documents in some specialized formats designed to represent mathematical expressions. Newer versions are simply "MSIE skins" with no independent HTML rendering engine, but older versions (the only ones that work in Windows 3.1) had their own (primitive) HTML engine.

The old Mathbrowser apparently sends no "user agent string," or a completely empty string, so it'll come up empty to browser detectors or sites tracking browser statistics.

Mathbrowser seems to be discontinued; its manufacturer's site doesn't seem to mention it any more.

You used to be able to read about it and download it at:
http://www.mathsoft.com/

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Might as well add this now to complete the browser list... Formerly, with this being designated as a "Brand X Browser List", it omitted MSIE because it wasn't an "alternative" browser to the majority one. Even earlier, Netscape was omitted as well, since NS and MSIE were the "big two" that everybody seemed to think were the only browsers (they encompass both types of music, country and western!), but then Netscape faded out so I added it as an "alternative" too, and now MSIE is also (while still popular) down in the minority-browsers range; actually, everybody is, since no single browser has a majority of usage. So it's in the list now too.

MidasWWW

MidasWWW was an early Web browser for Unix and VMS systems. It was developed by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Read info about it at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MidasWWW

Mighty

Mighty was a cloud-based browser from the early 2020s that ran on a remote system (the remote-system browser was actually Google Chrome) that end users used an app to access. It ran slightly faster than normal browsers on modern, script-heavy sites that benefited from having their scripts run on faster machines than the typical user's device, but didn't provide enough benefit for most users to find it worth the monthly subscription fee, so it soon was discontinued and its website now redirects to the site for an AI-powered image editor being promoted by the developers.

Article about it:
https://liliputing.com/not-so-mighty-after-all-web-browser-in-the-cloud-business-winds-down/
Website (now redirects to graphic editor):
https://www.mightyapp.com/

Minimo

Minimo is a Mozilla-based open-source project aiming at creating a stripped-down browser for use on systems with limited resources. The current focus is systems with 32-64 MB of RAM (that's limited resources? When I was younger, I used systems with 4-16 KB of RAM... and I walked 10 miles through 10 feet of snow, uphill both ways, to get to the computer store to buy them...)

The official project page is at:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

MMM

MMM is a browser for the X11 graphical environment under Unix.

Read about it at:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~rouaix/mmm/

Mnemonic

Mnemonic is a project to build a free, extensible browser. Presently, they're only working in Unix platforms.

Their site is at:
http://www.mnemonic.org/

Mosaic

Mosaic was a pioneering browser, the one which first introduced inline images, bringing about the era of the graphical Web, and rapidly becoming the most popular browser of its era. Some of the creators of the original Mosaic went on to become the founders of Netscape, which rapidly took over Mosaic's position as the top browser. After they left, a group at the University of Illinois (where Mosaic was first created) continued to release new versions for a while, but eventually gave up because the Web world had passed them by. Version 3.0 is still available from their site, and supports some standards-compliant features, like use of LINK tags to provide a site-specific navigation bar, which the "mainstream" browsers have yet to do. Despite this, Mosaic is of mostly historical interest due to the lack of continuing development.

You can obtain Mosaic for Windows at:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/mosaic-w/

Mozilla

The Mozilla project was launched by Netscape in 1998 when they released the unfinished source code to what was at the time going to be their 5.0 browser as open source. A development group, quasi-independent from Netscape (though including a number of Netscape employees in its early years) proceeded from there to develop what finally, over the course of several years, turned into a really good browser, with the early rough edges almost all smoothed over. A short way into the project, they decided to scrap the whole rendering engine (the core part of a browser, which interprets and displays HTML) and create a new one, called Gecko, which is now used in Mozilla-based browsers (including the popular Firefox). Mozilla builds were not official Netscape releases (the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit organization completely separate from Netscape / AOL / whoever-owns-any-piece-of-what-used-to-be-Netscape), but their code base did ultimately form the basis of Netscape 6.0+ releases while Netscape was still actually releasing browsers. If you downloaded a Mozilla release (Mozilla Suite, Firefox, etc.) instead of Netscape 6.x / 7.x / 8.x, you got a similar program, without the Netscape/AOL marketing junk, and sometimes with newly-implemented features that haven't found their way into the Netscape releases yet. However, there were sometimes also newly-emerged bugs as well; you had to be somewhat adventurous to try it in the early days, willing to put up with the "minimize" button not minimizing or other oddball glitches, but these have dramatically reduced in frequency and severity over time. In the years since, various divergent browsers have been spawned from this open-source project; some, like Firefox are being produced by groups under the umbrella of the Mozilla project itself, while others such as DocZilla are being created by different people, companies, and organizations using the Mozilla sources in conjunction with other technologies. Some of these projects aim to produce commercial products, while others are just "hobbyist" groups of enthusiasts wishing to create a program to their own liking.

