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Wikipedia:Browser notes

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Beland (talk | contribs) at 09:00, 23 June 2005 ({{howto}}). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Browser notes is a Wikipedia page aimed at helping contributors and readers choose a browser. There is no perfect browser for viewing Wikipedia.

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. If you wish to report a bug to do with Wikipedia's interaction with a browser, see wikipedia:bug reports.

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

Browsers on Microsoft Windows

  • 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 language-specific charset instead of Latin1 plus (at times incorrect) numeric character references. For advice, see Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/South Korea
    • IE cannot handle numeric character references (NCRs) in UTF-8: if a page uses this encoding and NCRs the encoding must be set to User Defined. (This does not affect the English Wiki yet as it is using a legacy encoding.)
    • All versions of IE have problems with text sizes, but should work fine with the default skin. Textboxes may be too wide on other skins, or font sizes may be illegible.
    • Text search ignores edit window in unspecified IE version. Works in IE v6.0-SP1.
    • Setting a font size does not work for the wikitext area or the edit summary and go/search boxes, unless one uses a local Cascading Style Sheet containing
      textarea, input {font-size: 100%}
(or other percentages of choice).
  • IE doesn't override the display font, for passages of multilingual text or IPA used for pronunciation. WP Editors are using templates to work around this deficiency (see Template talk: Polytonic, Template talk:IPA).
  • Opera
    • Very old versions cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Browser page size limits.
    • v7.2 interprets ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252, which results in the superscript-2 character to be lost (Peru is particularly bad). This has been resolved in v7.5, and the problem does not occur at all in 7.1 and older.
    • Interprets Devanagiri (Indic) scripts incorrectly as far as the use of vowels are concerned. (up to v.8)
  • Netscape
  • Mozilla
    • Text search ignores edit window in Version 1.4
  • Mozilla Firefox, formerly known as Mozilla Firebird, formerly known as Phoenix
    • Text search ignores edit window in v0.8 - v1.0 (see bugzilla entry on this issue. Possible workaround is to activate the "highlight" function in the find bar.
    • In v0.8, existing wikilinks can be left red (looking like absent articles) after a right-button mouse click. In MediaWiki v1.3, the colour became orange.
  • K-Meleon
    • No problems reported as of ver. 0.7.1.
  • NCSA MOSAIC
    • latest version (3.0) can't even load wikimedia pages due to lack of support for the http 1.1 host header system.

Browsers on Macintosh Systems

Mac OS X

  • Internet Explorer 5.2.3
    • Some text is invisible, with no apparent pattern. The words disappear mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and reappear a few words or sentences later. This particular problem hasn't been seen on a non-Wiki site. The error has been seen with OS 10.3.5 - 10.3.7.
  • Netscape
    • Browser search ignores edit window
  • Opera 6
    • Internal buffer sometimes can't handle long pages, mangles them
    • Slow. No auto login between sessions.
  • Opera 7.5
    • No problems reported.
  • Safari
    • When navigating using the back and forward buttons and/or editing, the window's vertical scrollbar can sometimes "freeze"; that is it ceases to get visually updated properly: the bar and its attendant arrows still work, but the bar will pretty much continue to get displayed in one position despite the fact that the user is dragging it elsewhere. This is an intermittent problem. Observed with 1.2.4 on Mac OS X Panther 10.3.7 and several earlier versions.
      • Workaround: click the resize widget in the bottom-right corner of the window, and drag it a few pixels. This will redraw the scrollbar correctly.
  • 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
    • Sidebar displays after the end of the page content rather than at the top along the page. (but note that the current version available for iCab, generally has problems displaying web sites correctly so far.)
  • Shiira
    • No problems reported.

Mac OS 9 and earlier

  • Netscape
    • 7.x : no problem reported
    • 4.5 : overlapping text and quick bar under cologne blue settings, may add weird space in text; some encoding issues
  • Internet Explorer
    • 4.5 : logging off from one wiki to another. Some encoding issues
    • 5.5 : sometimes freeze the edit window
  • 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 Window System. Platform limitations as noted.

