Sal, I'm impressed that you posted these links. These days, as browsers go, I'm perfectly willing to sit back and watch for a while. Like I said, I still run Nav3, images off. I was a little scared when I loaded my dad's PC with a new AOL disk, and was quite relieved that IE4 wasn't there yet. Here's a recent Anchordesk link on browser performance that I'm mostly in accord with:
Three Essentials for Smarter Surfing www5.zdnet.com
Superfast Web Experienced surfers know that if all you want is hard information, simply switch off the Image Auto-Load feature found on most browsers. This cuts page-loading time considerably, allowing you to judge more quickly whether to stay and read or click on through to the next page. An even faster method is to install a copy of Lynx on you computer.
I used to run Lynx all the time, dialed in to my office machine which was direct connected to the internet. In general, it was loads faster running over a crummy 9600baud modem than running Netscape/IE on a 28k modem. I have no idea what people stuff into their web pages to make a 500 word story into a 50kbyte file, even without graphics, but it's pretty silly. It'd be nice if ISP's would provide a machine with timesharing accounts, with a fast internet connection and lynx, for people to telnet into, you could filter out 90% of the bytes before they hit the modem bottleneck and still get 99% of the information from most sites.
Cheers, Dan. |
