With the proliferation of information available on the World Wide Web, it has become crucial for business to be able to quickly navigate the internet and obtain useful information for daily operations. Given the tremendous profit potential available to the designers of the best web browser, the number of applications developed has been quite large.
The intention of this project is to evaluate web browsers on the basis of versatility and ease of use, with the intended audience being the average computer literate professional.
Four software packages were chosen to be evaluated. They were as follows: Lynx, a text based browser; Netscape, the most widely used graphical web browser; Mosaic, the original graphical web browser; and OmniWeb, they graphical for the NextStep platform.
The software packages were evaluated on how well suited they were to performing a series of standard tasks used while browsing the World Wide Web. These tasks included bookmarking, saving files, general navigation, interuption of loading, customizing of environment and accessing information. Based on their performance on these tasks each package was assingned a grade between one and ten, ten being best. At the end of all tasks scores were summarized and the packages were ranked.
It was discovered that OmniWeb was the highest ranking package due to its operating environment. Netscape placed a close second and was the premier Windows 3.1 package. Mosaic was found to be fairly awkward and an unworthy competitor for Netscape. Lynx, although efficient and easy to use, was innappropriate for the tasks considering the graphical nature of the web and relatively high data transfer rates.
While none of the packages is perfect, there are attributes in all of them that would contribute favourably to the ideal package. One can only expect that the software developers will compare themselves against competitors and strive to reach that product.