Slimline Browser loads in a second

Tired of Web browsers that occupy many megabytes of your PC's hard disk and RAM? Mundial Avenue, a Belgian company, may have the answer. Its browser--provisionally named "Charlie"--weighs in at a little under 130KB, a fraction of the size of existing products. Yet the company claims the product has much of the functionality offered by its bloated rivals.

The program's author, Jean-Pierre Jacobs, says that it loads in under a second on a Pentium-based PC, compared to the six seconds or more taken by Internet Explorer on the same hardware. The browser is small enough to fit on a single floppy alongside a collection of HTML pages, making it of potential interest to companies wanting to ship a low-cost HTML-based help tool or information pack to customers. Mundial Avenue also claims that it can easily customize the program to support non-standard HTML tags, another feature that may appeal in niche markets.

Anyone wishing to try out this slimline entry in the browser stakes may have to wait a little while longer. A demo version is offered on the Mundial Avenue Web site but when ZDNet UK News tried to download a copy the link was not working.