Christopher B. Wright is a technical writer in the Richmond, VA area, and has been using OS/2 Warp since January 95. He is also a member of Team OS/2.

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The Warpzilla team (the group of programmers who are madly porting the Mozilla Netscape 5 code to OS/2) have recently released their latest alpha. Version .007, informally dubbed the "Bond Release", is a surprisingly functional, though somewhat basic, browser.

Sporting a very, very basic UI (just a field to enter URLs in and some menu commands) Warpzilla doesn't have the fancy buttons, built in support for mail and newsgroups, and HTML editing controls of the newly released communicator. You can use it to browse, however, and it does that extremely well for what is only alpha release code.

Warpzilla usually loads pages very, very fast, but it occasionally stalls out on large, complicated pages. It seems to have some difficulty correctly rendering nested tables (try going to http://www.slashdot.org with Warpzilla to see what I mean). It also doesn't support java, but it does support javascript - although not perfectly yet*. Still, it supports just about everything else: frames, fonts, layers, even support for forms.

.007 is the last version of Warpzilla that will be using the "older" rendering engine. The team is now starting to port the next-generation Mozilla engine -- the one that will be used in Communicator version 6 -- to OS/2. As it states in one of the help files, "the next release will be a step backwards in GUI functionality terms. But, with any luck, a monster leap forward in rendering."

* Correction (Oct. 3): The original article incorrectly stated that Javascript was not supported.

Warpzilla 0.007

by The Warpzilla Project
download from The Warpzilla Homepage (2M)
Registration: Free