Arachne has reached another stable release for DOS, and beta testing phase for Linux: version 1.64 >> DOS version << includes mainly small optimizations and bug fixes, nothing really revolutionary, but saving cca 8 KB of low DOS memory may be useful sometimes. Arachne for DOS now loads arachne.cz FROM CACHE in 2-3 seconds, and slashdot.org in 3 seconds (100 Mhz AMD K5, disk cache on). Additionaly, some small, but important HTML table layout bugs were fixed, and Arachne has moved to Netscape's paradigm of not confusing user by displaying distorted tables before final adjustent - but in Arachne, this behaviour can be easily turned off, which is not possible in Netscape. Screenshots on Arachne homepage demonstrate, that there are more and more MSIE-optimized pages online, where Netscape 4.7 is experiencing more layout problems than Arachne. Arachne HTML engine has obvious limitations due to its small size, but it is step by step evolving to meet all basic official and unofficial HTML layout rules - currently, most layout problems in Arachne are caused just by slightly different sizing of fonts. Most cookie, HTTP referer and redirection related problems seem to be solved by now. And undergoing Linux port (which shares most of source code with DOS version) allows us to improve stability and speed without increasing size of the browser package. >> Linux version << has reached beta testing phase: installation script, traditional Unix directory structure and user-dependent configuration stored in ~/.arachne/ are major improvements compared to previous alpha-release. Documentation for Linux version is still incomplete, but at least all the files will stay in durrent directory structure in future. When installing Arachne for Linux, installation script will try to briefly analyze your system, and check if required libraries are present at their ussual locations. However, Linux installation still requires at least basic knowledge of your system. BTW: You have to be system administrator to install SVGAlib applications, so if you don't have root account on your Linux system, don't waste time downloading Arachne for Linux until GGI version is released. On the other hand, any user in system can use Arachne once it is installed. SVGAlib gives up root privileges immedately after initilizing graphics. Linux version of Arachne now loads arachne.cz homepage from cache in much less than 1 second, and slashdot.org in cca 1 second (on the same 100 Mhz machine as DOS version was tested, but Linux version doesn't support virtual screens and animated GIFs). Arachne 1.64 beta for Linux currently allocates cca 4 MB of memory. It is distributed pre-configured to launch mpg123 player for MP3 streaming audio using both audio/x-mepgurl and audio/x-scpls type links. -- http://arachne.cz/ (Arachne WWW browser for DOS+Linux / Webhosting / MP3streaming)
