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Browsing the web on 98/ME in 2019 and beyond


Destro

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I’m starting to think that for Windows 98 web browsing, the focus should switch to Opera, not Mozilla based browsers.

There is no mozilla browser for Win98, not even roytam1’s versions, capable of rendering HTML5 / CSS2 (CSS3 came after 2010), and play embedded videos without crashing, freezing/hanging up, or GUI issues. Pale/New Moon don’t help in this matter too. Netscape 5 source code is out there, but its engine is too old and Netscape 9.0.0.6 has no source code leaked plus it’s based on Fx 2.x, so it’s another dead end. Fx 3.6.28 needs more love, but cannot play embedded videos or properly render YouTube to search for videos to play straight on VLC.

K-Meleon is too unstable and often crashes on me too.

Opera 12.x is the closest thing to that we have today, was an advanced browser for its era with HTML5 capabilities, but without the right KernelEx updates, we cannot “open this door” without problems or fiddling with it.

I’m not a fan of Opera. I prefer Safari on macOS (been trying and liking Edge Chromium lately), and Mozilla Firefox on Windows (also Edge Chromium on Windows).

Just for reference, last officially supported versions for each old Windows version:

Windows 95/98/Me: Opera 10.10

Windows 2000: Opera 12.10 (Beta 1)

Windows XP/Vista: Opera 28.0 Build 1750.48

Edited by Bruninho
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10 hours ago, Bruninho said:

Yes, skin. I'll try that with KM74, it's the last shot before giving up.

No matter which browser I use, when I go to html5test.com, they all report to me that there is no MPEG-4, H.264, H.265 and WebM with VP9 support codecs. Even though I had installed K-Lite Codec Pack 6.90 Full. When I go to w3schools HTML5 video test, every browser plays the video. I have only Ogg Theora and VP8 support. I'm amazingly p***ed at how hard it is to get codecs right on Windows 98.

Frankly, codec detection is buggy on Windows 98. Even HTML5test.com says so.

Let's see how KM goes before I shut down the VM for good and move back to my successfull Windows 2000 VM.

The codecs installed by K-lite are DirectShow codecs. Only Internet Explorer could use them, no other browser will.

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3 minutes ago, loblo said:

The codecs installed by K-lite are DirectShow codecs. Only Internet Explorer could use them, no other browser will.

Thanks. I have so many missing information about these things, it’s good to know. I never knew they were for IE only. Damn... 

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6 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Loblo, as you can see the recycle bin icon is transparent. This is code written by Tihiy that utilizes the extra functions in User32.dll unique to Win98/ME. See https://msfn.org/board/topic/131040-revolutions-pack-97/?do=findComment&comment=842079 If code is written for WinXP then KernelEx may need XP setting for the transparency to work. This is what I experienced with the program that produced a Rathole in the desktop. Opera does not run with XP settings though. Rathole.exe was a game/program that produced a small square location in the display released in WinNT that the mouse pointer and everything else disappeared when over the small square. 

There is transparency support in 9x only for composting icons shown in the file system, hence the few utilities available to exploit it. There is no such transparency support for compositing windows and XP settings of KernelEx won't help with that.

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Remember with Mozilla if you do not have the ciphers disabled and new ones created in the OMNI.jar then the ciphers will not be employed. If you go to HowsMySSL.com this will see what ciphers are employed in your browser. My modded greprefs.js makes a fair bit of a difference. You need to up the size of direct DMA as I have said a few times. All tweaks should be done, make the machine as use settings of a server for example.

>>There is transparency support in 9x only for composting icons shown in the file system, hence the few utilities available to exploit it. There is no such transparency support for compositing windows and XP settings of KernelEx won't help with that.

I do not agree just yet. Games use transparency in many occasions. Direct Show means that Quartz.dll is employed in the process.

