[NTLK] Newton Web Browsers (old topic)

From: Goodwin, Greg (GoodwinG_at_aafes.com)
Date: Wed Apr 28 2004 - 08:02:11 PDT


SO MANY BROWSERS... KINDA NICE ACTUALLY! ;)
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     I was actually playing with the major Newton browsers this weekend.

     My current hobby is taking a Newton and turning it into a desktop
using the EZ2VGA adaptor, and for a Ethernet adaptor in the other slot.
That leaves about 2.8 meg to work with generally.

NEWT'S CAPE ... UP UP AND AWAY!
-------------------------------
    So first of all I used Newt's Cape. Bear in mind, I am looking for
something that does forms, entry areas, and occationally pictures.
Newt's Cape did all of that most of the time. A little more
thouroughly, a little more slowly, but in most cases it worked.

LUNAR RANGER... TAKE ME TO THE MOON AND CRASH LAND ME THERE!
------------------------------------------------------------
    I popped in Lunur Ranger, and I swear, if that was not so buggy and
used so much space, I would stick with it. Simply beautiful! And to
date the best viewer of moving gifs. But it would push the enveloping,
bring in frames and tables, and graphics and on my VGA screen I thought
I was looking at a black and white screen on a Macintosh.. and then...
boom!! It would crash. Finally, the loops you have to go through to
add a book mark reminded me why I removed this would be great browser in
the past.

NETHOPPER... THE LITTLE FROG THAT NEVER BECAME A PRINCE...
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     Popped in Nethopper with the jpeg patch... wow.. that was always
one of the short fallings of that small browser. And then there was
another annoying trait... any page that Nethopper doesn't agree with in
some form or fashion it would come back with a 404 error.. as if the
page couldn't be found. (Newt's Cape and Lunar Ranger had no problem,
but Nethopper...) Removed that, though having such a compact browser
would have been nice.

COURIER ... BRINGING MESSAGES TO YOU BASICALLY AND QUICKLY...
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     Courier... from where I was coming from, no pictures, no form
entries (the big one for me), no tables or frames... what is the
difference between this and some basic html reader. :) (which is what
it does well...) Removed that fairly shortly.

PT100 ... NOT EVEN ABOVE WATER FOR A BROWSER BUT...
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     I have been playing with PT100 with my Newton. Finally registered
it after all these years. Got tired of telneting to the same BBS five
times at 6 minute intervals. :) I have to say, nice!! Good VT100, and
good 80x40 screen for some good old fashioned LYNX BROWSING via telent!
And I have done a lot of Lynx Browsing from various systems (Mac Plus,
Atari 800 (uhh.. in the last year or two), Model 100, and the Newton.
The Newton can actually run it's own TCP/IP stack and power it's own
browser, but sometimes it is good to get back to the basics. I'm sure
most Courier users will use this statement against me. Feel free.
Though Courier and Lynx are both text based, Lynx is a lot more usable.
Again, text entry fields being a big one for me. :) So yeh, awesome
terminal program. I am a bit fan of EE (Easter Egg) Terminal, but PT100
allows for telnet over ethernet. A nice nice feature.
    

IN SUMMARY ... I'LL KEEP THE CAPE.
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     In summary, if I had more memory to kill, maybe I would stick with
Lunar Ranger and deal with it's quicks, though the crashes without
warning get annoying and I worry about it hurting my VGA adaptor. But
Lunar Ranger is BEEAAUUTTIFUL in my opinion. Anyone know why they
stopped working on it?

     Newt's Cape is not as beautiful as Ranger, not as compact as
Nethopper or Courier, and in truth if someone did a charactiture of
Newt's Cape it would would be a swiss army knife with a bunch of other
attachments that were added after the fact just sticking out every which
way (the making of that knife decided to add fork, spoon, flame thrower,
night vision.... all after it was packaged.) Maybe not elegant by most
means, but really usable and adaptable.

     Sorry for this late edition to the web browser thread. Been
working on this message off and on at work for days now.

     Doctor Clu
     @><-->----------------------

PS: There are other browsers out there right? How do they do?

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