[gopher] Re: Yet another gopher browser for another OS: Arachne under DOS

[JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Arachne version 1.70 was the last version offered by the original developer, 
who stopped development around the year 2000.  The code has now been taken over 
by another person, and they are already up to version 1.90 +.  
   
  Arachne has supported Gopher to a minor extent for some years.  I have tried 
the various versions of Arachne over the years on my DOS PC, but have found the 
software to be somewhat unstable.  At this time the DOS PC uses Lynx to cruise 
the Web and PC Gopher III to cruise Gopherspace (see: 
gopher://home.jumpjet.info/11\Begin_Here\Clients\Pure%20DOS\PC%20Gopher%20III 
for a download of this client).  
   
  Arachne works with Network cards using the RTL8139 chipset, and the WATTCP 
stack (see: 
gopher://home.jumpjet.info/11\DOS_Lives\Important_Drivers\Network%20Card%20(RTL8139)
 for drivers).  
   
  Arachne definately could use better Gopher support, and it would be a great 
service to the Gopher community if someone would contact the Arachne maintainer 
and give him advise on improving Gopher support.  
   
  (P.S., 
  Internet Explorer 7 no longer supports Gopher, EVEN IF you add "EnableGopher" 
in the Registry.  Even worse, IE7 is being offered by Microsoft as a CRITICAL 
UPDATE, meaning that if you have "automatic updates" enabled, IE7 will be 
automatically installed.  Fortunately, you can uninstall IE7 and it will fall 
back to IE6 which does support Gopher).  
Stegozor <stegozor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
  Cameron Kaiser wrote:

>> Maybe you should update to the latest version available at
>> http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/arachne/a190j1.zip . 1.70 is rather outdated.
> 
> Is it faster? One of my complaints is that Arachne is quite sluggish, even
> considering this is a diminutive little 486DX/40. If 1.90j1 is speedier,
> that's definitely a plus.

Dunno, sorry. 1.90j1 is the first version I use. The only way to be sure 
for you is to upgrade and test. However, 1.90j1 is slow on my PC, maybe 
that has something to do with the fact that DOS can't handle 
multitasking. On the other hand, I used it after having booted from a 
diskette, so my DOS/Arachne configuration is anything but optimised...

>> I'm thinking
>> about mentioning the bug to Arachne developers, and useful information
>> from a skilled gopher sysop would help (why in your opinion it's
>> behaving the way it does, or anything I just can't imagine ;)
> 
> At least for old-5k00l browsers, they usually implemented item type 7 in
> HTML as     
---------------------------------
  You can search this index. Type the keyword(s) you want to search for: 
[input]   
---------------------------------
  . Naturally they don't do that anymore but I remember that
> being the case for pre-Mozilla Netscape, at least. I don't know if Arachne
> does that internally or not (haven't looked at the generated source and I'm
> at work right now).

The good with copying and pasting is that you don't need to understand 
what you're copying :)




        
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