I believe framebuffer would not be of any relevance for arachne, other apps like e.g. mplayer or links could output graphics via framebuffer or svgalib or X11 when built to support all of those.
I played with latest arachne for DOS in dosemu yesterday which worked fine with local files under Xorg, but failed on virtual terminal - I did not go as far as attempting to set up networking for dosemu.