[arachne] Re: Slow scrolling of large screens
- From: "Sam Ewalt" <ewalt@xxxxxxxx>
- To: arachne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:48:05 -0500
Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!
On Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:20:47 +0000, Udo Kuhnt wrote:
> Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!
>> Preferably, yes. "Someone" should do that. Perhaps an eccentric
>> millionaire will hire some programmers to adapt Arachne to todays's
>> hardware. We can only hope.
> Now we are getting a bit sarcastic, are we?
No, I'm being realistic, not sarcastic. There seems to be almost
no interest in the open source community for working on Arachne.
There are a handful of people working on Arachne at most. Hardly
anyone feels a compelling interest in a DOS browser. Sure, lots
of people could work on it, but hardly anyone does.
Where's the interest? No one is rushing to work on Arachne at all.
One would think there would interest in the DOS community as what
good is an OS these days without a first class browser? I don't
understand why there is so little interest in Arachne, but there
isn't.
Michael Polak, the original author of Arachne, came to believe
that his original conception for Arachne was deeply flawed and
that Arachne needed to be rewritten from the ground up. He had
many ideas for improvement and he was doing preliminary work on
what he called "Arachne 2.00" when the press of having to earn
a living directed his attention elsewhere. If there had been
any hope of making a buck with Arachne he might have continued.
> Given the fact that none of the thousands of Open Source programmers is
> a millionaire or has been hired by one, they do a lot of work in little
> time.
Linus Torvalds has been paid a salary by Paul Allen for years. Many
open source programmers are employed by IBM. Sun, and other companies
large and small that have a business interest in maintaining
alternatives to Microsoft. Many do work without compensation and
for various reasons, but to say that "nobody is a millionaire or
has been hired by one" is just not accurate.
>> It's something of a miracle that Arachne scrolls at all considering
>> it's origin in the frustrations of Czech college student in 1995
>> with how slow Windows and Netscape ran on his 386!
>> By the way Arachne is ten years old now. The first official release
>> was in the spring of 1996.
> Well, I sometimes wonder why Arachne is so slow on today's
> lightning-fast machines on which other ten years old software runs so
> fast that I have to use every trick I know to slow them down.
Yes, that's a good question.
> I really wonder if it was ever designed to run on a 386 class machine;
> to me it seems more like it had been designed for a computer that has
> yet to be constructed, for example, a 20 GHz 986.
> I would be very interested in a profiling version of Arachne to see
> which routines need to be optimised. Specifically, I would like to know
> what Arachne is doing while displaying these ominous "adjusting images,
> tables and frames" or "verifying images" messages that takes several
> minutes on some web pages even on multi-GHz machines.
> Also, I would like to know why Arachne has to redraw the whole screen
> every now and then while scrolling instead of drawing the screen *once*
> and then simply scroll it and just redraw the parts that had been
> clipped.
Also good questions. I don't know. You could ask Glenn McCorkle or
you could try to talk with Michael Polak in Prague. He has tons of
ideas and no time to pursue things.
A serious effort could hire Michael to work on Arachne 2. Like I
said, it's going to take an eccentric millionaire.
Arachne at FreeLists
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --
Other related posts:
