The World Wide Web of the 90s was a magical place, where you couldn’t click two links without getting bombarded with phrases such as the Information Super Highway and Multimedia Experience. Of course, the multimedia experience you got on your Windows 9x PC was mostly limited to low-res, stuttery RealMedia and Windows video format clips, but what if you could experience YouTube back then, on your ‘multimedia-ready’ Celeron PC, running Netscape 4.5?
Cue the [Throaty Mumbo] bloke over on that very same YouTube, and his quest to make this dream come true. Although somewhat ridiculous on the face of it, the biggest problem is actually the era-appropriate hardware, as it was never meant to decode and display full-HD VP9-encoded videos.
Because the HTTPS requirement has meant that no 1990s or early 2000s browser will ever browse the modern WWW, a proxy was going to be needed no matter what. This Python-based proxy then got kitted out with not just the means to render down the convoluted HTML-CSS-JS mess of a YouTube page into something that a civilized browser can display, but also to fetch YouTube videos with yt-dlp and transcode it into MPEG1 in glorious SD quality for streaming to Netscape on the Windows 98 PC.
Because the same civilized browsers also support plugins, such as Netscape’s NPAPI, this meant that decoding and rendering the video was the easy part, as the browser just had to load the plugin and the latter doing all the heavy lifting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with some tweaks even Netscape 2.0 can be used to browse YouTube and play back videos this way, with fullscreen playback and seeking support.
Although these days only a rare few modern browsers like Pale Moon still support NPAPI, it’s easy to see how the introduction of browser plugins boosted the multimedia future of the WWW that we find ourselves in today.
great browser, my first one, still feel the scent of it
there was a lynx as well those days but the glory goes to NS
and then opera comes and rule them all
Indeed, thumbs up for the Navigator. Though to me, that’s a pretty modern version. So it’s interesting to learn about it.
There also was that Netscape Communicator bundle, I vaguely remember.
Personally, I’ve used to use Netscape Navigator 2 in the System 7/Windows 3.1 days.
When HTML 2 (plus some bits of HTML 3) was common.
By the time Windows 98 (98SE) or Mac OS 9 was out, Internet Explorer 5 was well established.
I really don’t like to chime in on “video? ugh, give me some blog post or I’ll leave” because there regularly are fantastic exceptions. But damn, this video could’ve been distilled down to 5min without loosing any important information.
Some people just like to hear themselves talking…
Hi, generally speaking, it’s beyond me how people can even complain about such things.
I mean, sure, there’s no right that does prohibit it.
But I mean, the YouTube video was being uploaded for the kind of people who like to have a natural, un-edited experience. With the failures, too.
The crashs of Netscape Navigator and the error messages of Windows 98SE are authentic.
People who’re too young to have witnessed these days might be interested to watch a long, “boring” video.
Just to get an idea how using the web was back then, maybe.
My recommendation: Increasing the own patience can be learnt by sitting at a bus station or tram station for 15 minutes.
But without using the phone. Instead, someone should try to get along with himself/herself/theirself, learn to endure waiting.
Watch the birds or trees, how leaves will be blown around on ground etc.
After 3 days without using a smartphone,
it becomes easier to concentrate on things for longer that 30 seconds.
It’s possible again to watch a whole episode of a tv show after a week without a smartphone.
Thanks for the life hacks. I regularly do walks outside, without a phone. Even longer than 30 minutes. Can you imagine? :)
And I was around that time, using Win95 and later and all those browsers so I know that the stuff shown in the video indeed is a great feat in 2025!
I just said the video was (imho) quite bloated and could’ve been a fraction of the length without loosing important information. It’s not about concentrating longer than 30s, it’s about what I wanna do with my time (so I skipped through it, got hew he managed to do it and was fine).
It’s nothing personal :)
Hah, thanks! You’re welcome. 😁
It’s not a matter of patience, it’s about the density of content.
Again, nothing personally, really. It’s all good.
I just mentioned this, because in the past me too YT users had blamed me for my own boring videos being “too long”.
Despite them being very niche videos, meant for a small audience.
That’s why I was surprised and felt a bit sad back then.
Such comments like “another 5mins of my live wasted” aren’t motivating.
If people don’t like watching boring stuff, then why do they even bother?
No one is forced to watch a whole video, people can go leave anytime.
The YT web player allows speeding up and browsing through the video’s time scale.
Yeah, such frankly mean-spirited comments are quite unnecessary. There is a lot of content out there that you do not want to watch, which is why it’s so great that nobody is forcing you to watch it.
If others enjoy it, that’s great. If others can watch a video at normal speed while I’m at 1.5x or 1.75x, I’m also not going to complain about the host talking too slowly.
Plus, in this case I already watched the video and provided a summary so that one can simply read that and not bother with the video at all. What more does one want? :)
+1
🙂👍
On one hand, I want the information. On the other hand, I don’t like listening to people speak, it stresses me, I much prefer written articles. I can’t actually handle 45min of yap.
Ah, I remember watching Youtube (and even uploading videos to Youtube) with a 225 MHz Pentium 1 on Windows 98 as late as 2009 or 2010. It really started to struggle towards the end of 2009.
And then I had some static electricity on me and knew it, so I thought I’d ground myself through the keyboard lock which certainly has to be mounted to the metal chassis, doesn’t it?
It didn’t and the mainboard was destroyed. Got replaced with a 1GHz P3 machine, but Win98 never had the same charm for me ever again.