2000 Floodgap HELP: Using a web browser to access gopher space updated 27 November 2004 The majority of you are probably using a web browser to explore Gopherspace. Happily, most web browsers will still understand Gopher, but they are at best suboptimal. No major web browser understands Gopher+, for one thing. Also, Internet Explorer should NOT be used at ALL! (I'll explain presently). Still, they're the easiest way to access Gopherspace, so here's some help with using them and deficiencies you need to be aware of. Lynx is probably the best browser for surfing both the Web and Gopherspace in terms of its elegance. Text mode may be a limited oeuvre, but Lynx makes it shine. It seamlessly shifts between both protocols without crufty helpers or proxies, is fast and respectful to servers, dizzyingly configurable, and interestingly is the only web browser that recognises GET gopher selectors as web pages and automatically maps them into URLs. This is more exciting than it sounds, trust me. :-) It also supports the gamut of Gopher features, including search servers. The only thing it lacks is Gopher+ (oh, okay, and images ;). NCSA Mosaic, all versions tested, supports Gopher, but does not properly handle i itemtypes, which are used for displaying informational text; instead, it renders them as links, which invariably fail when clicked on. However, it is otherwise functional, and has most functions supported except for Gopher+ (tested 1.x, 2.x and 3.x). Pre-Mozilla Netscape (not the current codebase) is not spectacular but certainly functional as a gopher client. Examining version 4.8's support, it doesn't know how to understand Gopher+ but it's tolerant, and like Lynx, supports the gamut of Gopher features. It properly (or at least sensibly) formats gopher menus, accepts i itemtype, and doesn't try to mess with selectors. It is also very quick, simple and painless to use. While it isn't as seamless as Lynx, it gets the job done. Even though it is aging rapidly in terms of its standards support, where gopher is concerned it's a decent choice, and for older systems is probably still the best all-around option for Web and gopher in a single application. Mozilla's (and all current Mozilla derivatives', including Firefox, Netscape, Camino and others) current gopher support has improved considerably. Before Netscape 6.2.3, it didn't even support it. Now, as of this writing, it not only allows proper access to gopher menus and most search facilities, but no longer resorts selectors as earlier versions have done, which allows search engines and so on to present salient link order. However, it still does not support i itemtype at all, and you'll see NO information text from servers you access, which is a bummer (Bugzilla bug 118438). Nevertheless, you can use it to get and download files, at least, and it works stably. (Why Netscape 4's gopher engine was not used in Mozilla is still a mystery to me.) At the present time, Bernd Rinnerthaler has informed me that bug 118438 regarding i itemtype support has now been repaired -- but unfortunately, it did not make it into the Mozilla stable branch quickly enough, so it is not present in the currently available release forms of the Mozilla browser family (as of this writing, this applies to Camino 0.8.1, Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7.2 and Mozilla 1.7.3, to hit the major ones), although it is reportedly present in the nightly builds if you're feeling lucky. The Bugzilla URLs are https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118438 and in Firefox, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248230 Support is expected in Firefox 1.1, Camino 0.9 and Mozilla 1.8 presently. For the moment, if you have old-style Netscape, you might consider using that if you need i itemtype support. And now, Internet Explorer. Because of security bulletin MS02-047, Gopher support is NOW DISABLED IN INTERNET EXPLORER 6 and higher. Rather than fix the buffer overrun in the Gopher protocol handler, Microsoft, in typical fashion, simply decided to disable it entirely. Instead of spending another paragraph or two on a droll rant about how high up their rear ends the heads of Microsoft technical designers are, we'll just talk dispassionately about the impact of this security flaw: while the risk of an exploit is low in our very friendly community, it is not impossible, and the flaw is apparently damaging enough to be graded Critical. Nevertheless, if you want to reenable it, download the registry file from the clients directory here at Floodgap, or go into RegEdit, drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings, and enter a key named EnableGopher with type DWord and value 00000001. The reg file is available from gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/9/gopher/clients/ie6/iegopher.zip