[arachne] Re: The future of Arachne

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Udo,

Seems like a reasonable idea to me. I don't if it'll be popular or not but it seems to me having the resources to carry this idea out might be an issue.

I fit in the category of people who run this on legacy machines. I do like dos but there are too many things missing for me to consider it my main os. That's why I was hoping to see the name of this new project of the dos of the future. But I do want Arachne to progress without compromising it's 'lightness'. Actually, I don't run Arachne much, I install Arachne on old machines I make into email/web machines to donate. I ask the recieving party to chose between the free OSs I know of. Many pick dos. There are other light browser I could use if I had to but I'd rather not.

A design that would make it easy to include or exclude the 'heavy' stuff makes sense to me.

Regarding the serious use of Arachne vs the toy use...
There are too many sites I use regularly that prevent me from using it as my main browser. The last time I tried paypal and ebay had issues. The list of others I use that don't work with Arachne is quite large. So I'm curious how you manage to Use Arachne as your main browser. Or do you?

Jason
p.s. Don't forget: Some people's main comuter is a 386 :)

Udo Kuhnt wrote:

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 --





--
Jason Dodd

jasorn@xxxxxxxxx
618-917-4051

Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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