Bruninho

Less modern equipment were never the target for my site in particular, simply because the fact that I am a retro enthusiast has nothing to do with my job. The site is for the 2020 era anyway. For my job, I cannot give up on modern techniques that showcase what I can do for the customers, just to make it appealing for less modern equipments or old operating systems. In other words, to work on Windows 98 era browsers for example, I shouldn't use jQuery, I shouldn't use Parallax effects, I shouldn't use big images as background and neither SVG (SVG support was premature even after 2000s). I simply can't give up on these techs that can showcase my skills to big customers. What I could do is create a /lite version url and I am really not bothered to do that - I was a few weeks ago, I even attempted it, but was so time consuming that I gave up, because it wasnt relevant to my job. Most of my current customers have very new equipments capable of rendering all the modern HTML/CSS/JS so I have to use all the power of it I can. Works well on Windows 7, an OS used by many of the customers I talk to, and I cannot, will not give support for IE and XP and below operating systems. #1 there is no sub pages, you can just scroll down when you don't have JS - it's a one page only website, there is no other page. Just scroll it and you will see. Also, most of my customers use wide screen monitors, high resolutions. I work on a "40 widescreen at home and 24" widescreen at work, with resolutions above 1920x1080. The responsiveness comes from the media queries and should work. The page load is heavy on old systems because of the background sizes, not JS. Try to load it with JS disabled and you will see, that's because I have to pass the images through ImageOptim again to reduce its weight and I haven't had time to do that yet. Page loads fine on SeaMonkey 2.32 (which is Fx 34 based, I think) and with JS disabled. I just doesn't show the backgrounds because I use a Parallax script to create the parallax scrolling effect, which does a lazy loading of these images. With JS disabled, there is another pre-loading in place from CSS, where a :root selector declared there pre-loads the background images. The images are big because I need to cater for the big, ultra wide monitors such as the Apple Cinema Display, that can have resolutions bigger than 2K (even the LG Ultrafine sold on Apple Store has 4K, so I have to cater for these as well). #2, Like I said before, SVG support were never meant for old operating systems on my site. But there is a fallback, I have PNG versions of these SVGs that should have worked, so if it didn't work then it means the browser is not understanding the HTML5 <OBJECT> tag. I just used my site as an example of a very modern page for modern systems to compare with old ones here.

Please share with us how you worked around JS on Fx 24esr, so we can also check on newer Fx builds. Remember that these newer Fx builds require the KernelEx updates, stubs and jumper tweaks, and the compat setting XP SP3? It was the only setting from where I could work these browser builds

I don’t even like coffee 😂 but I like Starbucks hot chocolate drink sometimes.

I have to ask: Why? Even newest Edge Chromium can run on these systems. Customized browsers should (IMHO, so pls dont shoot me) be more focused on 9x and 2k systems.

I actually managed to use stunnel on my iPad. I installed an app called iSH, that runs a little linux bash shell there. From there, I installed openssl, stunnel, and configured it like I did on my mac. Then I pointed the Outlook 5.0 gmail account smtp and pop3 to my iPad's ip. Outlook on Windows 3.11 started to download my emails, and I didn't even need the mac, I just used my own iPad as the man in the middle. Excellent, that solves for me the problem of TLS on old email clients. I also installed lynx on iSH and tested it, it is quite nice. So I can understand why some ppl prefer to use it in MSDOS environments. I wanted to run a web rendering proxy script (by 'tenox' on github) that I have to improve web browsing on Windows 3.x, but it requires Chrome installed and I don't think iSH can do that, since there is no graphical environment, just CLI. EDIT: for those interested in it: https://github.com/tenox7/wrp EDIT2: Basically this method above and WRP can keep the vanilla nature of Windows 9x. How cool is that? OFC I’d prefer more independent methods, but they aren’t vanilla. The only way to keep the nature of the OS is to think outside the box; things like QEMU, stunnel, WRP... so to put it all together... an old QEMU running on Windows 98, with an stunnel for old email clients (like Eudora, for example), WRP for the browser YOU used to love on Windows 98 (Netscape, IEwww, or Firefox old version) and your script for youtube video download? That should be a decent swiss-army knife for a longer Windows 98 life. Also, OFC, there is an option to develop further the Tiny Core Linux image to boot straight to a browser, as long as we have a way to get the downloads out of the VM? But personally, we should help with that WRP thing, I can see potential in it. I could even see a way to make the WRP toolbar look more like the browsers UI. Oh, I am even going deeper: how about a browser extension to control WRP???

Yeah, I meant CSS3 updates that people think it’s supposed to be level 4.

The site works for modern browsers, and I designed it to be white, but future v3.0 of this will be worse for older browsers; because I am keeping jQuery and using CSS3 features like @media prefers-color-scheme, to give users the dark mode theme which is a trend nowadays. So expect it to be worse under w98.

