There’s an interesting thing about retrocomputing — the moment that you realize your 25-year-old machine can do almost everything your average person uses a computer for. The problem is that the average person mostly uses a computer as an internet appliance, and the big missing piece for most old machines is hooking up to the modern internet. HTTPS is good to have, but isn’t so easy to implement when your browser gets megabytes of RAM instead of gigabytes.
That’s why MacSurf by [mplsllc] is so interesting, especially version 2.0 just released-– its explicit goal is to get as much of the modern web onto an OS 9 equipped PowerPC Macintosh as physically possible.
Before you get too excited– no, you won’t be hitting up YouTube.com or even GitHub. That’s just too big and bloated now, even if you can get past the HTTPS hurdle. You will, however, be able to access, say MacintoshGarden.org, whose out-of-order HTTPS certificates sent the last version for a tizzy. The forums at 68kMLA work, and threads load quickly thanks to the as-needed image loading added this version.
Other nice things added include a proper history and bookmark manager. There’s still no tab support, but have you seen the modern web? You’re not fitting more than one webpage into RAM on a G3 no matter how hard you try. You can, however, download the web browser directly from the http-only MacSurf.org homepage.
We featured the first release of this netsurf-based browser, and have to admit we’re impressed with the speed of development. If you want a totally modern system on PPC instead of just an up-to-date browser, you might want to check out MorphOS.
Would Dillo run there? A lot of sites — including Github — have a non-js fallback for the Lynx + Dillo useragents, despite otherwise “requiring” JS to display anything (e.g. a poor design).
If it runs reddit I think that I would happily unretire my G4.
You can get some use out of old.reddit.com but I need to do much more targeted work on getting it to work. I’ll make sure to add it to the next release.
How about archive.org? With downloads?
Would love to get a now-freeware version of Opcodes Vision Pro running on my g3 laptop.. (burning cds that work with all dependencies has been vexing me..)
That’s a great idea, I made sure to get macintoshgarden to work well but I will make sure to spend time on archive.org.
Archive runs fine without js?
i miss the 1990s, when the browser was shaping up to be the ultimate thin client. the 1990s are over and these days the trick to using limited hardware is the opposite: run the browser somewhere else!
seriously…for development i sure do enjoy ‘make -j 8’ and ‘find . -type f | xargs grep needle’ that relies on big RAM + CPU (and is perfectly usable under ssh / screen), but other than that most of my computing needs haven’t changed since the late 90s. except for that darn browser! just run it remotely. then you can really use your old mac, if you want to.
Unrelated, but related, are those black-and-white photos taped to the display?
Post-it picture paper actually, but tap was needed to keep it up :)
Well done, I like it! 🙂🖤
For some reason, I think, both Windows 9x and OS 8/9 have a soothing effect.
It’s such a relaxing experience spending some time there now and then, like a little vaccation.
And to be able to browse the internet on them is so refreshing, too.
It feels like actually “going online” again, after such a long time.
Into the real internet. Not sure how to express.
Yay! We’re SURFIN like our ancestors intended!! So proud of your brainchild. Keep creating. Gary would love this.