The final official release of Classilla | Hacker News Reader

The final official release of Classilla

oldvcr.blogspot.com

42 pointszdw23 comments

It's sad that the internet has become primarily a tool for commerce. High security comes at a price (barrier to entry, pay-to-play, and lack of options). I wish for an alternative protocol for document discovery and retrieval, like the old internet. Gopher, maybe?

You're probably looking for Gemini

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_space#Gemini_resources for those who are curious.

I ran into Gemini last week looking into lightweight markup languages and Gemtext seems like an interesting one.

Gemini really does seem like a heavy handed approach (in a good way) to creating a pure hypermedia system and avoiding the road HTML went down. No Code-on-demand constraint, no concept of styling at all leaving display totally up to the client removes a ton of the complexity. I saw Gemini defined as "a better gopher" and think that's fairly accurate.

Http still works

Perhaps a reference to Chrome defaulting to https in the address bar soon. And whatever other future things put http further in the back row.

...with warning signs all over the place.

> High security comes at a price (barrier to entry, pay-to-play, and lack of options).

What are you talking about?

Implementing secure online applications is easier today than it's ever been before. Free signed certificates are readily available to hobbyists through Let's Encrypt and other projects, and there are a number of lightweight TLS libraries available if you don't want to use OpenSSL, such as mbedTLS and wolfSSL.

Perhaps they're talking about how you can't just grab any old computer and expect it to (at least partially) function?

I suspect they mean the level of effort to get a working web browser, on an older OS, that supports current websites. Of course, it's not just security (TLS, etc) that makes it hard. Browsers are very complicated these days.

Well, that's the choice of these current websites, which wouldn't also want to support an alternative protocol if one (like the parent post suggests) would get made.

If you need a protocol for document discovery and retrieval like the old internet and have the cooperation of the sites, then you can simply use basic https without javascript, all the things that Lynx browser can support, all the infrastructure is still there. But you can't force the websites to support that if their operators don't share these goals and values.

"Well, that's the choice of these current websites"

Sometimes. For example, there was a pretty organized effort to make plain http websites seem insecure, even if they were just informational sites.

And the end of TenFourFox! http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox...

This is sad to see. I wonder if there are smaller browser codebases out there that might be possible to port.

Might be possible to slap these patches on top UXP and get it building. http://thereisonlyxul.org

Author here. Sadly, not without a current toolchain, plus all the custom changes for Mac OS 9 on top of NSPR and other pieces. CodeWarrior is a solid compiler but the classic Mac OS versions definitely show their age compared to modern gcc and clang.

I wonder how much work would be needed to generate PEF from a modern PowerPC toolchain...

There's Retro68. It might be able to pull this off. You'd still need all the other pieces, of course.

Regardless, thank you for all of your work and contributions. Keeping those old PPC devices alive did more for the environment than I think you'll ever be able to quantify. Not to mention, I had a lot of fun with old PowerBooks and iMacs surfing the web.

Hey, thanks. It's nice to hear it said.

Oh wow! I didn't know that was a thing -- it looks as though that's exactly what I was thinking of.

With that in place... I suppose the next step would be to start writing a Mac OS browser shell to run WebKit in.

Author here. I looked at some of those (and I did recently dust off the classic Mac port of Lynx: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/02/maclynx-beta-3-really.ht... ) but they suffer some similar problems in that they are generally "toys" and won't view sites most people today would require as essential. The biggest bugaboo is JavaScript. Classilla's JavaScript is far more advanced than WaMCoM and Mozilla 1.3's, but it is still based on Firefox 3.0, which by modern standards is ancient. And that doesn't include what's missing from the DOM, either.

It's wild that you managed push the project as far as you did! My main use case for browsers on classic is to download apps on Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository, so hopefully they never enforce TLS or require JS. It's a shame that just as ultra light plain HTML sites are becoming cool again we're also seeing TLS pushed to the point where there old machines are getting shut out.

Might be interesting to have a way to seamlessly have the browser "run" on something modern, while displaying locally, and intercepting things like downloads to be on a local filesystem. I know most of this exists, but it's typically complex to set up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com