Businesses are beginning to realize the importance of the information on the World Wide Web. While there is much valuable information on the web, there is a significantly larger amount of infomation that is not usable. It is thus necessary that professionals have access to a tool that will make their time spent searching the web as efficient as possible. Therefore, it is the goal of this document to outline four of the most common choices available, and evaluate their suitability for the job.
Before graphical interfaces became commonplace, it was necessary to employ a text-based browser that could be run on any standard terminal. Lynx saw its most widespread use in those days, but still has many valuable features for users. The first widely available graphical browser was Mosaic, which was developed by the National Center for Supercomputer Application. Mosaic was quickly followed by Netscape which has become the unofficial standard for web browsing. Incorporating mail, news, and a HTML browser has enabled Netscape to control the lion's share of the market. A lesser-known application that runs on the NextStep platform is OmniWeb. What this application lacks in recognition, it makes up for in performance and ease of use. It has a quality user interface that makes using it simple and efficient.
In order to evaluate these choices, a series of tasks was designed to measure the applications' performance in day-to-day operations. These tasks were: Bookmarking, accessing URLs, stopping loading, saving documents, general navigation, and customizing environment. In each of these categories, each package was assigned a score between one and ten, ten being the best. After all of the tests were completed, these scores were combined with an overall impression score to give a final rating.