Is IBrowse Release 8a all it's cracked up to be?

Our recent Battle of the Browsers compared the latest and greatest browsers for the Amiga platform. Just recently IBrowse R8a was released, and changed everything. For those of you who have never used IBrowse before, I'll give you a description.

IBrowse has the best HTML3.2 support out of all of the Amiga browsers, it will display everything from coloured fonts, sized fonts, and tables (see html test page). And now IBrowse will even do 89a GIF Animations, which is something amazing to see on the Amiga platform. Although I am not sure (as the makers of IBrowse never sent me a full copy), I have been told that the final commercial version of IBrowse will support gopher, FTP, news, mail, and telnet (these have all been disabled in the demo version). Which means that IBrowse is so complete that it can even give Netscape or Mircosoft Explorer a run for their money. There's not much else to say about what HTML commands IBrowse does, it simply does them all (except frames). It is the most advanced browser I've seen for the Amiga yet.

IBrowse will also let you drag n' drop the icon bar to change it's position on screen (something even Netscape or Explorer won't do), you can also drag n' drop the status bar, or the animation, giving you a wide range of configurability.





It of course has the standard options,such as changing fonts, and the ability to change the 'fast link' buttons. And it's 'external viewer' configuration panel is a bit more advanced than Voyagers, or AWeb's, it looks most similar to Netscape's.

Also, because IBrowse uses it's own image decoding library it supports progressive gifs (when loading a picture, instead of showing a blank box it displays how much has loaded), no other Amiga browser currently supports this. You can also turn off the image decoding library and just use datatypes if you wish. If you click the right mouse button when over an image you get a pull down menu with such options as 'Save/Download Image to Disk' or 'View Image Seperatley', it's nothing amazing but it does come in handy now and then. They've even thrown in a Cache browser now (very similar to Voyagers)

IBrowse is simply the best browser there is for the Amiga platform at the moment. It looks great, it's extremely user friendly, and supports almost all the HTML3.2 commands. It's still slow on an A1200 with 2 megs of RAM, but it's slickness and performance well makes up for that.

The speed improved a bit since R7 but it's not really noticeable. When you encounter background colors it seems to take forever to display

Graphics Display: 97%

It does GIF anims and progressive GIFs, in 16,000,000 colours if you have GFX card. Enough said?

HTML3.2 Support: 98%

Until Netscape adds some more commands to the HTML standard, IBrowse has em all covered (except frames).

Features: 96%

IBrowse is simply dripping with extra goodies every where, if the commercial version really does news, mail, gopher, etc. There's not much more you can add

Overall: 94%

Just download it already, okay?