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RetroZilla: An updated version of Mozilla for Windows 95 and NT4 [2.2 RELEASED]


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Just a little status update:

- I may release a 2.1 release before I start working on Gecko, to fix some minor annoyances I have come across in the past few days. Most notably that if you middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, it opens it in a new window, (at least add a pref for it) Disregard this, as I am an id*** and didn't see the checkbox in the tabbed browsing panel. (big surprise, I know) and I may try to resolve the 256 color transparency bug. (I looked into it for 2.0, for some reason NT4 wasn't affected, It seems that Win95 is though; I may be able to fix it by using PNGs instead of GIFs) I may also disable many of the security alerts that are enabled by default, as they can get pretty annoying pretty fast.

- Regarding adblock, I downloaded an old XPI and noticed that it's pretty old and doesn't want to work with today's advertising networks, so I am going to either modify it or provide a host file-like solution (if it's possible with JS/XPCOM). I will release that at a later date, and its release cycle will be independent from the RZ release cycle.

- If you wrote or converted an old extension to work with RZ, please let me know, I will make sure that it works and I will publish it to the RZ extensions page (Tools => Get Extensions)

Edited by rn10950
my stupidity
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2 hours ago, roytam1 said:

any chance for new NSS and TLS 1.2?

I'll look into it, but it depends on how new it is. The problem with the newer code, especially the Security code, is that it won't compile under VC6. The closer it is to Gecko 1.8.1, the easier it is to port.

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12 hours ago, rn10950 said:

I'll look into it, but it depends on how new it is. The problem with the newer code, especially the Security code, is that it won't compile under VC6. The closer it is to Gecko 1.8.1, the easier it is to port.

This may help: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Security.tls.version.*

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSS/NSS_3.15.1_release_notes

Edited by roytam1
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9 minutes ago, CamTron said:

Do you need to use VC6? All versions up to Visual Studio 2005 support Windows 9x and NT4 as targets.

Of course he does, because he wants to avoid any dependency on .NET at all, obviously.

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20 hours ago, dencorso said:

Of course he does, because he wants to avoid any dependency on .NET at all, obviously.

Normal native applications built with Visual Studio 2005 do not depend on .NET at all. If you mean that running Visual Studio requires .NET, I don't really see how that's an issue. All you need is a computer with Windows 2000 or later (or even Linux with Wine). There's also the possibility of using Cygwin and MinGW to build Firefox, but I'm not sure if it would work with the older build system used by Retrozilla.

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On 5/2/2016 at 6:24 PM, CamTron said:

Do you need to use VC6? All versions up to Visual Studio 2005 support Windows 9x and NT4 as targets.

I don't think that VC2005 supports Windows 95, I know that it works with Win98/Me. Besides, the Mozilla build system is designed to work with one version of VS, possibly 2, at a time, so it may not work right and require a bunch of extra effort to fix the build system. I may experiment with building a Gecko 1.9/Fx3 tree, but I know that the Cairo GFX engine doesn't work on Win9x, so I will have to port that too.

Microsoft also isn't really good with publishing an extensive list of win32 functions and the versions of Windows they were introduced in, that would help a lot.

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Hmm... I seem to remember just being able to change some build options to get the output executable to work on Win95. It's been a long time since I used with Visual Studio, though. Anyway, I was just thinking that a newer version of Visual Studio might support more modern C++ features, which would make it easier to compile new code. (Maybe not, considering how long it took Microsoft to finally add C99 support.) But If it's easier to fix the code to work with VC6, then go for it.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Almost every API on MSDN has either Windows 2000 or Windows Vista listed under Minimum supported client, which is completely wrong 95% of the time. Microsoft used to offer the entire MSDN library for download, so if you can track down an old version of that, it will likely have correct information about older versions of Windows.

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Aye I'm gone for a year and come back to a new 9x (and NT 4 :wub:) project. Going to test it out now on the ME system.


EDIT:

I like it. It's a quick little browser that holds some promise. Buggy accessing MSFN Forums however.


EDIT2:

You may also like to look at some of the sources here, you may find it useful.

http://toastytech.com/files/95browsing.html

Edited by Flasche
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5 hours ago, Flasche said:

Aye I'm gone for a year and come back to a new 9x (and NT 4 :wub:) project. Going to test it out now on the ME system.


EDIT:

I like it. It's a quick little browser that holds some promise. Buggy accessing MSFN Forums however.


EDIT2:

You may also like to look at some of the sources here, you may find it useful.

http://toastytech.com/files/95browsing.html

My main goal for this is actually the NT 4 support, but if I am doing the work for NT, why not also target Win95. TBH, the lack of a modern browser is the only thing keeping me off of NT4 as my primary OS.

The MSFN bugs were introduced recently when they updated the forum software. The HTML elements they used in the new version are not (yet!) compatible with RetroZilla. I am working on rz3.0 now which should improve HTML5 support drastically. (For example, RetroZilla doesn't pass ACID2 in its current state, I plan to change that)

I already incorporated the sources over on ToastyTech, in fact it was that page that inspired me to do this, I figured that if we can make those minor improvements to the codebase, we can do much more if we backport more patches to the old Gecko.

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17 hours ago, rn10950 said:

My main goal for this is actually the NT 4 support, but if I am doing the work for NT, why not also target Win95. TBH, the lack of a modern browser is the only thing keeping me off of NT4 as my primary OS.

The MSFN bugs were introduced recently when they updated the forum software. The HTML elements they used in the new version are not (yet!) compatible with RetroZilla. I am working on rz3.0 now which should improve HTML5 support drastically. (For example, RetroZilla doesn't pass ACID2 in its current state, I plan to change that)

I already incorporated the sources over on ToastyTech, in fact it was that page that inspired me to do this, I figured that if we can make those minor improvements to the codebase, we can do much more if we backport more patches to the old Gecko.

Good to see some love for the pre 2k OSes of the NT line. Curious did you incorporate some of the back-ports bearwindows has on his site? http://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/wintips.htm

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Love this project, I always wanted to do something like this but was lacking the expertise. I code, but I do C, C#, and Python so this was a bit out of my purview.

Requests (some things I wanted in Seamonkey 1.x when it was still current, even):

  • Ability to remove the "Print" button like you can with the "Search" button on the navigation bar (I never print anything, and if I wanted to I'd use the menu or Ctrl+P).
  • Ability to toggle the navigation bar to small icons to the left of the text of the buttons (to save space on machines with low vertical space - ex. my Libretto 110CT with 800x480).

Will post more as I use the software more and come up with anything.

Is the throbber theme-able, by the way? I can't remember if it was possible in Seamonkey 1.x without resource hacking it. If it isn't, then could you add that capability? I'd like to use a retro throbber from Netscape for nostalgic purposes. :3

My life is a bit busy/chaotic at the moment, but maybe when things calm down I'll contribute some where/if I can.

Edited by Yushatak
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