>where the confusion comes in for, in his reply Jag wrote, "FWIW, I wouldn't >recommend surfing on a 68k Mac to my worst enemy- it's simply a waste of >time." <snip>
Having to use a 630 on my desk at work, I can tell you that the state of browsers for Mac 68k is disgraceful. There's no really good reason why these browsers should be SO slow. I have used a web browser on a 486 called Arachne running under DOS, and its twice to three times the speed of anything on the a Macintosh which doesn't have a PPC chip. And that browser does support graphics, tables, etc. etc. That being said, it is possible to browse the web on a Mac 68k machine (I do it every day). Here are some suggestions: If you don't need secure connections, and are connecting to sites which aren't graphic intensive use Netscape 2.02 with defrost. Its faster than any other browser. But, like all Netscape browsers if you hit a modern site with CSS or intense formatting, the browser chokes hard on the stuff it doesn't understand. Netscape 2.02 will just crash. Under Netscape 4.08 (the last browser that works on a 68k Mac) it can mean many minute waits. It doens't crash the browser, but it will cause it to enter into looping error modes that take forever to recorver from. Meaning you're sitting around with the machine seemingly locked up until it finally grinds out the render (sometimes even the clock stops). In a similar vein you can also use Cyberdog 2.0. Its actually a nice little browser, and doesn't seem to choke like Netscape. Its funky though in how it renders pages. If you do want modern support, ICab is your only choice. It supports everything, and renders very beautifuly. It also doesn't temporarily halt at stuff it finds confusing (like Netscape). That being said, don't expect a speed demon. I've seen starfish move faster than this browser does on complex sites. But say you don't need much in the way of graphics, and stuff, and just want to get to the meat of the subject. My favorite browsing tool of all is a browser called Wannabe. It doesn't do anything but display the text of the web page, but it does make for a very pleasing experience to have your pages display in a timely fashion. Now there are also some tricks to speeding up these browsers. The most popular being to store your browser cache in a RAM disk. It can significantly speed up your experience. It made ICab fairly tolerable on my machine. But, I have personally found that it tends to make for more crashes. Now, I might be doing it wrong or something, but I found that I couldn't live with the instability that this particular trick gave. A nice trick about ICab is that you can just about turn off every feature of ICab individually. I found that once you have almost everything turned off (including graphics) that it made this web browser rather spry. That being said, I figured if I didn't want any graphics I might as well stick to Wannabe anyway since Wannabe still wins in speed because it doesn't format the text. I hope this helps out. I'm sure I'll get some disagreement on my opinions, but they are what they are. Having to use a 68040 based machine every day, I just wanted to let you know that browsing and a significant amount of work can be done. That being said, don't expect it to be like browsing on other machines. The Macintosh browser scene seems peculiar in its lack of quality support for 68k machines. David P.S. Another web browser that is pretty cool in Lynx. Its text only like Wannabe, but has more features and render modes. There is a 68k version that some French guy had up for a while, but I've lost track of where you can get it now. Its main problem is that its a port of a UNIX program. Meaning its about as un-Mac-like as a Macintosh program can get. Still, it might make for a good compromise between the bare-bones Wannabe browser and a more featured browser like ICab or Netscape. P.P.S. To locate some of this software try http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/browsers.html Mr. Gamba has just about the neatest site for locating old browser type stuff. Check out his main pages too: http://home.earthlink.net/~gamba2/ -- Quadlist is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Enter To Win A | -- Canon PowerShot Digital Cameras start at $299 | Free iBook! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Quadlist info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/quadlist.shtml> The FAQ: <http://macfaq.org/> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/quadlist%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
