
Surfing the Modern Web with Ancient Browsers - paulgerhardt
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866
======
Mz
I 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in spite of being outdated.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.

~~~
ca98am79
This reminds me of when I filed for divorce in Philadelphia. I did all the
paperwork myself instead of hiring a lawyer. There was one document which was
required to be filled out with a typewriter. You could not print it out on a
printer, or do it by hand. It needed to be a typewriter.

I didn't have a typewriter and I did not know anyone who had one. I called
many copy/printing places in the city to see if there was one for rent - not
one place had one to use or rent.

I found some that I could buy, but it was $100+, and I didn't want to pay that
much to use it once.

Eventually I asked my soon to be ex-wife, who worked for the city, and she was
able to locate one which I used and was able to successfully file the
document.

~~~
p9idf
Every second hand shop I've ever been to has a whole shelf of typewriters for
less than $5.

------
colechristensen
Sometimes 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/)

~~~
dasil003
It'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)

~~~
clarry
> There isn't an intelligence capable of designing big open standards like the
> web

I think the problem here is _big_.

How about small standards with a limited scope? I don't want these huge
standards that take millions of lines of code to implement.

~~~
dasil003
That's exactly what the web _is_! It's made up of hundreds of such small
standards plus thousands of ad-hoc implementations, solutions, and deep
supporting infrastructure.

Again, the point is it's too big to be designed.

~~~
clarry
Yes exactly, too big is exactly what it is. And my point was that it could be
small. In practice of course we'd never even agree on a definition of what the
web is or what it should be, so even the idea of designing a compact standard
for it is hopeless.

------
bbanyc
Worth 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.)

------
agumonkey
First 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.

~~~
pipeep
> 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
How 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 ..

------
ie4_still_used
It 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
That'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. ;-)

------
ohazi
I 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
You might want to consider using pocket.

[http://getpocket.com](http://getpocket.com)

~~~
sadris
sounds like google keep

~~~
Spittie
Keep is a totally different service.

You can compare Pocket with Instapaper, ReadItLater and similar sites.

~~~
antihero
Is there any reason to switch to pocket over Instapaper?

~~~
mahmoudhossam
I remember switching from Instapaper to pocket, don't remember why though.

Give it a try yourself, that's the only sure way to find out.

------
gedrap
Hm, 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
It's still pretty popular even now. More than 250 million people use it
worldwide.

------
smoe
This 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.

------
thothamon
I 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.

~~~
Theodores
Say you wanted to make a film set in 1997? You could probably buy a period
computer easily enough from eBay, you could probably get Windows 95 on there
with Internet Explorer 4, but to display some content? You could make some
Photoshop mockups for period 'Google', 'CNN' et all, but to actually serve
those pages would require a period server. This little trick of rendering
would make it all slightly easier for the film maker. They would not have to
hand millions over to ILM just to make a few retro screenshots.

Personally, if I was making a film set in the 1990's I would go for the IBM
WebExplorer browser
([http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-
con...](http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2014/03/webexplorer.png)). It has awesome graphics.

~~~
Crito
If you're making a film, just have your art guys make mockups of the entire
thing in photoshop and have it display like a fullscreened slideshow or video
on an old monitor. The other old hardware needn't be functional.

This makes everything reproducible for multiple takes, lets your art guys have
ultra-fine control over the presentation of everything, and lets the actor
focus on acting, not driving a computer.

~~~
Theodores
Of course! Don't even have the keyboard actually attached, have some guy in
the gallery push the buttons too... Add those sound effects in post-production
as well. No wonder there are no themes that enable your computer to beep and
chirp like in the movies.

~~~
Crito
> _" Don't even have the keyboard actually attached, have some guy in the
> gallery push the buttons too..."_

Alternatively have the keyboard set up as one big "anykey" to advance the
animation. The advantage of this being that keyboard strikes would be synced
with screen updates, if there is ever a shot where you can see both the
fingers and the screen (which is typically avoided, but still).

------
jmspring
I 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.

------
ezequiel-garzon
Could 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
Images probably help bypass text-based censorship (i.e. deep packet
inspection, proxies)

------
malanj
I guess HN will pretty much just work fine?

~~~
claudius
It 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
Good 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/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390...](https://github.com/acg/w3m/commit/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390e43a874b3395fc)

------
rcarmo
Very cool. Somehwat ironic that I'm reading this in Firefox Aurora on my VPS,
controlled from my iPad :)

~~~
ChickeNES
Interesting sounding setup. What software are you using for the forwarding,
VNC, X11, or something else?

~~~
rcarmo
I 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.

------
rco8786
Lol @ DNA Lounge.

Also, why? Outside of the joy of hacking

~~~
omegaham
Legacy 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.

~~~
rco8786
> Legacy systems, unfortunately, are here to stay.

Just because something exists(or can be called "legacy") doesn't mean it
should be supported. I would venture to guess that nobody in the world uses
any of the browsers shown on any regular basis. And if they do, they have
absolutely no expectations of it working correctly.

When IE 1.5 was launched 8MB of RAM was acceptable and people were excited
about 28.8k modems.

~~~
jtheory
> I would venture to guess that nobody in the world uses any of the browsers
> shown on any regular basis. And if they do, they have absolutely no
> expectations of it working correctly.

It depends on where they work. We have to support IE6/7 because our users are
largely accessing the webapp from hospitals... which means they're using
computers that are very strictly controlled by the IT department, because
upgrades can break other, very expensive legacy software that relies on old IE
versions or other particular quirks of old OS versions. And if you break some
essential medical software, lives can be at stake, so they can't take it
lightly.

To be sure, they don't assume that our webapp will work in the browsers
they're forced to use. But if it doesn't, we can't possibly get them as a
customer until some distant day when they are ready to lay out the serious
investment required to upgrade.

~~~
rco8786
IE6/7 yes. I've had to support those too because they are still in use in some
places. That's why I said "any of the browsers shown"...all of which are
multiple generations behind IE6/7.

------
notastartup
what 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.

