Wikipedia:Browser notes

See also: Meta:Browser issues with MediaWiki

Browser notes is a Wikipedia page aimed at helping contributors and readers choose a web browser. There is no perfect browser for viewing Wikipedia.

Please list the pros and cons of particular browsers for viewing and editing Wikipedia articles. Limit your contributions to practical drawbacks and actual experiences with various browsers in interaction with Wikipedia. If you wish to report a bug to do with Wikipedia's interaction with a browser, see Wikipedia:bug reports.

No browser wars but if you must comment at length, take it to the Browser notes talk page, please.

Please change the order of the browsers to place the Consensus Best Browser first on the list for each platform and continue in order of preference. Keep comments brief.

The Opera, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, and Mozilla-based browsers support a direct interface for searching Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Searching for more information.

Browsers on Microsoft Windows

Gecko based

Mozilla Firefox

• Section "[edit]" links may be misplaced for some sections.
• Prior to Firefox 3, when editing, Firefox changed all non-breaking spaces (hexadecimal 0xA0) to breakable spaces (hexadecimal 0x20). Bugzilla@Mozilla bug 218277 documents the issue, which does not occur in the latest released version, Firefox 3.
• Prior to Firefox 2, the find-as-you-type text search ignored the edit window. Bugzilla@Mozilla bug 189309 documents the issue, which does not occur in the latest released version, Firefox 3.
• Firefox is not IE, which most people use, and the former is more standards-compliant than IE. Therefore, someone who makes an edit in IE may add something that looks right for them, but is not standards-compliant and thus doesn't look right in other browsers. Examples:
  • IE's treatment of CSS clearing is nonstandard. See, for instance, this revision in IE and a browser such as Firefox or Opera (note: the oddness might not appear if your screen size is very large; try narrowing the window). To fix this particular bug, use CSS style="clear: both".

SeaMonkey

• SeaMonkey is not IE, which most people use, and the former is more standards-compliant than IE. Therefore, someone who makes an edit in IE may add something that looks right for them, but is not standards-compliant and thus doesn't look right in other browsers. Examples:
  • IE's treatment of CSS clearing is nonstandard. See, for instance, this revision in IE and a browser such as Firefox, SeaMonkey or Opera (note: the oddness might not appear if your screen size is very large; try narrowing the window). To fix this particular bug, use CSS style="clear: both".

K-Meleon

• Current release uses the same rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and has the same few minor issues.

Netscape Browser

• Very old versions of Netscape Browser's predecessor, Netscape Navigator, cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Article size. However, this appears to be inapplicable to any version released since 2001.
• When using the Gecko layout engine, Netscape is not IE, which most people use, and the former is more standards-compliant than IE. Therefore, someone who makes an edit in IE may add something that looks right for them, but is not standards-compliant and thus doesn't look right in other browsers. Examples:
  • IE's treatment of CSS clearing is nonstandard. See, for instance, this revision in IE and a browser such as Firefox or Opera (note: the oddness might not appear if your screen size is very large; try narrowing the window). To fix this particular bug, use CSS style="clear: both".
• When using the Trident layout engine, Netscape is affected by from some of Internet Explorer's problems, detailed below.

KHTML & WebKit based

Safari

• Safari on Windows renders fonts using its own algorithm that yields results differing slightly from the native Windows font renderer.[1]

Chrome & Chromium

• Large text sizes in wikEd and Custom Regex Gadgets?

Presto based

Opera

• Superscript text creates a few pixels of extra line space. There is a fix, though with the fix the superscript/subscript text looks <small> and slightly raised or lowered instead of superscripted or subscripted, making it hard to determine what is superscripted or subscripted in some instances.
• Quotes not displaying on Wikipedia pages properly?
  • Click on View → Encoding → Automatic Selection.
• Opera is not IE, which most people use, and the former is more standards-compliant than IE. Therefore, someone who makes an edit in IE may add something that looks right for them, but is not standards-compliant and thus doesn't look right in other browsers.
  • Example: IE's treatment of CSS clearing is nonstandard. See, for instance, this revision in IE and a browser such as Firefox or Opera (note: the oddness might not appear if your screen size is very large; try narrowing the window). To fix this particular bug, use CSS style="clear: both".

