Arachne is also a the name of a small, fast, graphical
web browser made by Arachne Labs. It was originally
written as a fullscreen browser for MS-DOS, but has since
been ported to Linux using GGI. The MS-DOS
branch is currently at version 1.70, while the Linux port
is at version 1.66 alpha. The binaries of both
versions weigh in at less than two megabytes.
Arachne boasts full HTML 4.0 support, including
frames, imagemaps, etc. JavaScript is currently in the
works. It supports different character encodings and
international fonts, as well as skins. It does an
exceptional job rendering all web pages - one of my
former web sites displayed correctly only in Internet
Exploder and Arachne.
The DOS version has an elegant packaging system, and
includes support for both PPP and Ethernet connections.
Unfortunately, WinSock support was scrapped before it was
ever implemented. It also supports many video
cards, and uses a custom EMS/XMS interface. It
supports multi-threaded content downloads, and will run
on chips as old as i386, at very acceptable speeds.
The Linux version does its graphics through GGI, so
it runs under svgalib, X, heck, theoretically even
aalib! Being an alpha realease, it doesn't yet support
many helper programs directly and crashes more than
one would like, but then that's why it's alpha.
Unfortunately, Arachne itself is semi-commercial
software, though most of its helper programs are released
under the GPL or similar. One needs only to pay the
registration key if one is using Arachne for commercial
purposes, otherwise, it is free.