"A HTTP proxy server that allows to use historical and obsolete web browsers on the modern web. It works by rendering the web page in to a GIF image with ISMAP."
So it's a thin client terminal type of thing. I was really hoping it was done by a ridiculous number of polyfills!
Wikipedia says IE2 has JS which really surprises me. I never tried IE2 - I got online in 1994 and IIRC I was using Mosaic. I didn't know of the existence of IE2, I don't remember how I got Mosaic but most likely it came on the CD that the ISP provided to get started. I have fond memories of the internet in that time. Not that it was better but it was more amazing given not having internet before. Sending an email was magic then, and to talk to someone in another country for free seemed amazing.
If i get suspicious Mail or something similar i use my old BlackBerry Z10 to open it first.
Afaik there has never been a know Malware for the device.
The whole system itself was pretty security oriented from the beginning.
Sure it uses webkit for the browser but a browser exploit is usually just the first entry. Even if the Malware gets root i suspect it won't be able to run anything useful on the QNX Kernel.
Sort of. Since it works by having a proxy do the heavy lifting and the proxy is most likely running a modern web engine, then it would be as secure as that proxy and engine are. No site will be able to access the NT 3.51 machine though.
There were many small technical improvements along the way but 3.51 was purely just a 32bit protected preemptively scheduled system with a decent filesystem and boring UI: a sweet spot. A major later improvement was laptop support.
Same here. Windows 2000 was - in my opinion - Windows at its peak. Everything after it has been disappointment incarnate; the ever-expanding weight of further Windows versions on CPU/RAM/disk usage did not (and still does not) adequately justify the new features.
ReactOS is probably the closest thing we have to that ideal Windows experience now. Still holding out hope that it'll reach version 1.0 and truly be a proper drop-in Windows replacement.
One thing I've been looking for as I mess around with vintage computers is a SOCKS proxy that just strips HTTPS. The wide move to HTTPS, newer TLS protocols and newer certificate issuers has made a lot of old browsers more useless than they should be.
Proxomitron is not SOCKS (it's a regular HTTP proxy with MitM capability) but it can strip HTTPS in its "half-SSL mode". Its original author is dead and it was originally designed for OpenSSL 0.9.x, but there are patches that will let it use a newer version.
I use it on my network mainly for adblocking and other page filtering, and the "HTTPS upgrade" it does is more like a side-benefit.
On the other hand, a TLS 1.2 connection coming from a client purporting to be some old version of IE on Windows tends to cause some sites to reject the request, I guess purely because of how unusual that looks.
SOCKS is very easy to implement. You could probably knock this together in pretty much any language in little more than the time it takes you to read the SOCKS docs and how to set up the server side TLS connection.
Can't believe I haven't seen this before - I've had this idea kicking around for years. It was definitely more important in the days when IE was locked down as the default browser on Windows in corp environments.
This definitely could have been a valuable enterprise product in the early-to-mid 2010s.
OK, so a lot is going on here, if I am understanding this correctly:
1) IE 1.5 is displaying and updating an image.
2) Image is from a screenshot of a current version of Chrome, running on another machine
3) Image gives the impression that you're running Chrome locally.
4) Mouse clicks and keystrokes are transferred from IE to that remote version of Chrome, and Chrome screens are transferred back (as Images) in response.
Net effect is that you've got new Chrome functionality inside of old Windows 3.51... Nice!
(Observation: It might make sense to bypass IE 1.5 altogether, and just write a simple VNC-like program that shows images from remote and sends clicks and keystrokes, but this would be great for NT 3.51 if the user didn't want to install any other programs...)
And why not? It's one of the more decent alternatives if you want to run a stable Windows install on old PC's, so it's just as retro as, say AmigaOS 3.1
The author, tenox, is a retrocomputing enthusiast with an inordinate amount of technical knowledge. I guess it scratches some itches and gives him some good fun.
I was working on something sorta like this, but I thought it'd be cool to make a proxy that takes all requests and runs them through the wayback machine, so you could browse the old web in an old browser whilst maintaining the original URLs
So it's a thin client terminal type of thing. I was really hoping it was done by a ridiculous number of polyfills!