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Browsing the web on 98/ME in 2019 and beyond


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6 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Bruninho:

CometBird 9 says transferring data continuously from your website. Turning of JavaScript did not change anything.

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.

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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.

Edited by Bruninho
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I do not know but other sites like AOL Yahoo or ESPN  New York Times  FOXSports they all work with CometBird 9. One thing is the sites are split up into many different sites (possibly ads or other 3rd party sites) where as yours does not appear to do this. Perhaps the data load in one big package is too much, that is, does your site load progressively or in one hit? HTTP:// makes no difference. Also one game site on the CometBird Google home page that displays white; if transversing back with the back return one page button on the navigation tool bar; the page displays for a fraction of a second? This might be because of my FireFox 31 User Agent. No tested it is not the UA. (www.y8.com)

I personally like the old style of page where sites had separate packages and background colors could match your system colors. Use old user agent for this on MSN, I have enabled the use of system colors in grepref. There is some attempt with this with modern browsers with the dark theme. Most of the time we are stuck with bright white to backgrounding on more complete page downloads but Bruninho your site is not white of course.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
Tested UA
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I tried your website because it was not encrypted with IE6 and Maxthon 2.5.18. Maxthon worked but only seemed to show the 3rd party stuff. It was ~ 1300 GMT. IE6 had a script error which is probably because of Msjava too old. No I got the wrong file name, Jscript but mine is not that old. The /#en did not work to convert to English.

I am having trouble posting from Opera 12.02 at the moment, so I will try doing a profile back date but why did this happen? > Profile back date fixed this and can post again. I also enabled hardware acceleration which needs a reboot and Ddraw + DCIman32 + D3D9 + Dsound etcetera loaded now with Opera. I also enabled Show Notifications For Widgets and WebGL.

BrunoMaxthon.png

BrunoIE6.png

Edited by Goodmaneuver
strikethrough
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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.

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Right, Opera dark theme might have made me think your site had a dark theme and there was a page that had many videos or something in a dark boundary. There might be updates with CSS3 but it still is called CSS3, I do not know exactly but CSS3 was implemented in 2011.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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The instance about www.y8.com reported 5 posts up was not the UA and is something to look into. The User Agent of about FireFox 20 range is unusable with CometBird 9 it almost stalls with downloading many web pages (incompatible) but about FireFox 31 UA is good. I have updated the grepreff to fix the rsa_seed_sha to true and made UA Vista FireFox 34 as it is a bit better. No good for MSN as before though, it is very fast and shows page properly but to browse MSN easily original UA should be used or as explained before or use Opera12.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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After hours of setup a test system, tinkering and testing I'm running Firefox24esr port and Firefox31esr port on ME! Javascript seem to be no problem. FF38esr is not yet running here. 38 closes sillently or crashes on start without to open the GUI. Later I tell how it works. I write on FF31.

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13 minutes ago, schwups said:

After hours of setup a test system, tinkering and testing I'm running Firefox24esr port and Firefox31esr port on ME! Javascript seem to be no problem. FF38esr is not yet running here. 38 closes sillently or crashes on start without to open the GUI. Later I tell how it works. I write on FF31.

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

Edited by Bruninho
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@Bruninho website
Just some thoughts, since you seem to be really interested in old systems/browsers.
I understand we're coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, and your site is meant to showcase "modern" features of course. But you also claim it were "responsive and efficient", and sorry, but I have some doubts there. It may be true for users with modern systems and fast connections and no bandwidth probs, but that's not the target group which needs efficient pages. On less-modern equipment the site is instead rather heavy and unresponsive.
The #1 killer, and I mention this because it may matter for some customers too:
the site even denies access *completely* to all sub-pages if readers can't use javascript for whatever reason! (limited resources, hardware, bandwidth, system, security, whatever.) Of course some advanced functions may need JS, but that doesn't imply that the whole rest need be broken too. For example look at this forum here, or look at Amazon: their pages surely have tons of functions, and (I suppose) also stuff requiring modern browsers. Yet even for browsers as ancient as FF3.5 and slow connections it's still possible to load them in a reasonable time, and without needing javascript at all. It's possible. On amazon JS is only needed for secondary functions, like reading comments of comments, since a while. But browsing and searching still works okay without JS. Of course, partly bad layout in very old browsers due to CSS, but that's secondary, what matters most is that a page is still readable at least. On your homepage only the entry page loads normal -although slowly, and page width only 15cm on a 28cm wide screen- yet none of the subpages and none of the language variations are accessible at all. Completely blocked. No go.

