About Browse24

by Iván Cavero Belaúnde

Browse24 is a browser specifically designed for the 24 Hours of Democracy project. Unlike the official browser, Browse24 is serverless - it downloads the entire essay list once and uses JavaScript to let you walk through the essay instead of using cgi scripts. This adds up to lower load on the poor AOL servers and better performance in general, though you take a small hit on the first download. By virtue of using JavaScript and frames, however it requires Netscape 2.0.

If you want to use Browse24 for your own "tour," feel free to do so. You need to download index.html, controlpanel.html and about.html, as well as the appropriate GIFs, and modify them appropriately; the list of sites used lives inside control_panel.html, and this MPW script (sorry, Dave, I'm better at MPW than at Frontier) helps you munge a raw URL list into the desired JavaScript code. If you do use it, please link back to this site as well for people who want more info.

One caveat; because of a JavaScript quirk with forms, you must use the "Go!" button instead of pressing RETURN when you enter an essay # to go to (if you don't both frames get reloaded, so you get the essay you want below but the counter gets reset to 1 - not what you want).

Hope this makes everyone's surfing experience more enjoyable.