[arachne] Re: Arachne for Linux...

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

From: ewalt@xxxxxxxx

> I did try to run Arachne in a very early version on an XT with a CGA
> card--it took forever to accomplish anything whatsoever.

So what - Arachne also takes forever on some pages on a Pentium4/3066.

But that was not my point - my point was *if* somebody wants to use
Arachne on an old machine (which must not necessarily be an XT, EGA
cards were very common even on late 286 and early 386 class PCs), then
he should be able to run it. It can be safely assumed that anyone who is
trying to run Arachne on old hardware knows about the speed issues.

> Anybody who needs EGA or CGA support can always dig out an old
> version.

And what if he wants to use a feature that only the latest version
supports, like Javascript? In your humble opinion, is he then supposed
to buy another graphics cards and/or mainboard just to use that feature?

Like I said before, this really reminds me of the Microsoft way of doing
things.

Besides, there are no older versions of Arachne available for download,
at least not from the official site.

In my opinion, hardware support should only be dropped if there is a
*very* good reason for it, but just having a few more KB of unused RAM
to show off with does not count.

Eliminating support for old hardware just because it is old inevitably
leads to a fundamental question: If Arachne does not support newer
hardware, and older hardware is considered obsolete, then what kind of
hardware shall Arachne be written for? Soon enough, even machines
considered high-end by Arachne standards will become a rare sight, and
if we happily go about dropping support for anything that is older than
fifteen years, we may find out that there are no users left that still
have the right hardware to run Arachne, at least none that they haven't
yet dedicated to running something else.

Regards,

Udo

-- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de

-- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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