Or something I never understood when stuck on ultraslow connections in the past: the images look small, but in reality are already loaded full size. That costs a lot of unnecessary bandwidth (your page size 3MB needing ca 10min), and never understood the point: if only shown small, why load them big?
Or otherwise, considering they are already loaded full size anyway, a nice gimmick could be to show them full size just when hovering over them (css img:hover, no JS either)
That said, next thing I'll do now is open my user css and add this as a global rule, LOL!

Sigh, just noticed killer #2 for old browsers: the whole browser crashes when loading your page with SVG enabled.

Edited by siria
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55 minutes ago, Bruninho said:

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

nope, just KernelEx with upd v20 compatibility option set to xp sp2, it works even on 98fe.

318esr.png

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The most important and decisive step was to replace the ntdll.dll (4.90.0.3000) by the one of the unofficial service Packs version 5.0.2195.7080, (XP versions not testet) but only for the engine - XUL.dll. Only Xul.dll needs the ntdll.dll. I replaced it by the ImportPatcher:

[DLL replacements]
ntdll.dll=9xdll.dll

The renamed ntdll.dll can be in the system or program folder. I think the step was made possible by the latest KEX updates.

Test System ME, KernelEx Update 24, the VC++  runtimes,  hjsuffolk14's me service pack,.........., Xul.dll and FF.exe set to XPSP2 or 3. I see a little cosmetic glitch in the tab bar of FF31. I added these delay API's to Kstub823:

[Ntdll.dll]

NlsMbCodePageTag=
RtlGetFullPathName_U=
RtlQueryEnvironmentVariable_U=
_alloca_probe=
RtlDoesFileExists_U=
RtlNtPathNameToDosPathName=
RtlStringFromGUID=

Maybe not relevant.

 

 

Edited by schwups
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2 hours ago, siria said:

@Bruninho website
Just some thoughts, since you seem to be really interested in old systems/browsers.
I understand we're coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, and your site is meant to showcase "modern" features of course. But you also claim it were "responsive and efficient", and sorry, but I have some doubts there. It may be true for users with modern systems and fast connections and no bandwidth probs, but that's not the target group which needs efficient pages. On less-modern equipment the site is instead rather heavy and unresponsive.
The #1 killer, and I mention this because it may matter for some customers too:
the site even denies access *completely* to all sub-pages if readers can't use javascript for whatever reason! (limited resources, hardware, bandwidth, system, security, whatever.) Of course some advanced functions may need JS, but that doesn't imply that the whole rest need be broken too. For example look at this forum here, or look at Amazon: their pages surely have tons of functions, and (I suppose) also stuff requiring modern browsers. Yet even for browsers as ancient as FF3.5 and slow connections it's still possible to load them in a reasonable time, and without needing javascript at all. It's possible. On amazon JS is only needed for secondary functions, like reading comments of comments, since a while. But browsing and searching still works okay without JS. Of course, partly bad layout in very old browsers due to CSS, but that's secondary, what matters most is that a page is still readable at least. On your homepage only the entry page loads normal -although slowly, and page width only 15cm on a 28cm wide screen- yet none of the subpages and none of the language variations are accessible at all. Completely blocked. No go.

Or something I never understood when stuck on ultraslow connections in the past: the images look small, but in reality are already loaded full size. That costs a lot of unnecessary bandwidth (your page size 3MB needing ca 10min), and never understood the point: if only shown small, why load them big?
Or otherwise, considering they are already loaded full size anyway, a nice gimmick could be to show them full size just when hovering over them (css img:hover, no JS either)
That said, next thing I'll do now is open my user css and add this as a global rule, LOL!

Sigh, just noticed killer #2 for old browsers: the whole browser crashes when loading your page with SVG enabled.

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.

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@Bruninho:

I found that IE6 works real fast on your website, error though but if I turned off DDE it would probably work like Maxthon.

@Schwups:

Well done. The Rtl in Ntdll are stubs, KernelEx might be able to sort this out. The only thing I do not understand is XUL does not call any NTDLL implicit functions. I tried ImportPatcher on the XUL of 24esr8 no Ntdll.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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