In playing with my Mac IIsi recently, I have had to experiment with web browsers. There are obviously few options available for such old machines, but I’ve found three that each have their place — iCab, WannaBe, and MacLynx. WannaBe and MacLynx are both text-only based browsers, while iCab is still an actively maintained full-fledged web browser. My IIsi has 16MB of RAM and a 40MB HD, barely enough disk space to be useful. iCab does a reasonable job rendering websites, but it is exscrutiatingly slow. WannaBe is MUCH faster. It is my favorite of the three in terms of the pleasure derived from using it. However, WannaBe is missing many important features and the external plugins are cumbersome. MacLynx is quicker than iCab, slower than WannaBe, but is really a more complete browser than WannaBe. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet figured out how to make it work with sites using gzip encoding (like mine). It seems that MacLynx isn’t able to create the gzip file or decompress it properly or something. Perhaps I’ll write more about it later if it turns out to be interesting. Anyway, I just thought I’d share my thoughts on browsers for such old Macs.