Those of us on the content side are getting antsy to start basing services
on forms and user authentication. Well, more than antsy. As a part of
this I've come up with a table of different browsers and their
capabilities in this respect. Within 6 months I hope this will be a moot
exercise, but for now we need it, particularly those of us who want to
support as many people and platforms as possible.
So, here's the information I've compiled so far regarding browsers and
their capabilities, and which revs of those browser had it solidly
implemented. If I don't know when certain features were implemented, I
simply say "yes" or "no". Please let me know if you can fill in some of
the gaps or have corrections - private email would probably be best, and I
can post the updated table if there's interest.
As an aside, I've been tracking browser usage on my site for a couple of
months now, and over the last week there's been a huge surge in the
number of accesses from clients that don't pass along their name, from
about 5% to 23% of all accesses, and looking at the log doesn't turn up
anything significant, other than most of them come from hosts without
real hostnames, just IP numbers. Hmm.
Browser Current rev. User Auth. Forms Support
X-Windows:
Chimera 1.60 1.60 1.30?
Emacs 2.1 yes yes
Midas ? ? ?
NCSA Mosaic 2.4 2.0 2.0
NetScape 0.6 0.4 0.4
Spyglass Mosaic 1.0 1.0 1.0
TkWWW 2.0 1.0? 1.0?
Viola ? ? ?
MS Windows:
Cello 0.9 ? ?
GWHIS (Quadralay) 1.0 1.0 1.0
NCSA Mosaic 2.0a7 2.0a5 2.0a5
NetScape 0.6 0.4 0.4
Spry's AIR_Mosaic 3.06 yes yes
Spyglass Mosaic 1.0 1.0 1.0
Macintosh
MacWeb 1.0a2 no 0.98a
MacWWW ? ? ?
NCSA Mosaic 2.0a8 2.0a5 2.0a6
NetScape 0.6 0.4 0.4
Spyglass Mosaic 1.0 1.0 1.0
NEXTSTEP:
CERN-NextStep-WWW.app 1.1 ? ?
OmniWeb 0.7.5 0.7.4 0.7.4
Misc:
CERN-LineMode 2.14 2.0 2.0
Delphi-HTML ? no no
Lynx 2.3 BETA 2.0 2.0
Mosaic for the Amiga 1.2 ? ?
Netcom's "NetCruiser" 1.10 BETA no no
There's a lot of other odds and ends in my browserlog, but they are
either robots or products under development. This is all I feel
concerned about.
Brian