I’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable – I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
Regardless, my browser (the latest Mozilla 1.3.1 build for antique Macs) is acting up. How to access the web? I have 2 options.
- Take over my desktop on campus via VNC. This works, but is dog slow.
- Log into one of our servers via SSH and fire up Lynx. Works like a charm. Browsing is refreshingly fast without images, javascript, and ads…
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how usable many websites are. Blogs seem to be faring even better – kudos to the various blog theme developers. It’s important to remember that 2 critical sets of users see the web through the eyes of a text-only browser.
- Visually impaired readers
- Search engines.
Yes. Google is essentially a visually impaired reader. I personally think everyone should periodically try their sites in a text-only browser to see how these two very important groups of users see things.
I’m trying to quickly check in from home, but the browser on my home machine is acting up and refusing to access websites. I guess that’s forgivable – I’m still running my (otherwise) trusty old PowerMacintosh 8600/300 running MacOS 9.1. Before you laugh, this bad boy was literally the fastest personal computer in Calgary for a few weeks when I got it, and I paid more for this system than many people pay for cars.
Regardless, my browser (the latest Mozilla 1.3.1 build for antique Macs) is acting up. How to access the web? I have 2 options.
- Take over my desktop on campus via VNC. This works, but is dog slow.
- Log into one of our servers via SSH and fire up Lynx. Works like a charm. Browsing is refreshingly fast without images, javascript, and ads…
I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how usable many websites are. Blogs seem to be faring even better – kudos to the various blog theme developers. It’s important to remember that 2 critical sets of users see the web through the eyes of a text-only browser.
- Visually impaired readers
- Search engines.
Yes. Google is essentially a visually impaired reader. I personally think everyone should periodically try their sites in a text-only browser to see how these two very important groups of users see things.
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D’Arcy-
I looked for Lynx (since you didn’t have a link) and it doesn’t run on a Mac- are you logging into another platform server?
One of the things I keep telling my students is that Google needs total 508 compliance if you want your site to index- they are slow to pick that up.
They also tell me that no one will give up a Newspaper to read on screen- until I tell them that one day- a “newspaper” that you can’t adjust the size of the type- and the typeface-etc. will seem prehistoric.
Try using “links” instead of lynx. David, this is through shell. Fire up shell and type lynx, if it’s installed, it should load up.
D’Arcy, why don’t you just load ubuntulinux on your Mac? That will give you the latest Firefox and work great…rather than try hobbling around with Lynx, as pleasant as it is to go back in time and enjoy text-based browsing (I used Lynx a long time ago).
Take care,
Miguel Guhlin
http://www.mguhlin.net/blog
Miguel – I tried the Ubuntu LiveCD, but it borked on something. I’ll need to strip out the extra video cards, QuickDraw Accelerator, etc… to get it back to a stock 8600/300, and then I’ll try again. Seems like the sanest solution, since it’ll be awhile before I will be replacing the old workhorse.
Lynx works fine on MacOSX, but it requires Terminal – it’s a command-line app. Apple has a page on Lynx, but I think I got my copy from the OSXGNU listing.
almost all my music making took place on an 8500 running 9, until i got a mirrored drive door G4 and ran 9 on that. still am.
Opera is a great browser to check things in. shift-F11 switches to small screen mode, for instance. hmm–i think i like your blog better in this mode for some reason…