I have fiddled a little more with Links today. I have noticed that it seems to load images one by one using the "keepalive" connection, exactly the way Arachne does (the connection speed at work had fooled me earlier). The difference consists in the use of libjpeg and libpng which allows the decoding of the images "on the fly". No time wasted with the launching of an external application.
I have also recompiled Links with SVGALib support (this means that Links can now run much like Arachne does in the pure DOS environment). Earlier I had only the chance to run it windowed under X. Unfortunately I have obtained a huge mouse pointer hopping almost uncontrolably on the screen. Also, running Links with SVGALib is possible only as root, which is not desirable. So I have decided to give up in the end. After browsing a little I realized that Links may be "eating" a little too much resources too. There are only 16 Megs of RAM on this machine, and after browsing through 2-3 image intensive pages, the HDD started to rattle a bit. This does not happen in the case of Linux Arachne (at least when it does not crash :), but the trouble may come also from some inapropriate settings (eg memory cache too big or too big ammount of memory reserved for JS operation -- yes, this is also a setting). But, despite this, Links seems to be a lot more stable than Linux Arachne. A weak point is the lack of documentation For now I'll stop here. No more reviews on Links. If anyone of you is curios, try it yourself :) Cristian Burneci P.S. Did I mention Links is also Czech made ?