Old versions of Opera

• Editing buttons (B, I, Ab etc.) do not enable undo for Opera 8.01.
• Edit button missing for some sections (see i. e. first sections of the Mars article) for Opera 8.0.1
• Very old versions cannot edit long pages. See Wikipedia:Article size.
• Interprets Devanagari (Indic) scripts incorrectly as far as the use of vowels are concerned. (up to v.8)

Trident based

Internet Explorer

• Old versions of IE demonstrate poor support of relatively recent (e.g., post-1999) W3C Web standards, but are still in use. As a result, certain things may not look or work exactly right, although generally a workaround of some kind is implemented server-side if possible.
• Old versions of IE have problems with text sizes, but should work fine with the default skin.
• Setting a font size does not work for the wikitext area or the edit summary and go/search boxes, unless one uses a local Cascading Style Sheet containing textarea, input {font-size: 100%} (or other percentages of choice).
• IE does not override the display font where glyphs don't exist in that font, such as for passages of multilingual text or IPA used for pronunciation. Wikipedia editors are using templates to work around this deficiency, so it shouldn't be an issue where those are used at least (see Template talk:Polytonic, Template talk:IPA, Template talk:Unicode).

NCSA MOSAIC

• Latest version (3.0 from 1997) will not load Wikimedia pages due to lack of support for the HTTP 1.1 host header system.

Browsers on Macintosh Systems

Mac OS X

WebKit based

OmniWeb 4.5+

• v?: Does not display popups at all.

iCab 4.0+

• No problems reported

Shiira

• 1.2.2: Problems with authentication.
• 2.2: Upon crashing, it may lose recently-added bookmarks.

Sunrise

• No problems reported

Gecko based

Mozilla Firefox

• 1.0.x: has difficulty with subscript and superscript that does not use the <sub>/<sup> code, particularly the "x&sup2 ;" type. However, the unicode version does not display well, either. Unicode makes most numbers difficult to read and makes the numbers 3 and 4 unreadable. Does not allow for the searching of the edit box.
• 2.x: No reported problems.

Netscape

• v?: Browser search ignores edit window

Mozilla Suite

• No problems reported.

Seamonkey

• No problems reported

Camino

• No problems reported

Opera 4 to Opera 6

• 6: Internal buffer sometimes can't handle long pages, mangling them.
• 6: Slow. No auto login between sessions.

Presto based

Opera 7+

• 7.5: No problems reported.
• 9.51: No problems reported.

iCab prior to 4.0

• v?: The sidebar displays after the end of the page content rather than at the top along the page.

OmniWeb prior to 4.5

• v?: Occasionally hangs permanently.
• v?: Does not wrap text around graphics, except in preview mode.
• v?: Does not display indented paragraphs separated by blank line correctly, inserts two blank lines.

Mac OS 9 and earlier

Netscape

• 7.x : no problems reported
• 4.5 : overlapping text and quick bar under cologne blue settings, may add weird space in text; some encoding issues

Internet Explorer

• 4.5: logging off from one wiki to another. Some encoding issues
• 5.2.3: Some text is invisible, with no apparent pattern. The words disappear mid-sentence, or even mid-word, and reappear a few words or sentences later.
• 5.5: sometimes freeze the edit window

Opera

• 5.0 : cut long pages in editing mode; encoding issues. Overlapping text and bar in some pages (prefs)
• 6.0 : add undesirable blank lines, crashes unexpectedly

iCab

• Side toolbar appears in wrong location (below any main text).

UNIX/Linux Browsers

WebKit & KHTML based

Konqueror

• Konqueror may trigger automatic protection that Wikipedia has in place to make it harder for some spiders if a web shortcut for Wikipedia is enabled and used. Make sure Konqueror is identifying itself to Wikipedia, preferably as itself.

Presto based

Opera

• No problems reported.

Gecko based

Mozilla 1.4+

• No problems reported.

Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1+

• Section "[edit]" links may be misplaced for some sections (see i.e. first sections of the Mars article).

Netscape

• 4.x: Problems with <div> marked images; sometimes crashes when one writes a new article or heavily edits an existing one (users are advised to do any heavy edit-work in another application and then use cut-and-paste)
• 6 and later: No problems reported.

Galeon

• Left hand find bar overwrites text.

Dillo

• Formats quite nicely, but no CSS
• Cookies are tricky, so logging in is tricky
• Doesn't support UTF-8, so special characters will render as gibberish
  • but there is a patch that solves that problem. Debian's Dillo comes with the patch already applied.

