I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.
I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense?
It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape.
There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I’m wrong here, but I believe it’s called ‘Classzilla’?
This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle HN totally fine.
I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5 called ‘TenFourFox’, are now abandoned - but very much still available.
It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac community when it happened.
I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM.
(Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD’s and 16GB of RAM. There is literally no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So cool.)
Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view" algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using Google in/around 1998-99.
I know this is rose-colored glasses but hell, even interacting with the old Windows and Mac OSes was a breath of fresh air. There are things that show their age but there are also things that make it really easy for me to find my way around a computer.
Thanks for the link. That was a great trip down memory lane. I wonder if we'll ever adopt some of that old stuff ever again.
Did they really, though? Or did we just have more patience for general slowness back then? Things were simpler, no doubt, but the computers were also much slower (if you didn't have much RAM, loading a webpage would probably result in paging to the disk), the network was slower (even if you were lucky enough to have a T1, you were probably connected to it via 10 Mbps half-duplex ethernet), the servers you connected to were slower...
Don't get me wrong, I adore the simplicity and hackability of older systems, but I have a PowerMac G3, and even after maxing out the RAM at 768 MB (at launch, the max was 384 MB because there were no 256 MB DIMMs to test with), swapping the old 12 GB IDE HDD for a 32 GB CF card, fixing the ATI extensions to enable the dedicated GPU, and connecting it to a multi-gigabit network with symmetric gigabit fiber internet, there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of these things. Even loading 90s-era webpages on 90s hardware (with 2000s upgrades) is slower than loading many modern webpages on modern systems.