MacWeb

MacWeb is a graphical browser designed for the Macintosh computer. While it lacks some of the fancy features of the favored Macintosh browser, Netscape, it requires far less memory to operate.

URLs:

title

MacWeb home page

Features of EiNet MacWeb

A listing of MacWeb's features

MacWeb help

This page was under construction at the time of this writing

Print Resources:

• HTML Sourcebook. Ian S. Graham. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York. 1995. (ISBN 0 471-11849-4)
  Chapter 7 provides an overview of browsers and helper applications for PCs, Macintoshes, and UNIX computers

W3E References:

Netscape

Mosaic

Detail:

The Small Dynamo

MacWeb has earned the respect of many as a small, but highly useful browser. While the industry giants require over 1,000K to run (Netscape can run on 1,784K but prefers more, and Mosaic requires a whopping 2,700K of memory), MacWeb runs with a mere 750K. One would expect that such a small program would be practically featureless, but Macweb has many advantages over NSCA Mosaic for the Macintosh, and contains one feature so innovative that it was copied by Netscape.

Notable MacWeb Features

• MacWeb provides users with the ability to view a history of visited sites by holding down either the forward or back button.
• Users can click and hold down the mouse over a link to view a pop-up menu that offers choices for retrieving it , viewing information about the link, copying the URL, saving it to a hotlist, or saving it to disk. This feature was copied by Netscape.
• MacWeb quickly redraws previously loaded pages. It also starts and stops quickly.

However, MacWeb does not allow the user to copy text from the main window. This inhibits users from copying from a page and pasting information into another document.

Why Netscape is Still the Favorite

Despite the small size and many features of MacWeb, Netscape for the Macintosh continues to be the most popular browser for the Macintosh system. In order to gain ground on Netscape, MacWeb will have to improve in the following ways:

• It will have to match Netscape's ability to open multiple connections to a server; a feature which makes Netscape run faster than MacWeb.
• and it will have to improve its method of storing bookmarks. Netscape has a hierarchical system of storing bookmarks, which is an advantage to the methods used by all other browsers, including Netscape.

Despite these drawbacks, MacWeb's small size makes it the only option for a user whose Macintosh does not have enough memory to run one of the larger browsers. These users should not feel left out of the information highway, as MacWeb does a pretty good job for such a small product.