So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi

November 25, 2025 by Jenny List 113 Comments

It’s been twenty-three years since the day Phoenix was released, the web browser that eventually became Firefox. I downloaded it on the first day and installed it on my trusty HP Omnibook 800 laptop, and until this year I’ve used it ever since. Yet after all this time, I’m ready to abandon it for another browser. In the previous article in this series I went into my concerns over the direction being taken by Mozilla with respect to their inclusion of AI features and my worries about privacy in Firefox, and I explained why a plurality of browser engines is important for the Web. Now it’s time to follow me on my search for a replacement, and you may be surprised by one aspect of my eventual choice.

Where Do I Go From Here?

Hackaday in the Ladybird browser — It’s Hackaday, in Ladybird! (Ooof, that font.)

Happily for my own purposes, there are a range of Firefox alternatives which fulfill my browser needs without AI cruft and while allowing me to be a little more at peace with my data security and privacy. There’s Chromium of course even if it’s still way too close to Google for my liking, and there are a host of open-source WebKit and Blink based browsers too numerous to name here.

In the Gecko world that should be an easier jump for a Firefox escapee there are also several choices, for example LibreWolf, and Waterfox. In terms of other browser engines there’s the extremely promising but still early in development Ladybird, and the more mature Servo, which though it is available as a no-frills browser, bills itself as an embedded browser engine. I have not considered some other projects that are either lightweight browser engines, or ones not under significant active development. Continue reading “So Long Firefox, Hello Vivaldi” →

So Long, Firefox, Part One

November 20, 2025 by Jenny List 151 Comments

It’s likely that Hackaday readers have among them a greater than average number of people who can name one special thing they did on September 23rd, 2002. On that day a new web browser was released, Phoenix version 0.1, and it was a lightweight browser-only derivative of the hugely bloated Mozilla suite. Renamed a few times to become Firefox, it rose to challenge the once-mighty Microsoft Internet Explorer, only to in turn be overtaken by Google’s Chrome.

Now in 2025 it’s a minority browser with an estimated market share just over 2%, and it’s safe to say that Mozilla’s take on AI and the use of advertising data has put them at odds with many of us who’ve kept the faith since that September day 23 years ago. Over the last few months I’ve been actively chasing alternatives, and it’s with sadness that in November 2025, I can finally say I’m Firefox-free.

Continue reading “So Long, Firefox, Part One” →

Server racks branded with Internet Archive

Internet Archive Hits One Trillion Web Pages

November 18, 2025 by John Elliot V 14 Comments

In case you didn’t hear — on October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive, who host the Wayback Machine at archive.org, celebrated a milestone: one trillion web pages archived, for posterity.

Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle the organization and its facilities grew through the late nineties; in 2001 access to their archive was greatly improved by the introduction of the Wayback Machine. From their own website on Oct 21 2009 they explained their mission and purpose:

Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.

We were curious about the Internet Archive technology. Storing a copy (in fact two copies!) of the internet is no mean feat, so we did some digging to find out how it’s done. The best information available is in this article from 2016: 20,000 Hard Drives on a Mission. They keep two copies of every “item”, which are stored in Linux directories. In 2016 they had over 30 petabytes of content and were ingesting at a rate of 13 to 15 terabytes per day, web, and television being the most voluminous.

In 2016 they had around 20,000 individual disk drives, each housed in specialized computers called “datanodes”. The datanodes have 36 data drives plus two operating system drives per machine. Datanodes are organized into racks of 10 machines, having 360 data drives per rack. These racks are interconnected via high-speed Ethernet to form a storage cluster.

Even though content storage tripled over 2012 to 2016, the count of disk drives stayed about the same; this is because of disk drive technology improvements. Datanodes that were once populated with 36 individual 2 terabyte drives are today filled with 8 terabyte drives, moving single node capacity from 72 terabytes (64.8 T formatted) to 288 terabytes (259.2 T formatted) in the same physical space. The evolution of disk density did not happen in a single step, so there are populations of 2, 3, 4, and 8 T drives in the storage clusters.

We will leave you with the visual styling of Hackaday Beta in 2004, and what an early google.com or amazon.com looked like back in the day. Super big shout out to the Internet Archive, thanks for providing such an invaluable service to our community, and congratulations on this excellent achievement.

Share Your Projects: Imperfectionism

November 6, 2025 by Arya Voronova 38 Comments

Everyone has a standard for publishing projects, and they can get pretty controversial. We see a lot of people complain about hacks embedded in YouTube videos, social media threads, Discord servers, Facebook posts, IRC channels, different degrees of open-sourcing, licenses, searchability, and monetization. I personally have my own share of frustrations with a number of these factors.

