DIVE INTO SOFTWARE /
	alternative web browsers & tools for networking
	A number of years ago the infamous 'Browser War' made the internet world keep its breath. Two industry giants, an established one and a young challenger, were fighting for supremacy in the browser market. But strictly speaking there never has been a market for Web browsers because it has become customary to give them away for free. The assumption was that who had the biggest share of the user-base would also, in one way or the other, control the web (and maybe capitalize on that later). The 'Browser War' led to various aberrations from established internet standards because the manufacturers tried to win over users by adding new functions. It looked as if the web could drift apart into different sectors according to which browser people used. That was bad not only for designers who had to tweak their code until it gave reasonable results under different browsers but also for the open architecture of the net that relies on the fact that people adhere to defined standards and protocols. We are still feeling the effects of that - the same HTML code will still give slightly different results on different machines and scripts need serious debugging - but in the meantime many new W3C standards compliant browsers have been developed which avoid most of the pitfalls of the proprietary products, and which are faster, leaner and crash less often. Some are stripped down to bare necessities, some, like Lynx, don't even show pictures. To give you also a hint of what is going on behind the visual web interface we have added a statistical analysis tool.