I would not use that codecs Bruninho even though it installs unless you have latest KEX I do not think it will work. All you need as Loblo has said with latest KEX is LAV filters. FFdshow filters do not decode x265. x265 needs more CPU power though.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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33 minutes ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Remember with Mozilla if you do not have the ciphers disabled and new ones created in the OMNI.jar then the ciphers will not be employed. If you go to HowsMySSL.com this will see what ciphers are employed in your browser. My modded greprefs.js makes a fair bit of a difference. You need to up the size of direct DMA as I have said a few times. All tweaks should be done, make the machine as use settings of a server for example.

>>There is transparency support in 9x only for composting icons shown in the file system, hence the few utilities available to exploit it. There is no such transparency support for compositing windows and XP settings of KernelEx won't help with that.

I do not agree just yet. Games use transparency in many occasions.



 

That's just how things are, some of us have been around the block long and early enough to know that. There are other examples where transparency is used within a software rendering areas such as web browsers and image editors with layers but this doesn't mean the 9x OSes have support for transparency in their windowing system.


 

Edited by loblo
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I'm almost accepting defeat and resorting to RetroZilla and Netscape 9.0.0.6 with NSS updates. I have to accept that most sites won't be viewable and no youtube either.

I'd go with a higher Firefox version but they all have issues. Highest I've tried was Fx 10.0.12 (ESR), yet was unstable and renders most sites badly. Thinking of backwards compatibility, the fact that RetroZilla does not render much CSS at all makes it easier to read, for example. It's like a site was rendered in plain text with no formatting. Same happens in Netscape. I wonder if I can write custom CSS locally for some sites so I can make it a bit nicer? Is there any extension for these browsers?

Netscape with updated NSS by Roytam1 can, for example, access a 2nd gmail account I had created for retro machines testing. I just had to make this account render in low bandwidth mode so I can use the webmail. Pretty neat. Search engines work. A few sites like the lite CNN version (http://lite.cnn.io) works. even http://isp.netscape.com works. OK, Not bad at all. Youtube? Page renders with errors, but well... no video. Okay. It's enough for a search and then get the video link for VLC streaming (if possible) or download to view on WMP.

No browser for Win 98 is capable to render my current personal web site properly, lol. Anyway, I was planning a total redesign for 2021 of my website and one of my plans was to make it backwards compatible. IMHO a very good web designer should take it in account when designing a new site (backwards compatibility) but not so extreme to a point where you have more than one version or give up on some feature you'd like to use because it wouldn't work here.

 

Edited by Bruninho
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Bruninho said:
> IMHO a very good web designer should take it in account when
> designing a new site (backwards compatibility)

Oh yes, fully agree of course :-))

> I wonder if I can write custom CSS locally for some sites so I can make it a bit nicer?
> Is there any extension for these browsers?

Oh yes too - that's absolutely necessary for todays web!
Would be lost without TONS of css tweaks for lots of websites (incl. MSFN), and still growing fast.
For this purpose Mozilla browsers always used this file:
../currentprofile/chrome/userContent.css
By default it doesn't exist, look instead for "userContent_example.css", copy and rename it.
Just a little syntax example I made for youtube:

@-moz-document domain(youtube.com) {
/*  SHOW COMPLETE lower description text in classic view! */
div#watch-description-text {
height: auto !important; 
max-height: none !important;
}
}



Am sure there are also addons for easier userstyle handling.
But personally I'm just manually editing an ever growing file adblock.css in my old browser, because unlike userContent.css, this one could be toggled on-off during a session.
Although must sadly say, again since 1-2 years, in ancient KM1.6(FF3.5) the number of websites needing such tweaks is exploding! :-( Almost find myself fiddling and cursing daily now. And it keeps getting harder. More and more often am now forced to give up and just kill all styles completely. So far was using macros by menu on-demand only, but just yesterday was getting so fed up, started consider to do it automatically onload for some domains. This engine's CSS is just getting far too old, more and more overlapping elements in websites, more and more show wrong page width, either far too narrow or far too wide :-(
If you'll manage to use Firefox9 engine or even younger, things will certainly be better.

