On Thu, 1 Nov 2001 UberTechnoid@Home.com wrote:

> Amaya and Mosaic work ok for what they are, but even my Vax's Netscape
> 3.03 is WAY nicer. I've taken to running the vax's browser and displaying

There _is_ a Netscape version for VAX? *boggle*
That's pretty cool. :)

> it on my Sparc, but that isn't a very pretty solution to me. 3.03 is the
> latest version of Netscape for VMS/Vax and 4.7x is latest for solaris. 
> Which would you chose?

I am not sure if I can be of much helf I'm afraid; By and large I have
the exact same problems myself. But I'll chuck my SEK 0.02 in;

I am still running IBrowse2.2 on my 40MHz 68040 Amiga (in AmigaOS
that is), because there simply isn't any browser available (to my
knowing) that isn't an order of magnitude (literally, I am not joking
here) slower on my well-more-than-twice-as-fast-and-with-real-VM
110MHz Sparc5:s (running NetBSD-1.5.2 of course). I have tried mozilla
0.8 from pkgsrc and remote-displaying NS4.77/Slowaris. Mozilla 0.8
took minutes to start on a 64MB machine. It did render pages reasonably
fast, and scrolled ok, but the GUI (which I understand is made in some
kind of interpreted language?) was so horrendously slow it simply couldn't
be used. Mozilla-0.8 also segfaulted every now and then, randomly. Bad.

Running Netscape-4.77/Slowaris on a 4x450Mz Ultra80 w/ 4GB RAM and sending
the window home over a 100Mbit network (two hops) with 10Mbit between me
and the 100Mbit switch was only marginally faster than running mozilla 0.8
locally. This I don't understand, but that's how it worked (and I was
using an 8bit display at that, so there were no loads of 32bit
screenbuffer data to send). It's not nearly as slow running the same
Netscape on the SunRay clients that Ultra80 normally serves, so something
about netscape makes it horribly slow when X:ing the window somewhere
else. That, or my little sparc5:s simply can't take the load of tunneling
X over ssh (system load would contradict this but...). The advice I've
gotten from others is:

- run konqueror (in pkgsrc, but requires a great deal of KDE bloat, so
  I haven't tried it).
- galeon (also in pkgsrc I think). I am planing on trying this out
  on occasion. It's based on the Gecko HTML engine Mozilla uses, so
  given the experience with mozilla, it ought to be ok (the html-
  rendering in mozilla seems ok, it's just everything else that's
  horrendously slow).
- give up on finding a graphical *IX browser that runs on anything
  slower than 800MHz, unless one wants to write it personally.

/ali:)