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Amaya: I was intrigued by a browser product developed and endorsed by W3C, the non-profit organization attempting to implement standards for the Internet. Amaya is a great browser if all you intend to view are pages at the w3c.org site. However when attempting to render other pages, this browser does such an egregious job, it almost appears to be a bad joke.

Once I got past the disconcerting feature where one must double click embedded links while single clicking the navigation buttons, I “road tested” Amaya on some popular sites. Couldn’t load my on-line class site, got only a blank page. Amaya appears to be interpreting all HTML according to the very literal HTML 4.0 WC3 compliant definitions that few sites adhere to currently. Yahoo was a mess of distorted tables; Microsoft.com was rendered with an unreadable small font. There was also no native frame support and deprecated tags appear to be ignored. In Amaya’s snobbish attempt to speak the “King’s HTML”, they lose the structure of almost any page that I visited except the simplest.

Additionally, they were a tremendous memory hog, often using every bit of my 256MB to the point where I’d get the “System is low on resources” message. The memory drain may have been the result of another annoying Amaya “feature” where Amaya appears to continually repaint the entire page each time the vertical scroll bars are used to reposition the content. Despite the intense drain on my resources, the pages were also slower to load than with a browser like IE or Netscape. Life with Amaya would be like continually having to listen to a radio broadcast with bad static.

This of course certainly makes you appreciate my usual browser, IE, even though I have felt for years that the current browser concept could be reworked to make it more user-friendly for the average person. As reluctant as we often are to admit it, nobody does it better than Microsoft!

As annoying as it is for the web developer to have to deal with two competing Document Object Models, standardization as proposed by w3c.org would seem to be a good idea on the face of it. However, if Amaya is the best they can do, we’d do better to simply adapt to the IE Document Object Model for all development. Even the w3c.org pages didn’t look so hot when seen through the eyes of Amaya!