Development State
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Current State

The current release version of netrik is netrik 1.16.1. You can get the tarball directly, or you can look it up on the SourceForge download page.

Note: Netrik depends on a couple of programs/libraries; please see the section on dependencies for that.

You can also get the most recent development version by CVS.

The CVS version currently undergoes some refactoring of history handling and related stuff, which should ultimately result in more robustness and consistency.

Note: You can always stay up to date with the current development by subscribing to the mailing list.

Features

Netrik is a fairly complete browser now; it's useful both for browsing local documentation and web sites. However, there are numerous drawbacks still... (s.a. for recent improvements.)

The layouting is mostly correct now; it looks quite strange sometimes, but generally it's quite OK. Most sites should be usable with netrik now. Note that the rendering also has some unique features that may prove quite useful for some sites.

The HTTP support now works quite nice.

The pager is still fairly simple (no side scrolling, very limited keyboard handling), but nonetheless it is perfectly usable just now. It already features various very convienient movement and link selection commands.

Besides of the nice pager, probably the most distinctive feature of netrik for now are the unique and (hopfully) very useful page history commands.

What's to come next?

We are short off the first stable release now. It's feature-complete for a while now, and we are focussing on fixing all outstanding issues. (Known bugs, polishing.)

Once the stable is out, we will start adding new features in 1.x, e.g. cookie handling, file download, plain text file viewing etc. We will probably also start the 2.x brach soon, which will focus on layouting improvements. (Both speed and features.)

More information on netrik development can be found on the development page.

Benchmarks

I've decided that it's time to repeat the benchmarks, for at least three reasons: First of all, much time has passed since I last compared, and many browsers are available in new Versions. (Especially the graphical ones.)

Then, I realized that some browsers (links, and especially Netscape4) behave considerably different when loading local files than when loading via HTTP. This time I've compared HTTP speed, as this is more realistic...

Finally, to allow a more useful comparision between the text based and the graphical browsers, I've removed all image references from the test files.

The most important obeservation was that links needs additional time to load from HTTP. (The amount of time doesn't depend on the document contents, but fluctuates.) For simple documents, this is quite considerable: The loading time is up to about twice as long as for local files. That's why this time netrik, w3m and links all had very similar results. (Sometimes links was faster, sometimes netrik.) Lynx was still much slower. (It doesn't seem to scale well with big files...)

The difference to the graphical browsers wasn't that big this time. When loading local files, Netscape was nearly as fast as netrik/w3m/links, for most files. (For files with tables, it was actually much faster then the table-enabled text mode browsers links and w3m.)

However, it exposes a very strange behaviour when loading from HTTP: For very simple HTML files, it gets *much* slower; but with the more complicated files, it was still super-fast...

Opera is also gotten much better, and is sometimes nearly as fast as Netscape with local files now. Due to Netscape's anomaly with simple files, it's sometimes even faster over HTTP.

Mozilla is also gotten faster, but is still very much slower than Netscape or even Opera.