Great, excellent! I have just another question, might look unrelated for you, but its because I had another idea and wanted to see if its viable (or not). The question is valid for all other members here. Can cygwin run in a WFW 3.11 environment with W32s installed? If yes, can it use stunnel? I did a quick marginal search on google and I thought it can: https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/stunnel.html I probably do not need to explain my idea, but I actually thought of it for another thing (hence why I asked Win 3.x), not for the web browsing on Win 9x (but it could be used there, with other relevant applications for this topic)... I use stunnel on macOS to help Outlook on Windows 3.x to authenticate with Gmail. Works flawlessly. But I do not like the idea of using a Mac as a man in the middle for that. When you mentioned cygwin, the idea came to my mind.

Facebook and Twitter are perfectly useable on Netscape 9.0.0.6, from these urls: http://mobile.facebook.com http://mobile.twitter.com Now that's something. I always knew since the start of this topic that mobile versions would be more than adequate for Windows 98 browsing. Firefox has had partial support for CSS Flexbox since v2, with a vendor prefix until v21. But from v21 to v27 very limited, when it had full, complete support from v28 onwards. Most, if not all, modern sites now use this technique for layout of their pages. Before flexbox we were using floated/absolutely positioned divs, and way before, tables. Now, the up-and-coming technique coming to replace Flexbox is the not-so-brand-new CSS Grid. This information should give some context for those looking for the "sweet spot" Firefox version to use in Windows 98. But, even in v28, Firefox crashes thanks to JS and profile issues. I know this issue was not present in Fx 8, 9 or 10. Fx 10 already crashes a lot, though. Probably Fx 8 is the most stable version, though the layouts are f****ing terrible to read.

Suggestion: Update the #1 post with the relevant info to run the script, so everyone knows how to do, and gets the latest updates?

Might as well try it out later. The only reason I have kernelex was web browsing.

Did you use http instead of https? The site is plain simple html, no php. Just pure html, css and jquery, nothing more. Must be the preload of background images I do in CSS using :root selector. These images are heavy and big sized (dimension, not bytes) If they’re still heavy, I will pass them through ImageOptim again to see if I can shave more bytes from them.

Just did another test, highest Firefox I can run (without JS) was 35.0. Extremely slow, and suffers from the same profile problem as SM.

@Goodmaneuver: Just FYI, Netscape tests were run with JS enabled. FF45esr will not install here. @siria: I tried these scripts, but they never worked for me on any browser I have installed. The KM75RC3 mentioned here is another version which Roytam1 asked us to test a few pages ago. Apparently he did a modified version.

Yeah, but I didn’t want to prove a point there or something like that. All I wanted to do with this method was check if I was able to play mp4 videos, because browser tests said I wasnt or didnt have the required codec. VLC played the video, so the codecs are there. Probably the correct plugins for the browsers aren’t there. But before I tried to use some greasemonkey scripts on K-Meleon 75RC3, to see if viewtube would work. No dice. @Goodmaneuver: I forgot to mention, one of the screenshots show the desktop. That's because the browser in question crashed to the desktop when attempting to load the same page.

I did not zoomed them. They are shown as they were straight after page load. None of them were cut really - Itau (the orange one) was the only one I scrolled down on both competing browsers because currently they probably have a problem with loading the front page background. Dailymotion and Veoh or Vimeo, I did not want to try out because last night I tried them, and they were blank, completely white to me with no content. Like I said, they can’t be the future because they seem to be using JS frameworks (remember, JS was disabled) such as Vue or React to draw the site, hence why I think they render nothing to me when JS is disabled. I’ve seen projects and portals - I have been involved in one similar project - where all the rendering was made by Angular.js framework so this can be the case here. I see no future for JS frameworks because they bring back the same problems JS and jQuery attempted to solve in the beginning when standards and web browsers weren’t on the same level.

Truth be told, I've tried several versions of Firefox on Windows 98. None rendered the forums any close to the real thing. I'll make some screenshots with Safari 13.1 under macOS Catalina VS SeaMonkey 2.32 under Windows 98 and side by side (which is possible thanks to vmware) so you can see how well they render most websites I visit and dump them into a compressed zip file for easier sharing. I could even add Firefox 9 but I know it will not render my favorite websites any better, the rendering is terrible to be good enough. The zip file will contain the following battles: Safari 13.1 vs CometBird 9.0.1 Safari 13.1 vs Netscape 9.0.0.6 (plus roytam1's cipher and TLS updates) Safari 13.1 vs K-Meleon 75 RC3 (roytam1's) Safari 13.1 vs SeaMonkey 2.32 EDIT: Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/file/v5ygl4nxx1ciqm2/BrowserBattle.zip/file

