[arachne] The future of Arachne

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Hi all!

I always thought that most of the people who are using Arachne do this
because just like me, they like DOS and prefer it over other OSes. I
thought that just like me, they were accepting the constraints of
Arachne since they feel that it is better than using a different OS just
to be able to use Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, whatever.

Now I have learned that most of the people on this list seem to regard
Arachne as something they toy with because they are bored, or use on old
machines they are running DOS on because these are not suitable for
running Windows NT, etc.

There are also those who apparently do not want Arachne to become more
powerful and suitable for running on modern PCs because they are afraid
that it will no longer run on their legacy machines, while at the same
time they are using other browsers on other OSes on more powerful
machines they would never want to waste on DOS and Arachne.

So here is my proposal:

Instead of keeping Arachne small enough to run on old machines with
little memory just to please those who are not really interested in it
because they do not run it on their main machines and thus do not depend
on it, let's split Arachne into two versions, one for legacy machines
and one for modern ones.

The "modern" version should be developed to make optimal use of the
resources of the PC, while the "legacy" version should be optimised for
speed and a small memory footprint. If a new feature is to be added to
Arachne that would use too much memory for the "legacy" version or make
it too slow to run on old PCs, it should only be added to the "modern"
version.

I know that this proposal will probably be unpopular with those who are
only running Arachne on their old PCs because they will feel that they
will be left behind, but since they could choose to run Arachne on their
modern machines anytime, either in DOS or in an emulator, this seems to
be negligible.

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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