digitallysane
I'm very dissapointed with the 9.5 help. It does look somewhat better and that's it. All the functionality is worse than in 9.1. The example list is a mess, the whole system is slow and crashy, everything feels very fragile. There are layout bugs (especially on Linux) and the general usability of the system is very very low.
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Agreed, its probably the most rickety, monkey-infested help system I've seen.
A .chm file would be far more useful as the format is fast, portable and easily searchable by content or keyword. Additionally, most chm authoring programs alow html export (for linux and osx, if they can't open chm).
Lack of user comments in chm files is not an issue, as hardly anyone does this now anyway, nor is a lack of merging examples, as it is often broken in the present system.

There's recently been optimization's done to the help browser, grab the latest and try it. Also, I've found that a huge part of the problem is literally the browser itself. When I point my system browser to the same link, it zips. Admittedly not the optimum since you must have Houdini running, but it's worth noting.

Cheers,

J.C.

same here.. I have tried in both Safari and Firefox and it just says waiting for localhost…
So as of now I have no Help. Is there a way to fix it?
build 9.5.230

After doing a re-install of Houdini, I noticed that the first time it started the help browser, it checked the python version installed on the machine.

I'm thinking maybe there might be a connection between the problems people have with the browser, and their version of Python…

I have installed the latest python 2.6, and added it to my $PATH variable, and the help browser is fast and snappy! :-)