One blog to bind them all.
After a hiatus of two years, there is a new version of the Arachne web browser again, 1.97. I’m not sure what is new, it seems that only the CORE.EXE was updated, but there’s no new readme. You can get it here.
It’s really frightfully simple: just put an empty file named IEXPLORE.exe.local into the directory of the old version of Internet Explorer that you want to run. That’s all. I don’t know how far up it works, but it works with IE6 and older under XP. Two things:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work with IE8 any more. IE8 installs a new rendering engine that will be used by IE6 as well, so all you get is the old interface. Luckily, IE8 can be uninstalled. Now IE4 runs again 🙂
I just finished my Download Central stats for October and noticed that 44% of the downloads are made with Internet Explorer (29.7% with Firefox), but 37.5% of the pages are viewed in Firefox (31.3% in Internet Explorer). A study about the connection between the way people use the web and the type of browser they use would definitely be interesting.
With 4.0, which came with Outlook Express, Microsoft began using style sheets very extensively for HTML mail. The installer contained a number of templates that all used CSS. It’s interesting to think that with a more widespread use of Internet Explorer (it began overtaking Netscape only in 2000), we might have had more CSS and less use of font tags earlier.
When I wrote my previous post, I checked the stuff on some older web browsers too. Then I checked some other things as well. Here’s how well a few older browsers (that I happened to have at hand) display my websites.
I just noticed that when you save an image from Firefox, the browser doesn’t just copy the already downloaded image to the destination of your choice, it downloads the image again. I noticed because I was on a chan where remote linking is prohibited, and images (naturally) open in a new tab. When I tried to download an opened picture I would get the “no hotlinking” image instead. I had to download from the thread link.
This is annoying on several levels, it’s a waste of bandwidth, a waste of time, and it makes it practically impossible to download a picture that has expired, I’d have to take a screenshot, which is silly. I already knew that Firefox always re-fetches a page when you use the back button, but I didn’t know about the image thing.
I think I’ve been using Firefox for six years now, since 1.0.6 or something like that, and I like it for its many often very useful add-ons, but slowly I’m beginning to wonder if it might not be time to look for another browser, one that uses its cache properly.
I just noticed that the original homepage for the Cello WWW browser is no longer online. So I put it up for download and brushed up a mirror of the Cello website that I had created years ago. Some images still were linked with absolute URLs and one page was missing. That’s fixed now.
Cello was the first browser for Windows. It was developed by Thomas R. Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. Lawyers typically had PCs with Windows in their offices, but no version of Mosaic for Windows was released until September 1993. Cello beat it by three months. Actually Cello was more than just a web browser. It supported other protocols like FTP, Telnet, and the then still rather important Gopher. It could send emails and read newsgroups.
Nowadays it is not of much practical use any more. It won’t start unless it finds Winsock software, so it is not fit for an HTML reader on an unconnected old PC or on a Windows installation on DOSBox. It runs well under XP (better than Mosaic, which tends to crash quickly) but often will be unable to connect to a given server, and of course it could only display very old or very simple websites correct anyway.
One thing that has always fascinated me about it is its very uncommon style sheet. It uses larger fonts than other browsers, and it uses lots of colors. Lists are displayed in red, headers are maroon, navy, or blue depending on rank. Links, on the other hand, have no separate color, and have a dashed border instead of being underlined. Unordered lists have custom bitmaps for bullets. Horizontal rules are black, solid and rather thick. The cursors are uncommon too, cross hair is the default, over links it changes to an up arrow, and the busy cursor is a square with three borders and the word “NET” within.
I have created a style sheet that reproduces the way Cello displayed web pages fairly well. I had to compromise a bit with the cursors, but the colors and fonts should all be correct, it even ignores the center tag and leaves a lot of space at the bottom of the page just like the original. I used it as an alternate style sheet on Astoria (the computer and DOS sections still have it), and I took the liberty to add it to my mirror of the Cello website, so that it looks as if it were viewed in the browser it presents.
This is strange. After a routine update of Firefox, I had to install Flash Player again. To my astonishment, this installed Google Chrome as well, without ever asking me (or maybe I overlooked it).
While I wouldn’t have installed Google Chrome on my own, once I had it, of course I checked some of my sites in it, including this blog. I found that on most of my posts there is an advertisement when I view them in Chrome, but not when I view them in Firefox. Same goes for No Fanbois Allowed. Then I counter-checked with Internet Explorer: Yes, ads too. Firefox seems to be the only one not to display them.
I verified this in Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 3.6 and even a very old version of Opera, 8.5 from 2001, which I still use for email: When there are conflicting instructions for background colors or images in style sheets and HTML tags, then the style sheet instruction will override the one in the HTML tags. This can be used to advantage.
When I designed Download Central, I did not want it to be too dependent on style sheets. They define only the font, justify the margins of paragraphs and handle a few details. The background images of the pages, and the white background of the table that contains the text, are defined in the HTML tags. This ensures that a browser that does not support style sheets (Arachne, for example) will still display the pages approximately as intended.
As I have now verified, if I ever wanted to set all the pages to a single background image, or change the table color, either temporary or permanently, I could do so by just adding the appropriate instructions to the style sheet. And I could revert to the status quo ante any time by removing them again, or commenting them out.
Neat.
The ISA-Bus 