OmniWeb

• 3.x for OPENSTEP: Ok, but sidebar displays after main page content.

Console and Text browsers

Warning: Many console browsers will convert text in edit boxes to the encoding in use by your terminal (or what the browser thinks is your terminal's encoding which may not be the same thing) either at page load time (links and lynx) or when editing a field (w3m). If your terminal encoding is UTF-8 this is not a problem but if your terminal is using a legacy encoding (or is using UTF-8 but your browser thinks it's using a legacy encoding) then this is likely to destroy characters that are not present in the encoding your terminal is using when you save the page after editing.

ELinks

• Text only, but renders tables and frames.
• Supports HTTP authentication.
• Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields.
• Problems with editing UTF-8; set "User-agent identification" (in setup->option manager->protocols->http) to something like "Lynx/elinks/%v (textmode; %s; %t-%b)" to get non-ascii characters as hex codes.
• View is enhanced (especially of diffs) by using the following user.css and lua hook file (place in ${HOME}/.elinks and enable via option manager)

user.css:

/*
1. place in ~/.elinks
2. set user css to be "user.css" (no path, relative to ~/.elinks)
3. use document colors: use 1 or 2
*/

.diffchange {
        color: red;
        font-weight: bold;
}

.diff-deletedline {
        color: green;
}

.diff-addedline {
        color: cyan;
}

a.new {
        color: cyan;
        font-weight: bold;
}

hooks.lua:

--[[
lua preformatting function 

1. lua has to be installed before compiling elinks; if this
   is the case, it is used by default
2. place this file in ~/.elinks

this file does:

show <del> and <ins> element, make <s> more evident

preformatting for wikipedia pages: since elinks ignores the
class attribute of <td> tags, we move it into the inner
<div> element

]]

testing=false

function pre_format_html_hook (url, html) 
  -- formatting for <s> <del> <ins>
  html = string.gsub(html, '<[sS]>', '<s>[S:')
  html = string.gsub(html, '</[sS]>', ':S]</s>')
  html = string.gsub(html, '<[dD][eE][lL]>', '<s>[DEL:')
  html = string.gsub(html, '</[dD][eE][lL]>', ':DEL]</s>')
  html = string.gsub(html, '<[iI][nN][sS]>', '<s>[INS:')
  html = string.gsub(html, '</[iI][nN][sS]>', ':INS]</s>')

  -- diff-addedline and diff-deletedline classes
  if string.find(url, "diff=", 1, 1) or testing then
    html = string.gsub(html, '<td class="diff[-]addedline"><div>',
                             '<td><div class="diff-addedline">')
    html = string.gsub(html, '<td class="diff[-]deletedline"><div>',
                             '<td><div class="diff-deletedline">')
  end

  return html
end

Links

• In old versions the login may be broken. (Try to check referrer sending and cookie handling. If everything fails try to use ELinks, and check the same settings.)

Lynx

• Users can use their text editor of choice to edit textarea fields (this feature needs to be enabled at compile time)
• Forces wrapping of very long lines in a textarea, which is a problem in editing some articles.
• Display options for non-ASCII characters affect editing.
• Most tables are rendered as simple text.
• Viewing of diffs and redlinks can be improved by adding the following to the lynx.lss configuration file:

  span.diffchange:bold:brightred

  td.diff-deletedline:bold:green

  td.diff-addedline:bold:cyan

  a.new:bold:cyan

W3M

• No problems reported.

BeOS

NetPositive

• Not all elements of the CSS recognized, though still fairly functional. NetPositive has issues with some HTML entities on repeated editing (replacing entities by the character glyph), so be careful.

PDA & cell phone browsers

See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia on PDAs and Wikipedia:WAP access.

Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick

• Site renders fine in nostalgia skin.
• Works better with sidebar off.

Palm OS 5.4.5/Blazer 4.0/PalmOne Treo 650

• Default settings
  • 

    Default monobook skin rendering on the Treo650's Blazer.
    Site is unreadable (Wikipedia:Main Page alternative (simple layout)). Prior to everything downloading (and thus, prior to final rendering) page displays as plain text with links and basic formatting. After final rendering, the page is squashed into a thin vertical strip a few characters wide. This effect occurs with either "wide page" or "optimized" views. Same effect with the main front page, the "table free pages", and all article pages.
  • Registered users can work around these problems by configuring a different skin such as Cologne Blue or by installing their own style sheets for the various skins.
  • If the page loading is stopped midway, the original "non-rendered" version remains and is fully functional and readable. Timing when to stop the load (after content loads, but before the styling loads) is very difficult.
  • In Fast Mode, using the option to disable CSS may also provide usable results (tested on Blazer 4.5 - Treo 700p)
  • Large pages do not display completely. Editing large sections of text may not be successful.

