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My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted
articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things
Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your
submission to Dan Knight
.
Slow moving lines in the grocery store and slow loading Web pages
on my low-end PowerBook drive me
crazy.
Sometimes I can jump to a faster line at the grocery store, and
I've found that text-only browsers can speed up my access to the
web.
Most of the sites that I navigate are heavily textual, so I
usually don't need all of the images from traditional full-featured
browsers. I've found that surfing with text-only browsers on a
PowerBook 170 can be a remarkably
easy approach for web surfing.
Over the past several weeks I've tried WannaBe,
MacWeb,
and MacLynx, and
I've found that WannaBe meets most of my needs. I really like the
speed of this program; most sites will pop up in less than 5 seconds.
And Wannabe is a free download from the
Gamba Web site.
Wannabe doesn't allow sorts or searches, so I have used MacWeb to
snag URLs through searches in Google, and then I'll paste the URL
into the WannaBe address bar. However, MacWeb searches feel slow, and
using cut and paste for URLs bogs down my surfing, so I've tried a
few other tricks to speed things up.
In WannaBe, you can set a homepage when the program loads, so I've
set mine to Low End Mac. There are
many useful links to the Mac universe, so I've found it to be a good
jumping off point. To further expedite my surfing, I've copied a
number of URLs on Stickies notes. Stickies are a part of System 7.5,
but they've worked well on my PowerBook 170 with system 7.1. Whenever
I want to go to a particular site, I simply paste the URL from the
Stickies note into the WannaBe address bar.
I've even figured out a work around for searching with Google. I
noticed that Google searches all have similar URL's. For instance, a
search for Low End Mac and PowerBooks looks like this:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=lowendmac+powerbooks&safe=off&start=-9&sa=N>.
I copied that URL for one search into a stickies note, and use it as
a template for other searches. Whenever I start a search I cut out
the words lowendmac and powerbooks and add any other words with a
+.
I've also used Lynx because I have ZTerm, a shell account through
my ISP. I can connect to my school server using telnet and ZTerm. I'm
keeping Lynx as a backup, but after trying Wannabe, I've found Lynx
clumsy by comparison. WannaBe has a clean interface that is easy on
the eyes.
Of course, if you really want a full-featured browser that will
work on a 68030 machine, you can use iCab.
It has a small footprint and actually works fine on my PowerBook 170,
albeit slowly.
I don't always find that faster line in the grocery store, but
text-only browsers almost always speed up my sojourns on the
Internet.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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