Apache is the most popular UNIX web server today. Apache was originally based on code and ideas found in the most popular HTTP server of the time, NCSA httpd 1.3 (early 1995). It has since evolved into a far superior system which can rival (and probably surpass) almost any other UNIX based HTTP server in terms of functionality, efficiency and speed. Take a look at the web server feature chart to see how Apache ranks among the competition.

Open Market provides software products that are used to develop the infrastructure for Internet commerce. They pride themselves on scalability, content flexibility, lower entry and maintenance costs, and enhanced security.

Netscape sells several web server software packages. The Netscape Enterprise Server offers built in advanced services such as Internet-based access controls, automatic link management, and revision control. The FastTrack Server is an easy-to-use entry-level Web server designed to let novices create and manage a Web site.

IBM's Secure Server is provided for AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris, as well as NT and OS/2. Version 4.2 servers include enhanced scalability, browser-specific response capability, enhanced CGI support, PICS support, and HTTP Version 1.1 compliance. The IB servers have consistent configuration, management, and API interfaces across all of their supported platforms.

Jigsaw is W3C's sample implementation of HTTP, a full blown HTTP server entirely written in Java. Its design goals were: will run on any machine running Java, can be extended by writing new resource objects (a replacement for CGI), minimization of file system accesses.

WebSTAR is a Mac HTTP server which performs dynamic web server file caching, has the ability to run server side Java applets, contains an administration plug-in that lets one administer essential server functions from any web browser on the Internet, honors keep-alive requests, supports a 20,000 username/passwd database, has integrated support for image maps, supports common log format, supports cgi-bin folder, does on the fly bin-hexing of Mac files, and supports an expanded command set for server-side includes.

Microsoft IIS is tightly integrated with NT and includes native support for ActiveX, VBScript and JScript. The index server includes built-in support for HTML, text, and Microsoft Office documents, and NetShow provides streaming audio and video support for IIS. Crystal Reports is the visual reporting tool for IIS that lets you create presentation quality reports and integrate them into database applications.

For more server listings, take a look at Yahoo's Web Server's page.

Go.com indexes pages using Meta Tag criteria or the first 250 visible characters on your page. A few hours after submitting your URL to infoseek, it will mail you back a confirmation.

Alta Vista indexes pages using Meta Tag criteria or by listing all words in the document except for comments. The abstract is taken from the first few words on the page.

Excite indexes pages using a ``concept based'' technology which attempts to determine dominant themes or terms on a page and then select the lines for the summary that best contains those terms. Be sure to often state the purpose of your page. To do so without being repetitious to the reader, include your page purpose in comments three or four times.

Lycos indexes pages by grabbing a sample portion of one's page, therefore it is important to make sure that the message of the page is clearly spelled out near the beginning and that the front page of one's site is not one large graphic.

Open Text indexes pages by grabbing the first 100 words, including any and ALL tags, from the page. To get a decent representation is is better to not have any tags until later in the page.

WebCrawler indexes pages using Meta Tag criteria. WebCrawler specifically states that if one uses prominent keywords just to get it listed at the top of a search, the page will be removed from the database, so make sure that keywords on the page have to deal with the site's subject and are not just there for ``rating'' purposes.

Hot Bot indexes pages using Meta Tag criteria. When HotBot encounters the same page in to different locations, it groups them together. When these pages are listed in the search results, the title is listed only once, but all of its URLs are listed below the abstract. This give you the choice of which copy to view; the one located nearby, or the one duplicated on a server elsewhere.

Arena, now developed by Yggdrasil Computing, was a graphical web browser created at the World Wide Web Consortium as a testbed browser for HTML3.0 and CSS1. Yggdrasil Computing and the free software community are turning Arena into a full-featured free alternative to proprietary browsers.

Chimera is a browser for UNIX-based computers running the X Window System. The alpha version supports some HTML 3.2 features, and the bookmark file is an HTML-ish file that can organize bookmarks under groups. The resource file format is the same as the X resource format (Xrm functions are used) but are completely separate. It is recommended that you not use X resource files at all unless you really want to change the attributes of the Athena widgets (e.g. color, fonts, add hidden buttons, etc.). Each group starts with a string delimited by 'h3' tags. Each bookmark is delimited by 'a' tags.

HotJava is Sun's highly customizable, extensible web browser, written entirely in Java. The HotJava Browser conforms to Web standards and standard practice. It is designed to be highly scalable and customizable, enabling end-users, service providers and intranet providers to easily tailor it to meet their specific requirements. Like Web pages themselves, the user interface of the HotJava Browser is implemented using HTML and applets, and its behavior can be modified by an ASCII-based properties file.

Lynx is a text based browser for both UNIX and VMS platforms with more platform development in the works. Lynx is a product of the Distributed Computing Group within Academic Computing Services of The University of Kansas. Lynx was originally developed by Lou Montulli, Michael Grobe, and Charles Rezac. Garrett Blythe created DosLynx and later joined the Lynx effort as well. Currently it is being maintained by members of the Internet community coordinated by Foteos Macrides of the Worcester Foundation for Biological Research.

Internet Explorer from Microsoft is available for Win3, Win95, WinNT, and MacOS. MSIE is tightly bundled with the Microsoft Operating environments.

NCSA Mosaic is no longer in development, but is still distributing software for the X, MS, and Mac environments.

Netscape sells several browsers to the end user and corporate environments. Netscape is the most popular web browser to date and supports the latest HTML version along with other proprietary tags. Netscape browsers are forms, Java, and Java script compliant

For more choices, see Yahoo's Browser page.

The Microsoft Proxy Server runs on both a TCP/IP and IPX/SPX network, allowing integration with different kinds of LANs. Its support for a wide range of applications and protocols-including those with live, streaming audio and video such as RealAudio and VDOLive, LDAP, IRC, SMTP, and Microsoft SQL ServerTM-provides transparent access from any desktop. the Auto Dial tool in Microsoft Proxy Server automatically connects to your Internet service provider (ISP) whenever a user needs information not already stored in the local cache. When the desired information is retrieved from the ISP and stored, Auto Dial disconnects from your ISP.

The Netscape Proxy Server allows for documents, directories, or entire sites to be preloaded into the cache based on administrator preferences, and administrators can schedule updates of content that has already been cached. For example, whole sites can be downloaded during low-traffic periods, so they're fresh when needed by users. Proxy Server limits access to objectionable content by filtering URLs and content types and provides virus detection (via the built-in InterScan Virus Wall from Trend Micro). It also protects information inside the organization by controlling user and group access to specific documents or sites based on flexible parameters (IP addresses, host names, wildcard expressions, and so on). Secure reverse proxying lets Proxy Server act as an intermediary to outsiders who request documents from within the company by caching them outside the firewall.

Squid offers high performance proxy caching for Web clients, It supports FTP, Gopher, and HTTP requests. The cache software, available only in source, is more than an order of magnitude faster than the CERN httpd and other popular Internet caches, because it never needs to fork (except for FTP), is implemented with non-blocking I/O, keeps meta data and hot objects in VM, caches DNS lookups. Squid caches can be arranged hierarchically for an improvement in response times and a reduction in bandwidth usage. Squid runs on all popular Unix platforms.

For more proxy software, check out Yahoo's Proxy page.