Arachne (web browser)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arachne

Arachne web browser displaying the Wikipedia Main Page in VESA Mode
Maintainer:	Michael Polak, Arachne Labs
Stable release:	1.90;J1 (August 14, 2006) _[+/-]
Preview release:	n/a (?) _[+/-]
OS:	DOS, Linux
Use:	Internet suite
License:	GPL
Website:	Official: Arachne Homepage Unofficial: Arachne GPL

Arachne is a full-screen Internet suite containing a graphical web browser, email client, and dialer. It primarily runs on DOS based operating systems, but includes a few preliminary builds for Linux. Arachne was originally created by Michael Polak (under the label xChaos software, later renamed to Arachne Labs) in the C language and compiled using Borland C++ 3.1 compiler, but since been released under the GPL as Arachne GPL.

Arachne is currently the most advanced graphical web browser available for DOS as it supports many file formats, protocols and standards. It is also capable of displaying between CGA 640x200, two color and VESA 1024x768, high color modes. Arachne is a choice browser for aged systems which do not have any windowing systems installed.

Arachne in CGA mode

Arachne has image support for JPEG, PNG, BMP and animated GIF. It contains a subset of HTML 4.0 and CSS 1.0, including full support for tables and frames. FTP, NNTP for USENET forums, IRC chat, POP3, and SMTP are a few protocols which Arachne could handle. Arachne includes a full-fledged TCP/IP connection suite, which has support for some dial-up and ethernet connections. However, Arachne currently has no support for JavaScript and SSL.

Arachne can also be expanded with the use of addons for such things as watching DivX movies, playing MP3 files and viewing PDF documents.

The first dated release of Arachne was with 1.0 Beta 2 which came out 2 December 1996. The final official version by Arachne Labs was 1.70R3 for DOS (released 22 January 2001) and 1.66 beta for Linux (released 20 July 2000). However, the DOS GPL version is still being developed, and its latest stable version, 1.90;J1, was released on August 14 , 2006. There has not been any notable developments for the Linux version since Arachne Labs abandoned the project.