Can't stand the bugs in Linux, so i'm switching back to Windows, quick questions

[vwestlife]

There were indeed a lot of DOS users then who were not going to run Windows. In fact Arachne was second in ratings only to Netscape for a while during the famous browser wars.

Second in what kind of "ratings"? By the time Arachne was released on December 22nd, 1996, Internet Explorer was already the second most popular web browser behind Netscape.

[Ole Juul]

Second in what kind of "ratings"? By the time Arachne was released on December 22nd, 1996, Internet Explorer was already the second most popular web browser behind Netscape.

I don't think IE came around until Win95 and the uptake of that was pretty slow. I don't remember anybody running IE at the beginning. People ran Win3.1 still. In any case I remember clearly that there was a "browser wars" daily tally on some major magazine site at the time and Arachne got to number two. Perhaps the rating was based on downloads, don't know. You could check the arachne mailing list archives. (I'd do it, but can't spend the time right now.) It was really all about Netscape at the time and nobody else was really able to compete with their well funded resources. It was just a freak that Michal was able to do it for a few days.

This is all so interesting in how people seem to have different perspectives on "how it was". I sometimes think that people working professionally or at a university forget that they were in a special position compared with the masses.

[Doug G]

I use lynx regularly. I work with a number of remote headless linux servers via ssh access, and lynx is a handy troubleshooting tool for checking if web servers are really serving up http or not.

[Ole Juul]

I use lynx regularly. I work with a number of remote headless linux servers via ssh access, and lynx is a handy troubleshooting tool for checking if web servers are really serving up http or not.

I use it a lot too. I find it handy for browsing from all my servers - both from a diagnostic point of view and as a way to check location blocking. Also, it was only a couple of years ago that I decided to use Lynx as my primary browser and was actually quite happy with it for some months. It was partly a challenge to myself, but also a practical solution to my constraints at the time which was that the only truly functional backup machine here was my trusty DOS box. Some sites, of course, will not be functional without images, but others actually will block you. I'm finding more and more sites block users with non standard configurations these days.

[commodorejohn]

Some sites, of course, will not be functional without images, but others actually will block you. I'm finding more and more sites block users with non standard configurations these days.

It seems to fluctuate, but yes - far too many sites these days redirect any user-agent they don't recognize to a generic "screw you for not using our preferred browser" page.

[gepooljr]

"Back in the Day".... I just graduated from college in 1996 and took a job with Intel. I was hired to standardize the Enterprise from various flavors of DOS/Win3.1, Banyan Vines, Netware 4.11, cc:Mail to the latest and greatest from Microsoft - WIndows NT 3.51. 57,000 desktops (the largest migration of the time), 4,000+ Servers, the global WAN and 2 years later - everything was Microsoft including the Browser IE. Prior to that, Netscape Navigator was the mostly used simply because it worked with Windows 3.1 and UNIX Systems from Sun.

My experience now is that most web browsers are basically ubuiquitous due to smart phones, Apple Safari and Google.

[Tor]

It seems to fluctuate, but yes - far too many sites these days redirect any user-agent they don't recognize to a generic "screw you for not using our preferred browser" page.

Yes. I'm thinking of going back to what I did in the past - I used to set my Privoxy proxy (which has for years and years been between all of my browsers, computers, and the internet) to provide an 'accepted' generic user agent string. I kind of forgot about that when I started fiddling with user agent switchers in the browser - there was a period where the network banking would *only* work with a specific user agent string, and that would be different from what the *other* bank accepted, and both of them would change a month later. Horrors.

[Chuck(G)]

It seems to fluctuate, but yes - far too many sites these days redirect any user-agent they don't recognize to a generic "screw you for not using our preferred browser" page.

I haven't run into that of late. Of course there are plugins for many browsers allowing for "spoofing" of such data. For a time, I spoofed mine as "OS/2 2.0 running Arachne". Didn't seem to make much of a difference on most sites.

My lovely wife, after resisting my attempts to update her habits, for what--7 years?--has finally realized that she has to go away from her Windows XP/Courier email/Firefox ESR isn't cutting it. She's getting more and more blank pages on her browsing. I introduced her to Thunderbird a couple of years ago for some of her email accounts and finished the transition from Courier this week, so she's set up at least in the email department. I also set up dual-booting her system with Xubuntu and Virtual Box running XP, so at least some of her heavily OS-dependent applications can still be run, but that all has to be sorted out. She knows to use Ubuntu FF for browsing, which is progress...

We technophiles don't always appreciate the sheer level of terror experienced by the less-tech-savvy older folks.

(Yes I showed her Windows 10 and she would have none of it )

[gepooljr]

Good Job Chuck.... for my wife's upcoming 60's birthday, I finally convinced her to try Linux Mint 19. So far its been a success! Now if I could only "lose" her old hard drive with Windows 10 on it due to "an accident"....

[Chuck(G)]

Heh, another thing that I noted is the difference in approach to organization between us. I was stunned when I noted that her Courier inbox had something like 4300 messages in it, going back to her Calypso years (1998). (My own inbox typically never runs so long that a scroll bar appears). Fortunately, archiving by year under Thunderbird is pretty simple.