Bruninho said:
> I'm almost accepting defeat and resorting to RetroZilla and Netscape 9.0.0.6 with NSS updates

No, this can't be. Seriously, I can't understand at all that you shouldn't be able to move past FF2 engine in your VM, despite even most current KernelEx installed. Is this a restriction of VMs perhaps?? Too weird.

My old K-Meleon1.6 with gecko 1.9.1 (as in Firefox3.5, but probably KM1.7alpha/gecko3.6 too) did run very stable with basic KernelEx452, until just 1-2 years ago. Until worldruler Google started destroying the web by enforcing TLS1.2 everywhere. Although have heard that supposedly website authors must only offer it as primary choice, and fallbacks for weaker browsers are allowed, yet most don't care and send exclusively TLS1.2 now. But despite that cipher prob, my browsers were always rather stable, did not crash hardly ever, and only showed normal page load errors for missing ciphers. Crashes happened very rarely, mostly when experimenting with something. Sadly that has changed lately, despite still using the same browser. More and more crashes now, even up to several times a day (ARRGH) No idea how many may be caused by too modern websites now (despite JS disabled), or by KernelEx16 probs, or by later added TLS1.2, or by my various browser tweaks and macros (a few do inject JS on page loads), or due to my absolutely lousy web connection, or especially my sometimes completely full disk partitions, or extreme lack of video RAM, or perhaps even by the second RAM stick added just recently, which helps much less as hoped. Am suspecting that all those points are probably contributing their share of probs.

But you have a lot more resources, disk space and RAM etc., speed, and younger KernelEx with more fixes! So this really makes no sense that you should be stuck with basically the same ancient FF2 browsers running on vanilla Win98 already - this just can't be. At the very least Fx3.6 should run okay with basic KernelEx. Somewhere something is wrong...

It's well possible slightly younger browsers like Fx3.6 may need SSE. Do do you have this enabled in this VM?
And when using the modern KernelEx version, do you have copied over the db-files necessary for httpS sites? (from mozilla profiles created with old kernelEx452)
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@siria: Thanks for the tips about the userContent.css! I will check it out with RetroZilla.

I’ve tried many things with both KernelEx 4.5.2 and the KernelEx updated with this. I’ve tried Opera 10.70, Opera 12.02, Opera 12.02 was the closest thing to what I wanted, except it was missing some ciphers for forums. I tried 12.10 beta 1 (since it was the last supported by Win 2000) but it didn’t even install. So the best Opera is indeed 12.02.

I’ve tried many, many Firefox versions. Best ones? 3.6.28 and 10.0.12 esr. I can try to tweak them, but honestly, if they cant render youtube videos nor render properly some websites I like to check (like, my own website) then what’s the point? Thinking in backwards compatibility, it’s better to let them be rendered almost without CSS instead of broken. Then it would be more readable. It’s like going back to the basics, when the www started.

K-Meleon needs more work to be stable. I’d rather stick with Mozilla or Opera.

I don’t know if the VM is SSE, I use VMware Fusion. Is there any setting in my vmx file where I can check it?

As for the db files, no, I didn’t...

EDIT: Luckily Netscape 9 (since its based on Fx 2.x) has an userContent.css file too. I can use it. I'll save another snapshot because I am resigned with the current status (Netscape 9 as main browser) and I might want to try and update KernelEx again to test one more time SeaMonkey, Opera and Firefox newer versions again.

I really don't expect improvements though. First I'll check if VMware Fusion can make VMs with or without SSE.

Edited by Bruninho
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Bruninho said:
> Thanks for the tips about the userContent.css! I will check it out with RetroZilla.

And here you're already running into absolutely crucial css features MISSING in Firefox2.

1) "domain" probably OK?
@-moz-document domain(bleepingcomputer.com) {
header {position: relative !important;}
body div {background-color: yellow !important;}
}

2) but "url-prefix" needs min FF3:
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://example.com/zzzz/yyy) {

3) and "regexp" needs min FF6 acc moz-dev:
@-moz-document regexp("https:.*") {

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@document
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/At-rule

also stuff like css selector ":not()", needs min FF3.5

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