Hotjava is Sun's freeware web browser that is written entirely in Java, which means, in theory, you can run it on any computer running Java. You can only get versions for Windows 95/NT and Sparc Solaris 2.5, however. Downloading the 6.5meg Windows 95 version took quite a while. The installation had a problem because I decided to install the program in a directory with spaces in the name (e.g. "C:\Program Files\HotJava") and it tried to add this, verbatim, to the path. So I had to go fix my autoexec.bat by hand... Second of all, it took a little while to load and configure. I found the configuration screens a little slow and cumbersome to deal with, but I think that has to do with the third problem: Java, or at least Sun's implementation of the Java Runtime Environment (included with HotJava), is slow, even on a Pentium box with lots of RAM.
The browser itself has a nice look to it, though. I could probably use a browser that looks like this, though the screen redraws are choppy and sometimes wildly inaccurate. I loaded up my home page (http://www.phoneboy.com), and a large chunk of it ended up in the upper left corner where it wasn't supposed to be. When I reloaded the page, however, it came up fine. One feature I did find interesting was a button that you could enable to show you potential errors in the HTML code of the page you're loading. Anything that does not conform to the HTML 3.2 standard will show up here. This includes any Netscape or Microsoft-specific tags or additions to existing tags.
If they could make Java run more efficently in Windows 95, I might use this browser. But like with some other Java-based applications out there, I'm not gonna use them seriously until Java runs at reasonable speeds on home computers.
HotJava is available from:
http://www.javasoft.com/products/hotjava