Hello All; I'm reporting here on a comparison between DOS Arachne and a Linux/Unix derivate based browser DEMO called QNX Voyager. See http://www.qnx.com/ This demo is 100% contained on a 1.44Mb bootable floppy and contains a 32bit Posix compliant Linux-like Real Time Operating System, a micro GUI with mouse driver, a web browser with javascript support, a TCP/IP stack, a net dialer, a *WEB SERVER*, a Notepad and text Editor, a File browser, vector graphics animation, a TV settop box simulation (?), and a game (Towers of Hanoi) used as a javascript demonstration. NO Hard Disk access is used. The floppy creates and loads a ramdisk where the software is run. Requirements are '386 or better, 8Mb RAM, VGA color ONLY, and you BETTER have a mouse because it's nasty without it. :( Here we have a fairly painless way to get a little exposure to a Linux-like environment and confirmation of the obvious. That is, you will have just as much trouble or even more getting Linux type software to run on your system. If it likes your hardware, installation is a breeze. My first installation on my 90Mz Pentium with 16Mb ram and Trident VGA was easy. It took about 2 minutes. I was on the web in 5 minutes. Biggest problem was figuring out how to edit my login script. On this machine performance was quite good. But the slightest deviation from standard makes installation difficult. The QNXdemo apparantly doesn't like some keyboard controllers or the bios associated with the keyboard - however I had no problem with 4 machines. I did have major problems with my standard '486 install. First, I couldn't create the boot disk with the image writer because I had caching turned on for my floppies. No problem here after turning it off. Next, it seemed to freeze up after booting on my '486 with VGA monochrome. It turned out it was writing to the VGA color memory area, and my card was showing me the VGA monochrome area. That got fixed when I set the ATI card to initialize in color mode. Everything looked quite fine in mono so I guess it was just a matter of them putting only color video drivers on the disk. Last, although it found my bus mouse, it assigned it the wrong interrupt (1) so I couldn't get it to work. I disabled it and attached a serial mouse and was finally able to get on line and select links. There is a keyboard navigation mode but it suxxx badly and it doesn't let you pick links on web pages. In general, DOS Arachne is FAR superior to this linux-like browser. Arachnes' keyboard navigation is FANTASTIC by comparison. Arachnes' display quality in 640x480x4 is BEAUTIFUL by comparison. Arachnes' use of screen space is MIND BOGGLING by comparison. The QNX browser is similar to most others in that you only get about 66% of the screen for your viewing pleasure. Also, although the QNX browser supports javascript, the mouseover effects at www.qnx.com were absolutely AWFUL ! It felt like it crashed everytime you tried to move the cursor from the html area to the buttons - but it just got stuck in mouseovers. Arachne had no problem there, and neither did NS2.02 - but I had JS turned off with Netscape. ;-) On the QNX site, Arachne rendered the page MUCH too wide (about 50%). Both Netscape and QNX Voyager rendered the whole page width onscreen in 640x480. Both Netscape and QNX Voyager placed the images and tables in the proper place while loading. Arachne is the only browser that takes three passes to finish the page. Here is the comparison: All browsers on the same hardware - 33Mhz '486 with 12Mb ram and VGA 640x480x4bits. Netscape 2.02 and Win3.1 on HARD DISK ! DOS Arachne 1.61 and QNX Voyager 2.01 on RAM disk ! Modem is 33.6kbaud. Note that the space requirements are approx. (10%) and the NS + Win 3.1 combo includes minimum DOS, minimum Windows, all of Netscape (empty cache) and all of Quarterdeck Winsock. You could add 3Mb Windows swap if you like. DOS Arachne 1.61 QNX Voyager 2.01 Netscape 2.02+Win Total space (with OS): 3.224 Mb 7.414 Mb 5.823 Mb Load times home.arachne.cz 22 Sec 20 Sec 17 Sec www.qnx.com 52 Sec 40 Sec 28 Sec www.yahoo.com 15 Sec 11 Sec 9 Sec Thinking.jpg 11kb 320x240 5 Sec 3 Sec 4 Sec Movements home.arachne.cz pg home to end 2 Sec 1 Sec 0.23Sec pg end to home 2 Sec 1 Sec 0.23Sec www.qnx.com pg home to end 4.5Sec 2.5Sec 0.55Sec pg end to home 7.0Sec 2.5Sec 0.55Sec Switching in cache Arachne to yahoo 7 Sec 1 Sec 4 Sec Yahoo to qnx 21 Sec 3 Sec 10 Sec You can see that running in 32bit mode didn't do QNX much good except in the last tests - switching locations already cached. So far it looks like it's a good bet that Linux Arachne will be bigger and slower. REMEMBER. Netscape is the only one *NOT* running on a ramdisk. And my disk cache is ONLY 800kb ! - Clarence Verge -- - Help stamp out FATWARE. As a start visit: http://home.arachne.cz/ --
