Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Web Browsing

Web browsing on Mac OS X is as easy as launching Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which ships with Mac OS X. You can find it in /Applications, and the Dock displays its icon (a big, blue lowercase “e”) among its default icons for new users.

Alternative Browsers

Internet Explorer is a fine browser, but curious users may want to investigate some of the alternative browsers available for Mac OS X. They all serve the same basic function of letting you view HTML files on the World Wide Web, but each has its own style and set of unique, fine-tuned features.

iCab

This browser, available from http://www.icab.de, has a relatively small memory footprint and features built-in HTML validity checking and error-reporting, which can be useful for web designers. (It also may be the only currently popular browser that still offers new versions for ancient, pre-PowerPC Macintoshes running System 7!)

Mozilla, Chimera

The much-heralded Mozilla is an open source, cross-platform, and very feature-heavy web browser (as well as an email client and Usenet news reader) project originally launched by Netscape in 1998. It hit Version 1.0 in 2002; the latest Carbon version is available from its web site, http://www.mozilla.org.

The separate Chimera project (http://chimera.mozdev.org) is a true Cocoa port of Mozilla.

OmniWeb

The Omni Group’s shareware web browser, which concentrates on having a very streamlined, Cocoa-based user interface. This is available at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/ ...