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Modern Browser Project 2018


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If i really need to web browse on my 9x box I just use realvnc/mirror driver to a VM i have setup on my main rig and map a share from my 98 to it.  sad days but atleast it works well enough,

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On 1/12/2018 at 1:20 PM, ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~ said:

QTWeb never worked on 9x. In order for it to work, someone's gotta know how to use Qt 4.4.3 and remove NT 5.0 dependencies to make it usable on 9x.

My 3.8.5 NT4 port works in NT4. Untested in win9x+kernelEx anyway.

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  • 5 months later...

I have not looked into this very hard but...

By using Delphi 7 and Overbyte ICS component pack (if someone have Delphi 7)

http://wiki.overbyte.eu/wiki/index.php/ICS_Download
I own a compiled demo app "OverbyteIcsHttpsTst" from that package which I tested in W98, and it at least downloaded Google over HTTPS

And perhaps combining these with
https://sourceforge.net/projects/htmlviewer/
https://github.com/BerndGabriel/HtmlViewer

It says that: These components Support most of the HTML 4.01 specifications with many additional popular HTML 5 enhancements

I have not had the possibility to confirm if these works under W98 though, but the sources are there...

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  • 1 month later...
On 7/3/2018 at 11:04 AM, Azvareth said:

I have not looked into this very hard but...

By using Delphi 7 and Overbyte ICS component pack (if someone have Delphi 7)

http://wiki.overbyte.eu/wiki/index.php/ICS_Download
I own a compiled demo app "OverbyteIcsHttpsTst" from that package which I tested in W98, and it at least downloaded Google over HTTPS

And perhaps combining these with
https://sourceforge.net/projects/htmlviewer/
https://github.com/BerndGabriel/HtmlViewer

It says that: These components Support most of the HTML 4.01 specifications with many additional popular HTML 5 enhancements

I have not had the possibility to confirm if these works under W98 though, but the sources are there...

I've been looking into these things for a while now, first for WFW 3.11 which is in an even more dire browser situation as even prior to the TLS 1.2 armageddon that occurred more recently it could barely render modern pages without crashing 1/4 of the time or so depending on your luck and what sites.

Overbyte ICS actually runs on Win3x with Delphi 1.0, which is why I'm aware of that. I'd learned Delphi 1.0 to work on Calmira II (I have my own build at http://www.yushatak.com/calmira.html with new features, need to make another release for the more recent features I've worked on). Delphi isn't my favorite language (I'm a C# programmer primarily) but the ICS components and lack of all .NET on Win3x made it attractive.

On my TODO list are the following (in this priority order):

- 32-bit browser with TLS 1.2 support written in .NET 2.0 using raw sockets and my knowledge of HTTPS/SSL/TLS (targeting 98SE or 2K at minimum, unfortunately 95 isn't possible due to .NET doing 98 minimum unless someone wants to port MONO).

- 16-bit browser with TLS 1.2 support written in Delphi 1.0 with Overbyte ICS using raw sockets and my knowledge of HTTPS/SSL/TLS.

- 32-bit browser with TLS 1.2 support written in Delphi (7 or maybe higher ,depends on support/performance, need to do research) using Overbyte ICS of the relevant version. This might happen instead of the first item if it seems better than .NET 2.0 based, but either way for 95 users it will happen if there's interest). This will be based on the 16-bit browser, most likely, at least in part.

I make no promises as to whether I'll require KernelEx for 98SE - depends on how things go - but most likely it will not be necessary.

By the way, the old version of Overbyte ICS that works on Win3x with Delphi 1.0 is hard to locate - the one on the site doesn't compile properly. I contacted the author but he is minimally interested in that old of a version but was pleased I solved my own problem. If anyone needs a copy let me know, I plan to throw one up on my site but who knows when I'll get to that.

I'm pretty busy, so progress will be in spurts and stops at random - presently we're pretty much in planning. I'll post here to update the community since this thread pops up everywhere when you try to find such things.

I'd discovered an alternative in using a proxy server to "translate" the HTTPS to HTTP, but the best tool for this on modern Windows (mitmproxy) had a bug I discovered and reported with SSL2 handshaking being unsupported, so that went out the window for Win3x Opera 3.62. Might be worth investigating as it may be more maintainable to just add a device to the network to bypass issues with HTTPS and maybe even rendering such that we could use old software and get a modern experience.

Edited by Yushatak
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About Win3x: its also possible to "translate" HTTPS to HTTP with help of a web-proxy. Two problems: to find one that works and than to find one with reasonable speed.

Lately I had a Win 3.1 internet project on Conforums. Sadly Conforums closed his doors, but if you are interested my last web-proxy test is still there: https://web.archive.org/web/20180413184337/http://win3x.conforums.com/index.cgi?board=net&num=1517876379&action=display&start=49

By the way: in my opinion Netscape Navigator 3.04 works "best".

Edited by deomsh
Typo's
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5 hours ago, noles20 said:

I found a modified version of K-Meleon 74 that claims to be 98-compatible. However, you will need to have kernelEX installed. Here is the link: https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018/05/k-meleon-74-windows-9x-edition.html.

Doesn't support TLS 1.2, unfortunately. It's the best option at the moment but it's inadequate.

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noles20 said:


I found a modified version of K-Meleon 74 that claims to be 98-compatible. However, you will need to have kernelEX installed. Here is the link: https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018/05/k-meleon-74-windows-9x-edition.html.