• Cologne Blue
  • Readable and quite usable; logging in from a Palm device to switch to Cologne Blue may be a problem. After logging in, use the "my preferences" link at the top of the page to select different skins.

• User installed style-sheets
  • Wikipedia allows users to create accounts and upload style-sheets (amongst other things) to override/customize the rendering of pages via skins when logged in as that user-account. A style-sheet is required per skin. In the examples that follow the default monobook skin is assumed to have been selected. It is best to create a separate user-account for handheld viewing as the resulting rendering is illegible on most desktop browsers.
  • To start-off key in the URL for the per-user-account monobook style-sheet - en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/User:user-account-name/monobook.css into the browser. Replace the italicized user-account-name in the URL with the account name for handheld viewing. The site might complain that the page was not found - which makes sense as it has not been created yet.
  • Click on the edit this page tab at the top of the page. Copy in the boxed contents below into the edit region.

#column-content {
    margin: 0 0 0 0;
    line-height: 1em;
    float: none;
}
#content {
    margin: 0.0em 0 0 0; /* Change the 0.0em to 2.8em to make */
                         /* extra white space at the top of a wiki page */
                         /* The 0.0em causes the tab buttons at */
                         /* the top ("edit this page", etc) to disappear */
                         /* on gecko based browsers. In such a situation hit */
                         /* "alt+shift+e" to edit this page */
    line-height: 1em;
    padding: 0 0 0 0.2em;
}
/* Something about the above two sets of lines makes all content flow */
/* linearly down the page */
#column-one {
    padding-top: 0px;
    line-height: 1em;
}
#p-logo {
    position: relative;
}
#globalWrapper {
    font-size: 100%; /* Sets all fonts to normal size */
    line-height: 1em;
}
#contentSub {
    font-size: 100%; /* Sets all fonts to normal size */
    margin: 0 0 0 0; /* Removes margins */
    line-height: 1em;
    color: #FFFFFF; /* Sets the background to white */
}

ul, ol, li, dt, dd, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    line-height: 1em;
} /* Packs lines nicely*/

div.tright, div.tleft {
    border-width: 0 0 0 0;
    line-height: 1em;
    padding: 0 0 0 0;
} /* Shrinks thumb picture frames as much as possible. */

div.thumb div div.thumbcaption {
    line-height: 1em;
    padding: 0 0 0 0;
} /* Shrinks thumb picture frames as much as possible. */

• • Save the page by clicking on the Save page button at the bottom of the edit window.
  • On your handheld, browse over to en.Wikipedia.org and log in as the user-account created. This will be hard with the single-character width rendering - but it'll be the last time you'll have to - if all goes well.
  • Key in a favorite Wikipedia page. If it renders badly, hit the refresh button. Thereafter rendering should be legible. Sample screenshots follow:

Rendering of the beginning of an article using custom user.css.

Contents section (list items) rendering using custom user.css.

Inline article image rendering using custom user.css.

Regular paragraph rendering using custom user.css.

Safari on Apple iPhone

• Page renders perfectly without any problems.

Browser add-ons & proxies

Ad-busters

• See Mediazilla:5402.

Opera kiosk mode filtering

• May block access to articles if they begin with blocked strings such as "ad"

Atguard, Norton Internet Security, WebWasher

• On default settings, disallows access to articles beginning with the word "ad" (ad hoc, ad hominem etc)

Adblock Filterset.G Updater

• Filterset set blocks /ad/ in URLs, use Adblock Plus and Filterset.G Whitelist to bypass (whitelists Wikimedia related URLs)

Search Plugins

Plugins that can be used to search the Wikipedia easier.

