[arachne] (Re)Think added Tabbed Browsing to Arachne is not a Good Idea

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Thanks for your [Featus] contribution George. You are right to 
question the addition of Tabs to Arachne.

My personal view of Tabs in Mozilla etc is positive. They can be used 
to minimise waiting time. It is possible to arrange that a second 
page is being downloaded and rendered whilst the fist page is being 
read by the user. I find this a significant advantage.

The memory constraints of DOS Arachne may well preclude rendering at 
the same time as viewing the previous page. However my guess is that 
it might be possible to at least download in parallel with viewing. 
Manually, I regularly do something vaguely similar, as follows:
- Display news-site home page.
- Start reading home page, select link for first story of interest.
- As soon as first story displays, hit back arrow.
- Continue reading home page, select link for next story of interest.
- As soon as next story displays, hit back arrow.
- etc etc
- Once all news storeys have thus been cached, disconnect modem. 
- Use forward arrow to step through the storeys and read at leisure.

Whilst the above does not achieve the primary benefit of Tabs 
(reduced user waiting time) it does achieve the secondary benefit 
(reduced modem waiting time). The connection time is minimised 
without the need for multiple re-dials.

Should Arachne ever be ported away from 16 bit DOS memory constraints 
then... ???

John

On 4 Oct 2004 at 17:14, ghall4834@X wrote:

> I do not like tabbed browsing in all the browser that have them. So 
why
> would I want it in Arachne, the DOS Browser. If you added Tabbed
> Browsing you might as well add Sides Bars which are just as much a 
pain
> as tabs because both make it difficult to read web pages. Also, 
tabbed
> browsing would turn Arachne into a memory hog having to keep all 
those
> pages in memory just like mozilla does so that they can quickly 
switch
> between those pages. In Arachne, the only tabbed browsing would 
work
> would to reload each page when you switch tabs which would make 
arachne
> slower and require a bigger browser core when we are trying to keep 
the
> core as small as possible. Also, side bars would use huge chunk of 
the
> displayable display area to view so their would be less useable 
display
> area to display web pages.
> 
> Sincerely,
> George Hall
> 


Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --

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