Actually the

original link is here at MSFN, the topic by roytam1:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/177485-backporting-newer-browsers-to-win9x-with-kernelex/
and a bit more postings here
https://msfn.org/board/topic/133014-last-versions-of-software-for-windows-2000/?page=11&tab=comments#comment-1152197
and I think more postings hidden inside 1-2 other threads too... very hard to keep track.
Of course, also an own topic in the K-Meleon forum:
http://kmeleonbrowser.org/forum/read.php?19,146040

Attention, the KM-versions are even easer to confuse as the various PaleMoon/NewMoon/Whatever versions.
Unlike PaleMoon/NewMoon, those KM-forks have no different base names, all are called "K-Meleon", the newer goanna-forks just currently "K-Meleon-Goanna" yet (short KM-Goanna), to avoid confusions. And unlike NewMoon, the 2 KM-Goannas don't just have some engine tweaks inside, but their engines are a lot more advanced as in the geckos with the same KM-number!

There are the original old "KM74" (alpha/../stable) and "KM76" (alpha/beta/RC1+2) versions by Dorian, with Gecko 24esr+38esr inside.
Roytams new "KM74-Goanna" and "KM76-Goanna" have a *much* newer Palemoon-engine inside (from PM26+27).
Perhaps also important, the KMG74-shell is not the old original, but a fork of another old user fork, 74+1 by Naruman. Which was heavily tweaked already with extensions deeply embedded, which make global useragent overrides almost impossible.
It's complicated, but using the same KM-version numbers for KM and KM-Goanna is really misleading. In reality the most modern KM76-goanna is "K-Meleon77 beta" or perhaps already RC, since modern pure gecko has become unusable for KM, and the PM27 engine is a big step forward from KM76. Rather than some sideways fork, it's considered by the KM-community as the future (almost) official KM77 version, and rather stable already. The "goanna" suffix is only needed when double-using old gecko numbers 74 or 76.

The little versioning prob with KM74-goanna is that alternative numbers are hard to come up with, since the next number 75 isn't free anymore, was long since taken for another old gecko build.
Edited by siria
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Yushatak said:


Doesn't support TLS 1.2, unfortunately. It's the best option at the moment but it's inadequate.


It does support TLS 1.2 as far as I know? That's one of it's main features. A browser for old systems which can't access modern websites due to that TLS1.2 disaster anymore. But so far KM74-goanna is only alpha/beta state. And officially it's meant for win2000, not win9X.
Luckily it also runs on Win98 with KernelEx, but so far extremely buggy. Basic KernelEx is not enough, a newer Kex version is needed, which is very problematic. KM74-Goanna runs, but due to this newer Kex, it can't seem to create own key3.db files, which causes those error-popups. My feeling is the culprit is rather this Kex version as KM, since it also creates massive bugs for other apps, also native win98 apps, which were running perfectly fine before that update.
A hack for KM74-goanna is to copy over all 3 *.db files from some other profile. But that's not the only killer prob on Win9x, it's also still crashing every few minutes, especially while moving the mouse. Error messages then mostly mention some MSVC... dll as culprit.


If you're looking for browsers running best on Windows98 today, if the basic KernelEx is allowed, there are Opera12.12, Firefox9, and roytams Retrozilla versions (forks of Firefox2 and old Seamonkey). His builds have the best TLS1.2, but very old CSS and scripts.

Opera and FF9 are quite good overall, access+display, but can't seem to access quite as many sites as roytams builds. But still a LOT more as for example FF3.6. Opera could even solve reCaptchas when I last tried, but that was 1-2 years ago already.
Retrozilla is said to run on native Win95, and has TLS1.2
Opera12.12 is a lot better displaywise, and can access almost as many. I thought it was running fine with old, basic KernelEx disabled on it, but now have it set to Win2000 compat mode.
Firefox since 3.x and K-Meleon1.6 needed basic KernelEx too, with XP-compat, but today LOTS of sites are not accessible anymore, cypher errors all over the place :(

And yes, the very best would be this KM74-Goanna! For accessing sites and for displaying them correctly. If only it wouldn't crash all the time :-(
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47 minutes ago, siria said:

It does support TLS 1.2 as far as I know? That's one of it's main features.

Looks like I was straight wrong about TLS support in RetroZilla and K-Meleon 74, but there is an issue when connecting to some sites regarding a security protocol - this is from RetroZilla:

"RetroZilla can't connect security to github.com because the site uses a security protocol which isn't enabled."

When I look in the preferences under SSL it has only two protocol versions, "SSL version 3" and "TLS", which was what led me to believe that it must only support TLS 1.0. I don't have K-Meleon 74 on the machine in front of me at the moment or I'd test that too, but I imagine the error will be the same and the situation similar in the preferences. Perhaps it's a cipher suite, then? Anybody know how to check what github.com requires easily?

Edited by Yushatak
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Yushatak said:


When I look in the preferences under SSL it has only two protocol versions, "SSL version 3" and "TLS", which was what led me to believe that it must only support TLS 1.0.

If you mean you looked in the GUI, that means nothing. Roytam doesn't do GUI. Only engines ;-)



Open about:config and filter for TLS
security.tls.version.max = 3 = TLS1.2

If you have that already and still doesn't work, would try deleting the cache stuff in the profile folder, and those 4 files:
compreg.dat, xpti.dat, XUL.mfl, XPC.mfl
They will be rebuild at next start, that's why that start will take a lot longer. But only once.

Perhaps it's really a missing cypher suite, no idea then.
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