One neat feature in the Mozilla suite (and unfortunately not in Firefox) is support for the LINK element, something that's been in HTML for years but has only been supported by relatively obscure browsers. Now you can get a useful navigation menu bar for sites that have appropriate code. You need to go into the View menu to enable it, though, since this feature is disabled by default. Another feature is the use of icons next to the URL bar while browsing sites that have them linked using "shortcut icon" link tags. (MSIE only uses such icons when you bookmark a site.) But my favorite feature is the ability to disable unrequested popups; this makes browsing much more pleasant. Long ago I started using Mozilla as my normal browser, since it had reached a point of stability where it's usable, and was showing rapid improvement. I did eventually switch to Firefox instead of the Mozilla Suite, though.

In 2003, the Mozilla project announced a new roadmap for future development (past the current version 1.3) which called for the spun-off Firebird (formerly Phoenix, now Firefox) browser and Thunderbird mail/news client to be the primary focus of future development. At one point, it was thought that they would eventually become the basis of a new, sleeker, cleaner, Mozilla suite. This didn't happen, but as separate programs, Firefox and Thunderbird have become the focus of most of the attention of both the public and developers these days. Finally, in 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced that they would no longer produce any official releases of the suite, but they encouraged an independent project to form to continue its development; at this point, that has begun under the suite's original code name, SeaMonkey.

You can read more about Mozilla and download source code and compiled versions at the official Mozilla site, http://www.mozilla.org/, and also the unofficial Mozilla fanzine, http://www.mozillazine.org/. There's also an unofficial FAQ.

Mozilla Suite Transition Plan:
http://www.mozilla.org/seamonkey-transition.html

MSN TV

MSN TV is what WebTV is now called, though its site is still at webtv.net.

MultiWeb

MultiWeb is a combined graphical and speaking browser, intended for the visually handicapped. If you've got some sight, you can still look at the pictures (and there's a large-print option for viewing the text), but it doubles as an audio browser for the blind. It was developed at a college in Australia, under a government grant, and is free. However, its site isn't up at the address I used to link to, so I'm not sure if it's available any more.

The school's site is at:
http://www.deakin.edu.au/infosys/

NetBox

NetBox is a TV set-top box for Web browsing that's being marketed in Europe.

Read about it at:
http://www.netgem.com/english/

Netfront

Netfront, from Access Corp. in Japan, is a browser for PalmOS devices. It was used in the Sony Clie line, and has been patched for OS5 by a programmer named Dmitry Grinberg.

Netomat

Netomat is one of several "artsy" things (WebStalker is another) that take a totally alternative approach to viewing Internet content (not really "browsing"). In this case, Netomat will grab various text and graphics related to a query from Web sites and bounce it around the screen randomly, screen-saver-style.

Read about it and obtain it at:
http://www.netomat.net/

NetPositive

NetPositive is the browser that comes with the BeOS operating system. It has partial JavaScript support, but no Java.

