Stuck on an Island with Limited Resources

[dilettante]

This one may sound a little odd, but...

Let's say you have a user population trapped on old Win95 machines. Even worse, they have limited amounts of HD space free even though the truly unnecessary cruft has been deleted from the Win95 installation - and no hope of parole (upgrade). By some quirk of fate somebody equipped their machines with 128MB of RAM. CPU speeds range from 233Mhz to 800Mhz. Right now they have only the IE 3.x that came with Win95 OSR 2.1, which is near to useless today except maybe for Google.

Somebody came along and told them they MUST use the web now, and they need access to sites more or less designed for IE 5 level support of HTML and CSS. As a matter of fact, they really want the island folk to use IE 5 but these machines are literally out of HD space. Even the browser cache may end up being relocated to a RAM drive of 32MB or so.

No requirement for IE components or ActiveX in general, no data binding, no MDAC, no VBScript support required.

What browser and version would have the smallest installed disk footprint yet give these islanders the "best" browsing experience (render most pages properly)? They'll probably need the regular IE core font set or equivalent.

Keep in mind they'll be stuck at this version for two years or more. So it needs to be stable - no patches can be added once the browser is deployed. And it needs to be fairly "current" from an IE-oriented intranet developer point of view.


So far, things considered include:

* IE 5.5 SP 2 with most recent security rollup (a pig)

* Mozilla 1.5

* Firebird (but there isn't really a stable version)

* Opera (dropped immediately, they won't pay a dime)

Right now Mozilla 1.5 looks like about the only contender, weighing in somewhere around 15 to 18 MB. IE55SP2 seems to run about 3 to 4 times that. A big question is how cleanly Mozilla 1.5 will render pages developed with an IE slant.

Would stepping back to a late IE 4 be usable and save enough footprint to be worth consideration?


I know this can be tough to answer without precise details of what in IE 5 is required. We're dealing with generalities on this end too right now. When I asked about XML support requirements I got back "umm... maybe." I already suggested that it is not April 1st yet. It sounds wacky (and it is), but does anybody have any suggestions to offer?

 

[bcastner]

If I was on a deserted Island, and had access to the internet, I would (as all of this would fit on a floppy or CD:

Start by having a omplete download on CD of IE 6. It is slightly tricky to get the install to work. As Daniel Petri notes, "just copy and paste the damn instructions."

http://www.petri.co.il/download_the_full_ie_package.htm

I would then make certain I had copies of:
cwshredder *
SpyBot 1.2 *
AdAware *

* = Update the definition files within the program as the first step.

http://www.spywareinfo.com/downloads.php?cat=sp#det

I would have a good antivirus program, and a good firewalll product installed, even on my little island.

 

[dilettante]

Well, IE 6 isn't even supported on Win95, so that's out just to begin with.

These are some really odd machines. I can't change the OS, and cannot add/upgrade hard drives or RAM. Basically I can make a one-time visit to install a browser later than IE 3.x, and that's it. I have about 20MB of HD space to play with.

 

[search66]

Here comes Opera boy to the rescue!

For a slower machine like that with limited resources, I would go and download Opera 6. It's small fast and reliable.

Why did you have problems with it? But IE is a hog, so I would avoid that altogether if you have limited resources.

But for limited browsing, Firebird would be my second choice. As *cool* as Mozilla is; it still is quite chunky.

 

[bcastner]

dilletante,

You are absolutely right, my bad on IE 6 with Windows 95.

With only 20 megs of hard disk space, this is a tough one. Opera is possible, but likely requires more disk space than you have to give. I would vote for Net Captor:

http://www.netcaptor.com/

Or the original Mozilla. But see:

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Clients/WWW/Browsers/

 

[search66]

True. I think that Opera (with Java) is 12 megs compressed.

 

[IFRs]

Opera without Java is very small.
Java for anything will be a load.

 

[dilettante]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I agree, Java support is a toughie with things as tight as this.

Gives me some things to play with - I'll try "weighing" some different installs.

 

[Xemus]

There's no way at all to upgrade the hard drives? The rest of the stats for the computers seem ok, not great, but able to run Windows 2000 nicely, so hard drives are your bottleneck. From your statement, it sounds like there are major budget issues, but is a storage upgrade at all possible? Especially if they have to wait two more years for an upgrade.
How big are the drives now? If you do switch away from IE, can you remove it to gain space?
More info on different broswsers here:

http://www.codehouse.com/browser_watch/

Need ammo for an upgrade recommendation?

http://www.itsak.com/tech/upgrade.htm

http://www.closedsocket.com

 

[dilettante]

The "hard drives" are actually flash drives, that's where all the grief is coming from. These are almost like a kiosk or thin-client platform.