Show HN: Browse the (old) web with emulated browsers running in your browser
oldweb.today
oldweb.today
The web is amazing in its level of backwards compatibility, in that you can make a website compatible with all of these browsers from the 90s today!
Retro-computing growth is exploding based on what I see here and on Facebook, and it could be the key to saving the Web's openness.
I'm working on a project which allows for easily building hybrid static-dynamic sites compatible with Mosaic+, and I am grateful to others working to preserve this technology.
Thanks again!
This is an update to the previous version (discussed 5 years ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653033)
This builds on much previous work, including two excellent emulators, v86 (previously discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203) and Basilisk in JS (mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632843) running in the browser. These were modified to support a browser-based network stack, an Emscripten build of picotcp created by the bwFla Emulation-as-a-Service team (https://gitlab.com/emulation-as-a-service/picotcp.js)
The IE and Netscape browsers support older versions of Flash and Java. For good measure, there is also an option to run just the Ruffle emulator (discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115) for Flash-only emulation in your current browser.
The system can browse live web pages as well as archived pages from Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. OldWeb.today can be deployed as a static site and connected to other archives as well. (Only a server-side CORS proxy is necessary, for connecting to external websites or archives)
More details on how it works at: https://github.com/oldweb-today/oldweb-today
Blog post: https://webrecorder.net/2020/12/23/new-oldweb-today.html