Build a Perfect Browser

Last week’s discussion of browser alternatives got me thinking: Can there be a middle ground---a "happy medium" in the browser wars? It’s an interesting question. Here’s what I mean:

Take the Big Two browsers. They’re both powerful. Netscape just about invented the mass-market browser business and has done more to advance the browsing state of the art than just about any other company. Microsoft made it free and--- surprise!---has done more to set and follow standards than just about anyone.

But even the most ardent supporters of IE or Comm will admit the browsers’ limitations. They’re both huge apps with very spotty records in terms of bugs, for example. I didn’t hear a single soul suggest that either IE or Comm--- or even the two combined---were the last word in browsers.

Then there are newcomers and some old-time hangers-on in the browser wars. Some have innovative ideas---such as Opera’s multiple Windows within the browser. But here too, even the ardent fans admit the problems---the quirks, the bugs, the rough edges. Again, no one suggested that Opera or some other third browser was ready to be declared the final solution to our browsing problems. So what would the perfect browser be?

• Does size of the application matter, and if so, what’s the upper limit?
• Should the browser be dribbleware-based (like IE and Comm’s online upgrade services) or entirely self-contained (like Opera)?
• Should the browser support Java, Javascript, DHTML, VRML, streaming media, etc? Which standards matter to you?
• If there’s a choice between "cool" and "standard," which matters more?
• Does cross-platform performance (ie a Mac and Unix version) matter?
• Should it be free, or would you be willing to pay? If so, how much?
• Etc.

You get the idea.

There’s a ton of good ideas in this group---let’s toss them out on the table and see what kind of a "what if" browser we can design together! Join in starting Monday about noon EST (GMT-5) at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/

Part Two: Answers For Three Common Questions

[Recap: I get over 300 emails a day, many of them asking for help with various hardware and software problems. I answer what I can, and am glad to help when I’m able. But even at a minute or two per mail, I could spend my whole day doing nothing but giving free tech support by mail, and I’d slowly go broke! 8-)

Three questions come up more often than any others do, so it’s probably worthwhile to go over the answers here. Maybe you’ve had these questions, or know someone who does. In any case, by discussing the answers here, and having them posted in the permanent LangaList archives in the What’s New section of Langa.Com, it’s my hope that many readers can get the information they need!]

Last week, I covered "How to Make a Complete Boot Floppy." There was a minor typo in the last step where I said that at the end of the process your boot floppy is "not complete" when I meant "now complete." I think the context was clear, but I apologize for the typo, which both I and my volunteer proofreaders missed.

This week, I’ll cover how to use the free DriveSpace utility to achieve ultra-small, ultra-efficient cluster sizes; and next week, how to safely perform a no-reformat clean install of Windows.

How to use the free DriveSpace utility to achieve
ultra-small, ultra-efficient cluster sizes

I get a lot of mail like this:

Dear Mr. Langa,

I enjoyed your "Tips from the top" page in the Winter 1998 issue of Windows magazine. I was particularly intrigued by your description of the abilities of DriveSpace.

However, I was not able to get DriveSpace to create 0.5 KB allocation units. Every time I tried to get it to DO something, it responded with a message that mentioned the need to compress the data. Would it be possible for you to publish a follow-up piece that expanded a little on your original statements?

Thanks for your consideration,

Rob Harper

On a large hard drive, a "FAT16" partition might chop the drive into segments 32K in size. FAT32 might chop the disk into 4K segments. Either way, this is the smallest amount of disk space the operating system can reserve. This means you get waste. Save a 1K file, and FAT16 will place the file inside a 32K area on the disk, in effect wasting 31K of the capacity. FAT32 will place the file inside a 4K area, wasting 3K.

With lots of files, the waste really adds up. A typical large FAT16 drive wastes several hundred megabytes!

Enter DriveSpace. DriveSpace comes in two major versions. Every copy of Win95 and Win98 ships with basic DriveSpace that can double the capacity of any FAT16 hard drive. The Win95 Plus! Pack (a $50 item) offers an upgraded version that can increase the compression levels even higher on some files. The Win95 Plus version of Drivespace works fine under Win98, too.

For FAT32 drives, you’ll need a different compression scheme---not Drivespace---found in the Win98 Plus! pack. I’ll write more on that later.

Drivespace works by creating a giant file on your FAT16 hard drive that’s called the "compressed partition." The compressed partition is a real file subject to the rules of all real files on your hard drive. It uses the normal cluster scheme that your system would normally use. But because it’s one giant file, it avoids most of the "waste" or "slack" space that normally happens when you drop many small files on a disk.

Drivespace converts your real files into pseudo-files that exist within the compressed partition. The Drivespace software lets you access these pseudo-files exactly as if they were normal files. But because they are not normal files, they are not bound by the normal limits of cluster sizes. Drivespace can chop up the compressed partition far more efficiently than can DOS, using pseudo-clusters as small as 512 bytes. If you save a 1K file with Drivespace, you’ll waste little to no space at all! Compare that to the 3-to-32K of wasted space without Drivespace.