But my problem is not TLS. I do not visit dailymotion and neither Veoh frequently, so pardon for my honesty, but I don’t actually care about these; I care about the pages rendering perfectly, cuz I am a web designer and my OCD would fire to big figures when I see a badly rendered page. When I saw the pages almost perfect in SM 2.32 and W98, I could say I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Some required JS to render the images (called lazy loading method). But nonetheless, its rendering ok. The only pages giving me a TLS problem are both forums (MSFN and VOGONS). I can work around these with tweaks, except for Opera 12 where it does not have the necessary cipher suites. All others are either HTML/CSS rendering or Javascript issues. I understand what youtube does. I don’t think its a TLS problem for the two sites you mentioned, they seem to rely on jQuery or other JS framework to render their pages (like Vue.js or React, for example). Actually, you can write an entire site just with one of these JS frameworks and I must admit its a technique I do not master and neither want to, because I do not see the future for it & I am more into design than programming. For example, I am one of those who want jQuery dead, because it was created to give unsupported features to browsers when they didn’t support them. Now that they all support, jQuery shouldn’t be used anymore but some devs are too lazy to (re)learn vanilla JS or find it easier to use a framework to build an entire portal instead of well written, semantic HTML code. If it were a TLS problem I’d get a message from the browser saying that. Plus, TLS3 is still not an official thing yet - just a beta compulsory use. Most sites still support TLS1.2, if not all of them. With SM 2.94.5 and Windows 2000 SP4 “on steroids”, I have perfectly rendered sites, all the whistles and bells of modern web. So it is my benchmark for what I believe we can achieve on W98, and I now believe because we now managed to have perfectly rendered pages on it, although without JS. Now all we need is someone to step on it and help us fixing these issues.

@Goodmaneuver: The problem with Opera 12.02 is the TLS and ciphers, they don't let me open certain websites or forums so this one is a no-no for me. Cometbird 9 is similar to Firefox 9.0.1, so the HTML5 support and things like CSS3, for example Flexbox (widely used in many sites today) is not present there. They are on SM 2.32. Plus, Fx higher than 3.6.28 crashes a lot more often for me and with JS on. I cannot load dailymotion and neither Vimeo, on both JS and non-JS scenarios with my browsers (SM 2.32 and KM75RC3). All these sites work on SM 2.49.5 and Windows 2000 SP4 + BWC, with JS enabled, so I know they can render somehow. Even Youtube is working for me there. K-Meleon 75RC3 has the same problems and crashes a lot more often than SM. Actually, the annoying problem I have with the profiles not allowing me to use the address bar when I re-run the browsers, happens on all mozilla-based browsers except Netscape 9.0.0.6 and Firefox 3.6.28 - which is nothing actually amazing to use for me, compared to Netscape 9.0.0.6 (yes, I know this one is based on Fx 2.x). At the moment, I'd stick with Netscape 9.0.0.6 and roytam1's NSS update, since I can load both forums and a few sites on it although without correct rendering and without videos. At least it can see the gmail with the low bandwidth layout selected.

Indeed, download and play locally is the only way to go apparently. I downloaded a video of my favorite movie theme (Top Gun - Highway To The Danger Zone) and saved as mp4 on my macOS. Then transferred it to the Win98 VM. VLC 3.0.8 with KernelEx is playing it quite smoothly:

I am now trying to get the videos to play. I have both LAV and VS Filters installed, however I do not know what more I might be missing. I get a black box screen on youtube, and on www.invidio.us (a youtube mirror) I get a screen cap. of the video, with the message "No video with supported format and MIME type found." Hmmmm....

@DosFreak, I noticed that VOGONS forums have their own font glyphs, but I can't get them. Any chance you can get them for us to test on our old browsers? EDIT: Installing the font will not work either. So currently I have these issues with SeaMonkey 2.32 on Windows 98: - I need to recreate the profile before every time I want to run SM. Otherwise, the address bar will not work; - JS has to be disabled to be able to browse most websites; - No video playback The goodies: - HTML5 & CSS3 support available, most sites are rendered perfectly although some require JS to be 100% perfect.

What I do not understand is why you had to convert them. When I download the fontawesome pack, I have a folder named webfonts, where I can find 5 different formats: eot, svg, ttf, woff and woff2. If TTF is available in this pack, then why you had to convert them? Here's what I have been using on my future new version of my website: Be careful when unzipping, because I compressed on macOS and therefore may be some underscore files too. fontawesome.zip

Robert Tepper - No Easy Way Out (Rocky IV)

I will upload these original TTFs later. I do not have access to premium FontAwesome version (which is probably 5.9) but apparently free version is 5.0, same as mine.