Ask HN: Server-side rendering/proxy for website compatibility in IE5/6? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Server-side rendering/proxy for website compatibility in IE5/6?

2 pointsspolu4 comments

It looks like something useful for banks etc... and feasible even though that would probably feel "slow".<p>One could send transcoded versions of a website with a renderer running on a server and gathering inputs from the client and applying it to the server-side rendered version?<p>Anyone heard of something similar to that?

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WRP [1] implements exactly that and it works with browsers that are much older than IE 5. The author has a write-up about how it got made with some curious screenshots of ancient browsers at [2], [3] (parts one and two). One downside to WRP is that because it uses images with an image map for the rendered pages the content are not searchable.

There's also Opera Mini for Java ME. It reflows the websites for what screen resolution it's running at, usually quite well, and gives you searchable text. It's intended for featurephones but I once got a legacy version of it to run on an old laptop with Linux for fun with Microemulator [4].

Of course, an administratively simpler option would be to have the old machines access a server running the users' an entire desktop with a modern browser, PDF viewer and the like using remote desktop software. I arranged this kind of setup with a Linux server and a Windows client for a legacy workstation at work and it proved quite usable. Out of all the major remote desktop software that would run on old Windows (VNC clients, Remote Desktop, NX) the RealVNC client proved the easiest on the client machine's CPU in our setup.

If you had to absolutely make it happen from within the browser you could employ a VNC Java applet but that would be to the detriment of user experience. For security and privacy you can tunnel VNC over SSH.

[1] http://www.tenox.net/out/#wrp

[2] http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866

[3] http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910

[4] https://code.google.com/p/microemu/downloads/list

Thanks that's awesome.

You're welcome. In case you want to try the Opera Mini trick: I've just looked and found that the latest version I got to run was opera-mini-4.4.31891-advanced-en.jar. Google the version number for downloads. To run it get Microemulator and execute

  java -jar microemulator.jar opera-mini-4.4.31891-advanced-en.jad

Sorry for the mixed up sentences in my previous comment. I posted and then edited it in-between things and didn't notice the mistakes until too late.

http://www.browserstack.com/

Allows for the testing of internal and external URLs with a number of systems including IE 6 on XP (but I don't see IE5 in the list)

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