Internet Explorer

1. IE7Pro

   This plugin can be set up to search Wikipedia as follows:

   1. Open Tools>IE7Pro Preferences.
   2. Click Search on the panel on the left.
   3. Use Wikipedia for the Name field, and something like w or wp for alias.
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title={KW_UTF8} in the Engine field.
   5. Now you can hightlight any word on a web page, right click and choose Search using>Wikipedia to go to the corresponding Wikipedia page. (This can also be achieved setting Wikipedia as the accelerator in IE8.)
   6. You can also type w (or wp depending on which one you chose as the alias) followed by a phrase in the address bar to go to the corresponding Wikipedia page.

Mozilla (all, including Firefox)

1. Dictionary Search

   This plugin can be set up to search the Wikipedia as follows:

   1. Open "Tools->Options->Extensions", or "Tools->Add-ons"
   2. Click on "Dictionary Search", then the "Options..." button
   3. Choose one of the dictionary slots, and enter "Wikipedia page for $" (or something like that) as text, "W" as accesskey (if it needs an accesskey), and "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$" as URL.
   4. Now you can highlight any word on a webpage, right-click and choose to go to the corresponding Wikipedia page.
2. Mycroft Wikipedia Plugin

   Adds a Wikipedia in the language of your choice to the list of search engines on the Navigation bar.

Opera 9

To add Wikipedia to the Opera searches do the following:

1. Go to the main page of Wikipedia, locate the search box on the left-hand side, and right-click in it.
2. From the context menu that drops down, click Create search...
3. Write "Wikipedia" as name and "wp" (or some other shortcut) as keyword.

Opera 6-8

Use the Opera search.ini editor and a Wikipedia plugin. Alternatively you can [edit search.ini by hand].

See also Wikipedia:Tools/Browser_tools/Opera/URL_shortcuts

JavaScript bookmark (All browsers with JavaScript enabled)

1. Bookmark this simple lightweight javascript which pops up a prompt for a search term.
2. Create a new bookmark and put the following into the URL/Location:

   javascript:void(q=prompt('Wikipedia search:',''));if(q)void(location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?go=Go&search='+escape(q))

Textarea tools

Lynx

• Allows any text editor to be used once the option is set.

Konqueror

• Internally highlights misspelled words in textareas.

Safari

• Underlines misspelled words in textareas if you check the Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type option. Control-click or right-click for a list of suggested corrections.

Omniweb

• Underlines misspelled words in textareas if you check the Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling as You Type option and offers more advanced editing options for textareas.

Internet Explorer

• IESpell adds spellchecking to Internet Explorer.
• External is a small program that may help you use any external program to edit the textareas in the browser

Opera

• Opera 10 and above: inline spelling checking based on the OpenOffice.org dictionaries called Hunspell.
• pre Opera 10: Supports the spelling checking on Windows and Linux if you install GNU Aspell. Instructions are available from Opera.

Mozilla and Firefox

• Universal Edit Button adds a extra icon in the address bar for the editable pages
• Wikipedia Extension
  • Adds a toolbar with various formatting functions and quicklinks to most Special: pages.
  • Not tested on Mac
  • Make sure you get the latest version, 0.7.1 as of this writing; download at update.mozilla.org is out-of-date and does not work on 1.0
• SpellBound adds spellchecking to Firefox, supporting international dictionaries. Download from here for Firefox up to 1.0.x and from here for Firefox 1.5.x. Firefox 2.0.x has spellchecking built in.
• These tools add an option to the browser to use an external editor on a web page textarea.
  • Mozex
    • Doesn't support Mozilla on Mac
    • Doesn't support Firefox 1.0 as provided (see this for a workaround)
  • Electrix
    • Not currently maintained
  • It's All Text!

Safari

• UnicodeChecker allows in-place conversion of Unicode text to HTML entities and back. Requires Mac OS X Panther (10.3). Freeware.
  • Great for editing text in non-ISO-8859-1 character sets on the English-language Wikipedia (Cyrillic, etc).
  • Works as a system service from a menu (Safari→Services→Unicode→), or keyboard shortcut (command-shift-8).
• CocoAspell adds international spelling dictionaries to the inline spell-checker. Freeware.
  • Based on UNIX Aspell.

See also

• List of web browsers
• Wikipedia:Clear your cache
• Wikipedia:Article size
• Wikipedia:Using JAWS
• Help:Multilingual support

External links

• Mozilla variants
  • Firefox
  • Camino (Mac only)
  • SeaMonkey
• Internet Explorer (Windows only)
• Opera
• OmniWeb (Shareware for Mac only)