This short document provides a little background on the development of FrameFree.

Last wednesday May 1, 1996 I was giving a talk down at CalTech, and I got into a discussion with one of my hosts about the user interface horror of frames under netscape. Later on in the evening, I realized there there was a solution, even though netscape does not have a user option that lets you turn frames off.

All we had to do was replace all the strings in the program that looked like "frame" with "xxxxx". Initially we used EMACS to globally replace the string in Netscape. This worked, but modified about 40 places. We wanted a more elegant solution that could be distributed so we investigated doing this with the unix tool "sed", but it turns out that sed won't work on binary files on IRIX.

After I got back from my trip, on thursday evening, I decided to simply write a short C program that would modify just the places in the Netscape executable that needed it. That's when I wrote framefree.c

Last night, after discovering that HotWired and even SUCK. had coverted to frames, I decided to create a little web site about FrameFree!

It works great on UNIX and PCs, but I've gotten several requests from MAC users. Unfortunately, I don't know if anyone has ported FrameFree to the MAC yet.

On July 1, 1996, Stephen Matta sent me the "FrameFree Now" gif image. Thanks Steve!