It’s common to believe that hacking as a culture doesn’t thrive until a certain set of conditions is met, and everyone has their own set of conditions in mind. My own dealbreaker, as you might’ve seen, is open-sourcing of code and hardware alike – I think that’s a sufficiently large barrier for hacking being repeatable, and repeatability is a big part of how hacking culture spreads.

This kind of belief is often self-limiting. Many people believe that their code or PCB source file is not a good contribution to hacking culture unless it meets a certain cleanliness or completeness standard. This is understandable, and I do that, too.

Today, I’d like to argue against my own view, and show how imperfect publishing helps build hacking culture despite its imperfections. Let’s talk about open-source in context of 3D printing.

Continue reading “Share Your Projects: Imperfectionism” →

Making YouTube Work In The Netscape 4.5 Browser On Windows 98

October 31, 2025 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

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.

Continue reading “Making YouTube Work In The Netscape 4.5 Browser On Windows 98” →

Making WiFi Sound Like Dial-Up Internet

October 24, 2025 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

Dial-up modems had a distinctive sound when connecting, with the glittering, screeching song becoming a familiar melody to those jumping online in the early days of the Internet. Modern digital connections don’t really have an analog to this, by virtue of being entirely digital. And yet, [Nick Bild] decided to make WiFi audible in a pleasing tribute to the modems of yore.

The reason you could hear your dial-up modem is because it was actually communicating in audio over old-fashioned telephone lines. The initialization process happened at a low enough speed that you could hear individual sections of the handshake that sounded quite unique. Ultimately, though, once a connection was established at higher speed, particularly 33.6 k or 56 k, the sound of transmission became hard to discern from static.

Modern communication methods like Ethernet, DSL, and WiFi all occur purely digitally — and in frequencies far above the audible range. Thus, you can’t really “listen” to a Wi-Fi signal any more than you can listen to the rays of light beaming out from the sun. However, [Nick] found an anachronistic way to make a sound out of WiFi signals that sounds vaguely reminiscent of old-school modems. He used a Raspberry Pi 3 equipped with a WiFi adapter, which sniffs network traffic, honing in on data going to one computer. The packet data is then sent to an Adafruit QT Py microcontroller, which uses the data to vary the amplitude of a sound wave that’s then fed to a speaker through a digital-to-analog converter. [Nick] notes this mostly just sounds like static, so he adds some adjustments to the amplitude and frequency to make it more reminiscent of old modem sounds, but it’s all still driven by the WiFi data itself.

It’s basically WiFi driven synthesis, rather than listening to WiFi itself, but it’s a fun reference to the past. We’ve talked a lot about dial-up of late; from the advanced technology that made 56 k possible, to the downfall of AOL’s long-lived service. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Making WiFi Sound Like Dial-Up Internet” →

The Internet We Didn’t Get

October 2, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Collective human consciousness is full of imagined or mythical dream-like utopias, hidden away behind mountains, across or under oceans, hidden in mist, or deep in the jungle. From Atlantis, Avalon, El Dorado, and Shangri-La, we have not stopped imagining these secret, fantastical places. One of these, Xanadu, is actually a real place but has been embellished over the years into a place of legend and myth, and thus became the namesake of an Internet we never got to see like all of those other mystical, hidden places.

The Xanadu project got its start in the 1960s at around the same time the mouse and what we might recognize as a modern computer user interface were created. At its core was hypertext with the ability to link not just other pages but references and files together into one network. It also had version control, rights management, bi-directional links, and a number of additional features that would be revolutionary even today. Another core feature was transclusion, a method for making sure that original authors were compensated when their work was linked. However, Xanadu was hampered by a number of issues including lack of funding, infighting among the project’s contributors, and the development of an almost cult-like devotion to the vision, not unlike some of today’s hype around generative AI. Surprisingly, despite these faults, the project received significant funding from Autodesk, but even with this support the project ultimately failed.

Instead of this robust, bi-directional web imagined as early as the 1960s, the Internet we know of today is the much simpler World Wide Web which has many features of Xanadu we recognize. Not only is it less complex to implement, it famously received institutional backing from CERN immediately rather than stagnating for decades. The article linked above contains a tremendous amount of detail around this story that’s worth checking out. For all its faults and lack of success, though, Xanadu is a interesting image of what the future of the past could have been like if just a few things had shaken out differently, and it will instead remain a mythical place like so many others.