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Surfing the Modern Web with Ancient Browsers
- agumonkey 13y agoFirst thing I did when I got a Sun Ultra 10+ running. Of course being a Sun machine, you get to enjoy HotJava, probably the only web browser with a `garbage collect` menu entry. I could display things, as expected, very crudely.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoAnd a nice 'meet the people' page :-) Of course you don't need an Sun box to run it.
- pipeep 13y ago> probably the only web browser with a `garbage collect` menu entry In Firefox, you can force the global JS engine to GC on the `about:memory` page.
- agumonkey 13y agoHow stupid of me, after following nnethercote efforts on his blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/aboutmemory/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/aboutmemory/) for months ..
- RBerenguel 13y agoOh, HotJava! I still remember using it years ago. It was surprisingly snappy and effective
- agumonkey 13y agoHa ? wikipedia mentions the first JVM were not performant enough for that. Which version did you use ?
- RBerenguel 13y agoI don't remember the version, it should be between 1997-2000 with a Pentium 2. I didn't find it specially slow or unresponsive, but my image of it may be more idealistic than what it really was. I remember using it on occasions, just for the sake of using different stuff than usual.
- rco8786 13y agoLol @ DNA Lounge. Also, why? Outside of the joy of hacking
- josephpmay 13y agoCouldn't, let's say Google, run this server side and redirect legacy browsers to it? It could potentially allow large websites to drop legacy support more quickly and move to more modern technologies.
- lstamour 13y agoGoogle did similar proxying for mobiles back in the day. If you used Google's mobile search you'd often end up on pages via a proxy. They still do it now, or used to for Windows Phone 8 devices last I checked. Which is odd, since there's nothing restrictive about IE10 on a phone. I wonder how Google's proxy would work in Mosaic or Lynx?
- omegaham 13y agoLegacy systems, unfortunately, are here to stay. Not everyone gets to update their browsers whenever they want to. And while I don't have to deal with IE 1.5, I definitely have to deal with IE 6 in my workplace. IT is a bunch of idiots, so we'll probably still be using it for the next ten years. Hell, some of them actually updated to Windows 7, and we're using IE 7 on them. Completely absurd. So if there are ways to make pages accessible to older systems, that is a very good thing. Of course, I'll never be able to use it, but someone else probably can.
- yuhong 13y agoWin7 shipped with IE8.
- joshstrange 13y agoSource: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie7_6-windows_other/what-version-of-internet-explorer-comes-with/ab41ffe9-fc95-4f6f-8d2a-ee3422a00f82 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie7_6-windows_ot...
- malanj 13y agoI guess HN will pretty much just work fine?
- claudius 13y agoIt renders a bit weirdly in w3m (indentation is shown as * and plusses and such), but apart from that, it seems to work just fine, so there is probably little reason why it shouldn’t work in any other browser that understands basic HTML? (posted with w3m, written in a linked-in Emacs tab…). Edit: Screenshot: http://chubig.net/t/w3m-hn.png http://chubig.net/t/w3m-hn.png
- sigil 13y agoGood to know that you can log into HN with an unpatched w3m now. w3m sends "Content-length: " instead of "Content-Length: ", which HN used to dislike. https://github.com/acg/w3m/commit/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390e43a874b3395fc https://github.com/acg/w3m/commit/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390...
- userbinator 13y agoI can testify that HN works well in IE6. It's mostly advanced HTML5 features, scripting, and CSS that aren't supported in older browsers, but basic text formatting and forms shouldn't be any issue.
- colechristensen 13y agoSometimes I think back and ask myself if all of this progress in web standards has really got us anywhere. What can we do now that couldn't be done 20 years ago (putting aside connection speed) and is all of this progress really worth the trouble. It makes a person want to start over, from scratch while keeping it simple adding as little as possible. Of course something like that would have to be done extraordinarily well to be worth it at all to avoid https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- pjmlp 13y agoIt just made us lost the sense where to go, by re-inventing, badly, what was already possible on the desktop with Hypercard and similar systems.
