SuperHighway Browser

SuperHighway Browser -- Frontier Technologies' SuperHighway Browser (formerly known as Win Tapestry) is a fairly standard web browser with one unique feature -- it's the first browser on the 'net to offer support for Johnson-Grace ART files. ART files are a special combination filetype that allows both a sound clip and an image to be integrated together at extremely high compression rates. This results in much faster downloads than regular .gif and .jpg files with the added benefit of audio to go along with the graphic. Just how high are the compression rates for ART files? Well, here's an example provided by Frontier, "The ART graphic of our Haunted Mountain started with a 24 Kb .BMP file and a 335 Kb .WAV file. After compressing these together, it turned out to be an incredibly small 14 Kb ART file!" For more information on this exciting technology, check out the Johnson-Grace Art Press site. Unfortunately, this extremely cool feature isn't enough to keep the current release of SuperHighway Browser from escaping mediocrity. Although the browser does support necessities like centering, background images, helper applications (including options for launching external gopher, ftp, and telnet clients), multiple document capability (up to thirty HTML documents can be displayed concurrently), a search command, and standard HTML 3 tags, the absence of essential features like tables (of any kind), Netscapisms, caching, and the overall speed found in better browsers keeps SuperHighway from being more competitive. SuperHighway does include an interesting and useful twist on the bookmarking theme - an Internet Organizer is provided to store your bookmarks by subject, with many pre-installed bookmarks already configured. Notwithstanding the Internet Organizer and the support for ART files, the SuperHighway Browser still has a long way to go before it can become a viable and competitive alternative to the web titans. Now if only Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer supported ART files... Pros: First browser to offer support for ART files, cool Internet Organizer Cons: Slooowwwww, suffers from a significant case of feature deprivation New: Optional Cybersearch and Security modules now available, new built-in bookmarks, bug fixes Version Reviewed: 2.00d Date of Review: 1/7/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud apps conference Main Menu