  • Arena
    • Claims HTML-3 compatibility
  • Chimera
    • No problems reported.
  • CLRMosaic
    • No problems reported.
  • Dillo
    • Very fast GUI browser
    • Formats quite nicely, but no CSS
    • Cookies are tricky, so logging in is tricky
  • ELinks
    • Text only, but renders tables and frames.
    • Support http authentification.
    • Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields.
  • Galeon
    • Left hand find bar overwrites text.
  • HotJava
    • Solaris only.
  • Konqueror
    • Problems with tables on pages when sidebar is activated. Left-aligned tables get overwritten by the sidebar. (before v3.3)
    • Working on two Wikipedias may result in being logged out of one or both of them.
    • CSS layout problems with floating images, particularly on narrower screens. For example, maps on Austria overlap rather than flowing around one another (v3.2-12).
  • 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.
    • Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields.
    • Forces wrapping of very long lines in a textarea, which is a problem in editing some articles.
    • Display options for non-ASCII characters affect editing. Be sure to set "character_set=ISO Latin 1" in your lynxrc, otherwise accented characters will be silently mangled during editing!
  • Mozilla 1.4+
    • No problems reported.
  • Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1+
    • No problems reported.
  • Netscape
    • Cookie support is difficult, so logging in can be tricky.
    • 4.x: Problems with <div> marked images; sometimes crashes when one writes a new article or heavily edits an existing one (users are advised to do any heavy edit-work in another application and then use cut-and-paste)
    • 6 and later: No problems reported.
  • Opera
    • No problems reported.
  • OmniWeb
    • 3.x for OPENSTEP: Ok, but sidebar displays after main page content.
  • X-Mosaic
    • No problems reported.
  • TKWWW
    • Built-in editor
  • ViolaWWW
    • No problems reported.
  • Webspace
    • SGI Irix only
  • Webview
    • No problems reported.

BeOS

  • NetPositive
    • Not all elements of the CSS recognized, though still fairly functional. NetPositive has issues with some HTML entities on repeated editing (replacing entities by the character glyph), so be careful.

PDA & cell phone browsers

  • Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick
    • Site renders fine in nostalgia skin.
    • Works better with sidebar off.
  • Palm OS 5.4.5/Blazer 4.0/PalmOne Treo 650
    • Site is unreadable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page_%28table_free%29). Prior to everything downloading (and thus, prior to final rendering) page displays as plain text with links and basic formatting (example). After final rendering, the page is squashed into a thin vertical strip a few characters wide (one and two). This effect occurs with either "wide page" or "optimized" views. Same effect with the main front page, the "table free pages", and all article pages.
    • If the page loading is stopped midway, the original "non-rendered" version remains and is fully functional and readable. Timing when to stop the load (after content loads, but before the styling loads) is very difficult.
    • A completely plain version (similar to the "pre-rendered" version above) would be very useful, as it would be much more friendly to small screen sizes and slow connections.

Browser add-ons & proxies

Ad-busters

  • Opera kiosk mode filtering
    • May block access to articles if they begin with blocked strings such as "ad"
  • Atguard, Norton Internet Security, WebWasher
    • On default settings, disallows access to articles beginning with the word "ad" (ad hoc, ad hominem etc)

Search Plugins

Plugins that can be used to search the Wikipedia easier.

  • Mozilla (all, including Firefox)
    1. Dictionary Search
      This plugin can be set up to search the Wikipedia as follows:
      1. Open "Tools->Options->Extensions"
      2. Click on "Dictionary Search", then the "Options..." button
      3. Choose one of the dictionary slots, and enter "Wikipedia page for $" (or something like that) as text, "W" as accesskey (it needs an accesskey), and "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$" as URL.
      4. Now you can highlight any word on a webpage, right-click and choose to go to the corresponding Wikipedia page.
    2. Mycroft Wikipedia Plugin
      Adds a Wikipedia in the language of your choice to the list of search engines on the Navigation bar.

Textarea tools

Built-in Tools

  • Lynx
    • Allows any text editor to be used once the option is set.
  • Konqueror
    • Internally highlights misspelled words in textareas.
  • Safari (for Mac OS X)
    • Underlines misspelled words in textareas if you check the Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type option. Control-click or right-click for a list of suggested corrections.
  • Omniweb (for Mac OS X)

Add-ons

  • Internet Explorer
    • IESpell adds spellchecking to Internet Explorer.
  • Opera
    • Supports the spelling checking on Windows and Linux if you install Aspell. Instructions are available from Opera.
  • Mozilla and Firefox
    • Wikipedia Extension
    • Adds a toolbar with various formatting functions and quicklinks to most Special: pages.
      • Not tested on Mac
      • Make sure you get the latest version, 0.6.0.7 as of this writing; download at update.mozilla.org is out-of-date and does not work on 1.0
    • SpellBound adds spellchecking to Firefox.(SpellBound supports international spelling dictionaries)
    • These tools add an option to the browser to use an external editor on a web page textarea.
    • Mozex
      • Doesn't support Mozilla on Mac
      • Doesn't support Firefox 1.0 as provided (see this for a workaround)
    • Electrix
      • Not currently maintained
  • Safari (Mac only browser)
    • UnicodeChecker allows in-place conversion of Unicode text to HTML entities and back. Requires Mac OS X Panther (10.3). Freeware.
      • Great for editing text in non-ISO-8859-1 character sets on the English-language Wikipedia (Cyrillic, etc).
      • Works as a system service from a menu (Safari→Services→Unicode→), or keyboard shortcut (command-shift-8).
    • CocoAspell adds international spelling dictionaries to the inline spell-checker. Freeware.
      • Based on UNIX Aspell.

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Browser_notes&oldid=15677754"