Browsing the Web with !ArcWeb

Acorn Archimedes computers when fitted with an Ethernet card are able to access the World Wide Web using a suitable browser. One of the less memory hungry browsers that works reasonably well is !ArcWeb and the images below show screenshots of various websites and how they are rendered by !ArcWeb.

All of the screenshots on this page were taken using an Archimedes A410/1 with 8MB of RAM, using !ArcWeb, !Paint and !Translator to take the screenshots and convert them to PNG format.

It's worth noting that whilst the Archimedes and !ArcWeb can browse the web, it should really be considered as a curiosity rather than a practical way to browse the modern Web. A much better way to browse the web using RISC OS is to buy a Raspberry Pi and use !NetSurf.

Retro-Kit

The retro-kit website is built to be standards compliant for the most part and makes use of XHTML and CSS extensively. As such, !ArcWeb can load and render the site without the style sheets presenting the content in a usable, readable form. 

Retro-Kit website as viewed through ArcWeb

Retro-kit website as viewed in ArcWeb

The Archimedes running RISC OS 3 is capable of a desktop resolution of 800x600 display. The screenshot below shows !ArcWeb running at that resolution and displaying images in 16 colours.

ArcWeb running on an 800x600 16 colour RISC OS desktop

Google

Google makes use of "inline" style sheets rather than placing them in a separate file. As such, !ArcWeb assumes that the content of the inline styles should be presented as content that the user should read. This leaves the main content of the site some way down the page.

Browsing Google with !ArcWeb

Scrolling down past the CSS reveals the Google home page.

The Google search page

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