- dasil003 13y agoIt's a nice dream, but even if you had that power to go back and time you'd probably just make other mistakes. There isn't an intelligence capable of designing big open standards like the web, rather they only move forward by natural selection, much like terrestrial life has. In the end I think we've gotten some pretty remarkable things this way, remember before the web there was no such thing as cross-platform, instantly-available globally, and accessible to any person with any disability multimedia. Few people seem to recognize how much of an accomplishment this is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E
- yuhong 13y agoYea, that is why WHATWG HTML is a "living standard". In fact, I am thinking that even the "HTML5" buzzword is a misnomer.
- stoptalkingshit 13y agoNope. What has happened is a remarkable idea has fallen into the hands of baboons, who promptly bungled the implementation completely. And now we have this myth that it has to "evolve" because for years some people missed the OBVIOUS. Welcome to the future of shamanistic computing: blood-cooled CPUs, integrated ouija boards, USB incense burners...
- ie4_still_used 13y agoIt is a revelation how quickly some sites will load when you turn off JS, and by extension much of the modern web. I mean, really, really quick, as you avoid the blocking of third-party services, which is quite common these days. It does also highlight how many sites actually depend on large numbers of external sites for basic functions on their own site. As an example - a site would not load at all, because it was trying to load dogshit like Disqus. Sigh!
- lstamour 13y agoThat's funny, because in Third-Party JavaScript written by folks from Disqus, they partially explain the lengths they went to so that they didn't disrupt the page loading. Of course, in turn Disqus does have to protect itself from the page using iframes, so there's room for junk in both directions. It's perhaps amazing the web works as well as it does, all tangled up across domains. Hence the point of this image-rendering proxy. I'd be more interested in a proxy that does the reverse -- strip websites down to bare blue links on grey by any means necessary, including OCR of images. That could be fun. For a few minutes. ;-)
- thothamon 13y agoI don't see the point of providing a life-support system for these old, insecure, outdated web browsers. It's not really analogous to, say, driving old, restored cars. These browsers are rootkit magnets. The people who use this unmaintained software are inherently less safe.
- nekopa 13y agoI'm interested in using this for my (original) iPad. As time progresses, more and more websites cause the browser to crash. The latest example was when I tried to view the new apple iCar thingy on apple.com. Never could get it to load. I don't think that my tablet is a root kit magnet, nor that I'm inherently less safe. I just find that this hardware works well enough for most of my needs, except now for browsing the web, which I never thought would happen...
- mnx 13y agoAnd can't you just install an alternative browser? do none exist for the ipad?
- Yetanfou 13y agoNothing official, as Apple only allows browser shells (which use the iOS version of WebKit), no complete browsers.
- kryptiskt 13y agoOpera Mini does the rendering server side so that isn't beholden to that rule.
- gknoy 13y agoWhen I tried to install a recent Chrome on my in-laws' ipad, it required a newer version of IOS than was available for that model of Ipad.
- joshuacc 13y ago
- ohazi 13y agoI still use links pretty regularly. Not to the exclusion of modern browsers of course, but sometimes it's nice to read longer articles as actual text without all the fluff, and to be able to stop reading and then continue a session on another computer (w/ tmux). The only thing I find mildly annoying is that HN comment threads get flattened.
- mahmoudhossam 13y agoYou might want to consider using pocket. http://getpocket.com http://getpocket.com
- sadris 13y agosounds like google keep
- Spittie 13y agoKeep is a totally different service. You can compare Pocket with Instapaper, ReadItLater and similar sites.
- jonathansizz 13y agoTo explain further: Pocket (and equivalent) 1] strips out all the extraneous cruft from an article, keeping only the text (in a typeface and font size of your choosing) and any included photos/videos; 2] acts as a centralized archive of articles, which can be tagged and favourited at will (so you don't need to bookmark articles in the browser for later reading); and 3] is available across multiple devices (phones, tablets, PCs) for a single account, including offline access. It's an awesome experience to simply right-click-save interesting articles in your desktop browser during a work break, knowing that you'll be able to read them whenever and however you like, for example on your tablet in bed in the evening.
- cocoflunchy 13y agoPocket is actually ReadItLater rebranded ;)
- rcarmo 13y agoVery cool. Somehwat ironic that I'm reading this in Firefox Aurora on my VPS, controlled from my iPad :)
- ChickeNES 13y agoInteresting sounding setup. What software are you using for the forwarding, VNC, X11, or something else?
