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You have to see it to believe it!

Notice how little of the window is taken up with borders and controls? Before switching to Cyberdog, I used to be frustrated at the amount of usable space a browser/e-mailer/newsreader subtracted from the meaningful portion of a display--there's not that much to start with on a 15" monitor! And Cyberdog's look is simple and expansive, not distracting.

With the e-mail and newsreader parts, Cyberdog can create multiple mail trays, handle--or "filter"--the mail in all your trays (including the trash tray), and display lists in more ways than you might be used to. And its endlessly customizable letterheads can serve many purposes, in addition to the obvious one of saving favorite embedded graphics for repeated use. The search engine is incredibly fast--if you're looking for a word or string of words somewhere hidden within six hundred entire messages spread among all your mail trays, you can do it easily. (I just timed that operation on my mail trays; on my Power Macintosh 7200/90, it took 3 seconds--tops.)

Cyberdog is quite a bit more stable than the other popular browsers I've used, though it's not perfect. Before switching to Cyberdog, I rarely got beyond half an hour without a quit or a hang; now I get to decide when I'm getting off the Internet! I routinely run Cyberdog for four or five hours at a time.

I don't mean to claim that Cyberdog is a nearly perfect browser; it just comes much closer to perfect for me than anything else. There are two serious deficiencies, as well as some other shortcomings which could be improved. One serious difficulty occurs in the handling of JavaScript web pages; this problem is expected to be remedied when the Blake beta, a Cyberdog "part" which Kantara Development is working on, becomes available. Blake is in prerelease now, and shows good promise.

The other serious problem is in the downloading of newsgroups and web pages for offline reading; Cyberdog is not set up to do this directly. There are workarounds, but they are less satisfactory than a menu choice would be. And unfortunately--because of the tight integration of Cyberdog's newsgroup reader with the e-mailer part--it's not practical to upgrade the newsreader without access to the Cyberdog source code.

(concluded on page 3)

Visit Cyberdog for the Curious

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