Is Russnet free?

Absolutely. We only ask that you register in order to use the language modules. This is so that you may keep track of your scores as you progress through the activities.

Do I need special fonts?

No. There was a time when Russnet used a custom created font, because there was no widely accepted standard for rendering Russian text on the web. However, time has passed, and unicode has become a worldwide standard for rendering text in almost every language. Russnet's core modules have been converted to use this standard, so no special fonts or programs are required. You can type in Russian in Russnet the way you would in any other program. If you do not know how to set your computer up to type in Russian, we do provide an online keyboard that lets you choose between standard and phonetic layout.

Some of the oldest content on Russnet still does require the old Russnet fonts. Business Russian and Cultural Map of Russia, for example, require these fonts. These particular modules are no longer actively supported, so use them at your own risk. Business Russian may be updated in the future to support unicode.

What are the system requirements for Russnet?

Russnet relies heavily on javascript and cookies - so in order for Russnet to function, users must have javascript and cookies enabled in their web browser. In addition to that, audio and video portions are presented in RealPlayer format. You may download RealPlayer for free.

We only support modern web browsers. Our policy is to support the current and previous release of major web browsers. At the moment we support Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. The list of web browser versions we support are:

• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 8
• Firefox 2
• Firefox 3

We recommend that people use Firefox whenever possible, as its standards compliance, stability and security are superior to that of most other browsers on the market. You may freely download the latest version of Firefox here.

Because of modern web standards, Russnet will probably function normally in other modern browsers such as Safari and Opera - but they are not officially supported at this time.

Note that we have dropped support for Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 lacks the basic standards compliance and security that is critical for even simple web browsing as of 2009. It's successor, IE7 was released in October 2006.