A demo CD of BeOS can be obtained at:
http://www.bedepot.com/
More BeOS info is at:
http://beos.about.com/compute/beos/
A BeOS FAQ is at:
http://www.other-space.com/be/faq.html

Netscape

Formerly one of the "Big Two" popular browsers, and even earlier the absolute dominant browser, Netscape is the case in point for how rapidly browsers can rise and fall. Netscape took over rapidly from Mosaic as the most popular browser in 1995 (created by the people who created Mosaic), and was rapidly undercut in recent years by Microsoft Internet Explorer. In the meantime, Netscape was bought out by AOL, though that ubiquitous service still uses MSIE as its own browser. Netscape 4.x, the last version using the old (pre-open-source) rendering engine, has a dwindling user base and is considered highly archaic by many Web developers. Netscape 6.x (they skipped 5.x for marketing reasons) was based on the entirely new Mozilla Gecko rendering engine. Netscape 7.x was based on a newer and more stable Mozilla version, and was basically the Mozilla suite with some marketing junk added. Netscape 8.x is based on Firefox, but it also, rather bizarrely, uses the MSIE (Trident) rendering engine, switching between Gecko and Trident based on how "trusted" a site is (untrusted sites use Gecko because it's more secure, while trusted sites use Trident because it's more likely to be compatible with present-day sites; this isn't very satisfactory to Gecko fans who argue that its higher W3C standards compliance should make it the preferred rendering engine for all uses). Perhaps because of this use of the Windows-specific MSIE embedding, Netscape 8.x is available only for the Windows platform, unlike earlier Netscape versions that were released for other operating systems such as MacOS and Linux. A Mozilla-based browser was eventually embedded in the CompuServe software, but AOL {gag, vomit, retch} never had the guts to switch despite their ownership of Netscape. If AOL had made this their browser, that would have caused a huge overnight increase in Netscape / Mozilla usage back in the days when lots of people still used that service.

You used to be able to read about it and download it at netscape.com, but there's no obvious sign of browsers there any more among all the portal crud they've encrusted their site with. In 2003, Netscape was pretty much killed off as a browser maker, but Mozilla lives on. Apparently, AOL sold off the remaining remnants of Netscape other than the name itself to Microsoft in 2012, consisting primarily of a bunch of patents they might be able to use to sue everybody else who makes browsers... ugh.

An early review of it, from 1994, is at:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/601/601sneak1.html

NetShark

NetShark is a browser for the Macintosh by InterCon Systems Corporation. I don't know any more about it, and don't have a URL to obtain it.

Net-Tamer

Net-Tamer is a shareware program suite to do PPP-based Internet activity under MS/PC-DOS. It's mostly in text mode, but has a pseudo-graphical browser. When I tried it, most pages came up as totally blank screens (some were blank with a few images in the middle), but perhaps I messed up some configuration.

Read about it and download it at:
http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html

Newsie

Newsie is a news reader for Atari ST computers, but it also has a text-mode Web browser. The download site for it that I used to link to has gone away, so I don't know whether it's still available.

Nexus

What Tim Berners-Lee renamed his original WorldWideWeb browser, to distinguish it from the Web itself.

Nokia WAP Toolkit

The Nokia WAP Toolkit is a Windows-based simulation of a WAP-based Internet-enabled cell phone. It can be used to browse WML sites, and is intended for the use of developers interested in providing content for such devices. It comes with documentation (in PDF format) of WML and WMLScript, and can be obtained free by registering on an online form in Nokia's Developer Forum site:
http://www.forum.nokia.com/

Nokia 9000

The Nokia 9000 series of cellular phones fold out into a terminal which can be used for wireless Internet access. Its built-in browser (apparently one created specifically for this application, not a "ported" version of another browser) is graphical, but with many limitations based on the screen, bandwidth, and input differences from full-sized computers. Many tags and attributes are not supported. Internet content is retrieved using the WAP protocol, but the browser supports real HTML, not WML. Some guidelines on site authoring for compatibility with the Nokia 9000 series are included on their Web site. (However, they're mostly provided as PDF documents, which, as far as I know, aren't accessible on a Nokia 9000!)

Read about it at:
http://www.nokia9000.com/
A "Web-page compatibility self-test" (not very good; it does a very simplistic pattern-matching of your page, finding apparent "unsupported tags" even as substrings of parts of the DOCTYPE declaration) is at:
http://www.nokia9000.com/marketing/web-test.html
Nokia 9290, the latest in this series:
http://www.nokia.com/phones/9290/

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