- rcarmo 13y agoI use xrdp (google xrdp scarygliders for a bleeding edge version) and Jump Desktop, which does RDP over SSH without fuss. Latency over a 3G connection is low enough for coding. I have the a Vagrant template for setting this up here: https://github.com/rcarmo/vagrant-templates https://github.com/rcarmo/vagrant-templates ...all you need to do is read the Vagrantfile. I use the vagrant-lxc plugin to set up and tear down these environments on Digital Ocean.
- smoe 13y agoThis could also be useful to circumvent the censorship in some places, no? I've seen a site which convert websites to images for that very reason a few years ago. Although less sophisticated. But sadly I can't remember the name.
- bbanyc 13y agoWorth noting: sufficiently ancient browsers (e.g. Netscape 1.x and most versions of Mosaic) can't even connect to modern websites, as they predate HTTP/1.1 and the "Host:" header. See http://www.jwz.org/hacks/http10proxy.pl http://www.jwz.org/hacks/http10proxy.pl for a workaround. (Unfortunately SSL was developed in an HTTP/1.0 world and it's taken nearly 20 years for us to get the equivalent functionality with SNI.)
- Mz 13y agoI think this stuff just inherently matters. I recently talked to my kids about the American postal service and how you can still send things "general delivery." It's a little used option and you can't use it to replace a regular mailing address, but when I worked in insurance, I did send a check "general delivery" once. I think the family in question was living out of an RV and traveling around regularly. Maybe they were retired. I did not really know. They had me send the check to the nearest post office. These new fangled RV lifestyles would not work so well if you could not occasionally use this very old fashioned thing called general delivery. While I was working in insurance, every time they upgraded, it introduced new bugs and some upgrades (where we would migrate something to a whole new system) failed to be backwards compatible. This created real problems. It was still necessary to preserve old information and old methods of doing things. For example, most of the claims were done on a computer using digitalized images of the paperwork which had been submitted. Once in a while, it was necessary to do an actual paper claim. Not everyone knew how to do a paper claim but it was information that had been preserved. I repeatedly ran into situations at work where things could potentially just go to hell in a hand basket if some old methodology were not somehow still preserved and available in spite of being outdated. Someone, somewhere still uses these browsers for various reasons. I am glad someone sometimes works on this type of issue, never mind how silly might appear to folks who take it for granted that upgrading your system to the latest thing is the norm. It may be for you. It isn't for everyone.
- antihero 13y agoThere are free, legacy-compatible operating systems (Linux) that have modern browsers and work on a huge range of hardware. Creating sites that are compatible with super-old browsers is costly, and makes development of things like JS based webapps either complex or not even possible. Why should we spend money or time fixing things for a tiny percentage of the population who have options?
- blahedo 13y agoWell, that's why it's not the case that every application and website should worry about it. Which is why the OP's project is so nice: it abstracts the problem into an emulator, so one person can worry about it and solve it for (to a first approximation) all sites on the one side and all legacy browsers on the other side.
- jmspring 13y agoI just recently installed Ecom station in order to play the OS2 version of Galactic Civilizations that I have. Browsing around in Navigator 4 was interesting. I'll need to try a bit more.
- notastartup 13y agowhat I basically want from this is a png-browser-vnc. basically, any action you perform (mouse click, mouse over, typing text), it will get sent to a qtwebkit process, and render you back the results. Now instead of rerendering the entire screenshot of the page, it should only render the region where the change occured. For example, if a mouse moves over a menu, it will figure out which region the image has changed as a result of this (onDomChange probably) and render that portion, send it back to the client. Still looking for this or maybe I should build it.
- ezequiel-garzon 13y agoCould somebody provide some details about the picidae network [1] mentioned in the article? Its focus seems to be circumventing censorship as a proxy, which makes me wonder why they use images instead of just serving the same content. [1] http://net.picidae.net/ http://net.picidae.net/
- kevingadd 13y agoImages probably help bypass text-based censorship (i.e. deep packet inspection, proxies)
- gedrap 13y agoHm, I remember there was a thing called Opera Mini (8-10 years ago?). It worked in a similar way so that you could browse web using old basic cellphones. It was quite popular in Eastern Europe where having computer with Internet access was something out of reach for a large fraction of population. I was using Nokia 3510i for that purpose :)
- shwetank 13y agoIt's still pretty popular even now. More than 250 million people use it worldwide.