It has been tested to work on Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. You may read Microsoft's brightly boneheaded corporate burble on why they didn't bother to fix their code at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS02-047.asp **If you're getting an error from IE about all gopher sites, resulting in an inexplicable error message 'Cannot find server or DNS' which is totally spurious (I get many complaints about floodgap's DNS, which is completely functional, because of this completely inaccurate explanation), that's the symptom of this error. Patch your IE, or better yet, ditch it for something better. If you are still using Internet Explorer 4 or 5, or you ignored my advice and patched Internet Explorer 6 to reenable gopher support, the news is not much better: IE in any incarnation is miserable as a Gopher client. Because it inherits the NCSA Mosaic codebase, it does not handle the i itemtype correctly, which is used for displaying informational text, but that's just the least of your worries. It does not allow access to TCP ports other than 70, which is a VERY crippling limitation, and you can even outright *crash* IE 4 through 5 completely (and even Microsoft Web Proxy) by going to any gopher selector that has a question mark '?' in it. This seems to have been repaired, finally, in some versions of 5.0 but I still observe this bug from time to time. There are also some reported problems with using itemtype 7 search servers, such as Veronica-2, where some versions just hang. It does seem, however, that older versions of Internet Explorer, apparently v2.x and before, and possibly v3.x, do not suffer from the problems that 4.x and 5.x do (quite strange, as IE was allegedly based on Mosaic). This also means that webTV users can surf Gopherspace unfettered, since it's based on an older version of IE; it appears very similarly to Netscape's presentation. Regardless, IE is such a worthless web browser in just about every other respect that I strongly suggest you jump to something like Firefox -- a far faster, more secure and more capable browser -- than remaining with IE for your web browsing tasks. As soon as Mozilla fixes i itemtype in their released builds, it will probably be my Gopher browser of choice -- Camino and Firefox already do all my Web browsing. Get Firefox now. http://www.getfirefox.com/ Mac users, check out Camino at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ Konqueror, the KDE browser, doesn't seem to work at all. Although it will connect, some screen shots I was kindly sent by a contributor show that it only displays the first line sent by the server. Not much help. This is from version 2.1.1. However, enterprising users have come through for the Konqueror gopher community and generated a kioslave that in my cursory evaluation seems to cover just about all the basic tasks. If you'd like to try it (and tell me how well it works), you can download kio_gopher from its home site at http://kgopher.berlios.de/ In the shameless plug department, HyperLink 2.5a and 2.5e for the Commodore 64 (disclosure: yours truly is the author) renders Gopherspace modeled on Netscape, and does support indexed search servers. CSO searches are not available in HL yet 606 , however. i itemtype is supported. No Gopher+ yet. See http://www.armory.com/%7Espectre/cwi/hl/ What do you do for browsers that utterly lack Gopher support at all? (This includes Apple Safari and Opera, unpatched IE, and so on.) In this case, you can use a proxy to do the conversion and spit out pre-rendered menus. Besides the Public Proxy we offer here at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ open source also can help; a Squid developer has recently informed me that Squid has gopher support (or will shortly), modeled on Netscape 4.x's gopher rendering. This is an excellent proxy server and should provide good capabilities. Look for it in version 2.5. Again, user comments invited. Please note that not all proxy servers are created equal; I am also informed that Apache's proxy server does not support gopher at all (403 error). The bottom line: Serious exploration of Gopher still demands a Gopher+ client to get the most out of the protocol, and we offer some here. Nevertheless, if you'd like to go for an all-in-one browser solution, or if you're just playing around and don't want to install something else, we recommend Lynx or Netscape 4.x, though once Mozilla and its ilk have fixed their final issues, that will likely become our platform of choice. You can also check out a standards-based proxy that we offer at http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ Send your questions and your suggestions/test cases (particularly with browsers we haven't mentioned here) to: gopher@floodgap.com . 0