What’s more, Drivespace can compress files as it saves them. It operates invisibly in the background to squeeze files down to the smallest possible size. Between the avoided cluster waste and the file compression, Drivespace can let you roughly double the capacity of your hard drives.

In the bad old days of DOS, drive compression schemes got a bad reputation. They were flaky and unreliable. Although Drivespace is reliable---for example, it literally has never caused me to lose a single byte---it never was very popular, in part because people were wary of it due to bad experiences with earlier disk compression schemes.

Some people are afraid of the performance hit that the extra step of compressing or uncompressing exacts. This too is a relic of the bad old days when we all ran machines that were snails compared to today’s average systems. If you have a very old, very underpowered machine, you might—might---notice a performance hit, but on any reasonable system, I’ll bet you won’t notice any difference at all.

You can use Drivespace on any FAT16 drive to reduce cluster waste and to double the capacity of your drives. I don’t know why you’d want one without the other---I recommend you simply run Drivespace and let it do what it wants to do. Your drive will be much larger and have much less wasted space than before.

But if you want to use Drivespace just to reduce cluster waste, there are two ways:

Partial: Backup everything. Run Drivespace, let it go to completion. After it compresses the files on your disk, it will ask what compression option you want. Choose "high performance" and no further files will be compressed until and unless you run Compression Agent. You also can use Compression Agent to exclude already-compressed files from compression so they get expanded back to full size when Agent runs. Either way, you’ll have very efficient cluster size.

Full: Backup everything. Reformat. Reinstall the "compact" version of Win95. Run Drivespace, let it do what it wants to do. After it runs, compressing what little is on your disk, it will ask what compression option you want. Choose "high performance" and no further files will be compressed until and unless you run Compression Agent. You then can install whatever other Win95 components you want, all your apps, and restore your data. You’ll have very efficient cluster size without compression.

Is There Freemail In Your Future?

Maybe you saw Mike Elgan’s note that disclosed that Microsoft’s HotMail now has 16 million email customers--- more than AOL, more than anyone else in the world. And HotMail is gaining new subscribers at the rate of 100,000 per day!

That’s a number that has to make you sit up and go, "Hmmmmm," especially when that’s just one of the freemail providers out there.

Freemail is usually ad-supported: the email window carries ad banners like many web pages. Freemail also often requires that you provide considerable demographic information (education, income, etc.) before you sign on--- far more than most ISP’s require. The explosive growth of freemail shows that neither of these is much of an obstacle to most people.

But if you peruse the sigs in the posts here in the WinMag and CMPnet BBS areas, the overwhelming majority of email addresses are from conventional (non-free) email. I have to wonder why.

I’ll tell you why I’ve personally avoided freemail in this week’s CMPnet column, and then I’d love to hear either why you do or don’t use freemail. Share your thoughts---and let’s check out each other’s return addresses--- starting Wednesday at http://www.langa.com/badlink.htm.

(Prior to that, Sunday-Tuesday, the " Avoiding Big Brother---Can the computer industry police itself?" discussion continues.)

I usually throw out spam immediately, but this week I got one missive that opened with this intriguing paragraph:

Sigh.

IE4, QuickTime and BrowserTune98

The newer QuickTime Plug-Ins have trouble with one of BrowserTune’s older QT-format tests. That’s interesting in itself, but it means I need a new QT file for the in-progress BT98 update. Suggestions welcome!

The new Service Pack for IE4 seems to exhibit some of the same problems as the pre-SP1 version; things can break mysteriously and without warning. One reader lost the ability to display all but the most basic fonts. Another lost Target Window support, and others have trouble with links (the weird bug where all links deliver the same page).

It appears to be a bug with the way some installable applets interact with IE. Fortunately, the fix outlined in past LangaLists and on the "broken browser" pages of BrowserTune works fine with the newest IE. Just follow those repair steps, and chances are your version of IE will revert back to good health!

I got a shrink-wrapped retail Win98 Upgrade box FedExed to me by Microsoft’s PR agency, so that means the final, retail boxes are in trucks and trains fanning out across the country even as I type this.

For most people, Win98 isn’t an essential upgrade, but it’s a highly desirable one. It works better, faster, smoother and more stably than any previous version of Windows. It won’t change your life, but it probably will make your day-to-day computing experience noticeably better.

I recommend a Win98 upgrade for just about everyone---in fact, I think it’s a better choice for almost everyone than any other version of Windows, including NT! Check out http://www.browsertune.com/win98.htm for more info.

Just or Grins: High-Tech Pharmaceuticals

Some Juno subscribers wrote to tell me that they’re seeing strange punctuation in their LangaLists; other readers had their text reflow in strange ways, leading to shortened line lengths. I’ve adjusted the settings on my end, and hopefully we’re now at the most generic, plain-vanilla, universally compatible ASCII level.