I have a old Zenith Data Systems Z-Note 325L laptop
386 @ 25 Mhz / 4megs of Ram
/ 80 meg hard drive / tranceiver to Cat5 (10 base T)
For more room, I have some Network Drives mapped.
Is there any Internet Browsers that you guys use... that are really compact? I.E. 4 and 5 are out.. too little memory.
Thank for any info.

I know a guy who uses Opera on old laptops; 386/486; anout the same horsepower as your Zenith.

Also, it used to be that Netscape had their earlier versions available for download. They may have dropped them, but somebody must have a copy of Netscape 3.x tucked away somewhere.

Here's the NS archive:

http://wp.netscape.com/download/archive/client_archive3x.html

HTH

Check out Lightspeed's 16-bit browser page - probably Opera 3.62 would be your best bet.

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For a 386 with 4 megs of RAM, just about any Windows browser is going to seriously crawl. Some of the old 2.x and 3.x versions of Netscape are available at http://browsers.evolt.org/?navigator/16bit and other sites. I have just about every version of Netscape archived as well. Navigator 3.04 with Javascript disabled should work for a good share of sites; 2.0 would be pushing it.

You may find that most DOS browsers won't be as painfully slow on a 386. Arachne is the best graphical browser for DOS and very easy to set up. Bobcat Lynx 386, on the other hand, is the fastest browser for those specs.

If you decide to use a DOS web browser then instead of Bobcat Lynx, look at DOSLynx, it is still in developement and more mature than previous Lynx variants:

http://users.nccw.net/fmacall/

Need a small browser for 3.11 ?

One of the very smallest stand-alone browsers that does not rely on M$IE to get you on-line is Mosaic v1 (also known as WINTEL), authored at the University of Illinois in 1993.

At a whopping 607 Kb (installed), it's "footprint" is barely noticeable as a drain on either your CPU or your RAM.

It isn't fancy, though, and it doesn't recognize ACTIVE-X, most JAVA, and other M$ spyware, but it does recognize various image formats (*.bmp, *.pcx, *.gif, *.jpg) and web-page codes (*.htm, *.html, *.php, etc.)

I got my copy on a CD (Software Vault - Emerald Collection) I bought at a thrift shop for $1.00 :-D , but you can download a copy of Mosaic v1 (Wintel) and a bunch of other "retro-browsers" at this link:

http://www.sauna.org/retro/dl-all.htm

Hope this helps!

:-D

I remember reading an article years ago about how to make low spec machines into good internet machines. Can't remember all the details but basically you use the browser itself as the shell instead of Program Manager. That way you have maximum resources for the browser and can perhaps run something fairly modern. I think you edit win.ini and set the line shell= to point at your browser executable. When you reboot Windows it will boot straight into the browser.

Anyone tried this? I don't have Win 3.1 anymore to be able to try it out.

In regards to the previous post, setting a browser as the shell only saves a marginal amount of resources (about 1%) and RAM (around 5 kB) by not having Progman running in the background. You'd still need to have Winsock or something similar running as well. In any event, it won't make any difference in terms of speed.

I still stand by my advice in saying that it's best to stick with DOS for browsing on a 386. I have personally tried Netscape 2 and 3 on a 386, and they each take at least a minute or two just to start up. I wouldn't advise most Windows browsers on anything less than a 486, unless you have incredible patience.