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Browsing the web on 98/ME in 2019 and beyond


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Also, I think that what makes JS crash with these browsers is the size of these scripts. They are too big for them to handle (dunno if the browser or windows 98 is the real culprit here). Even though I have rloews ram patch to have 2GB RAM.

Probably, I can think its a browser cache issue.

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7 hours ago, Bruninho said:

That would not work. I believe the JS is tied to the browser engines. They understand the instructions as of the JS versions of that era. Most sites now use jQuery, which is essentially a JS framework (like Vue, React...) that’s the problem; old JS cannot understand the newer, more advanced jQuery, yet alone more advanced vanilla JS instructions. Most of the known vanilla JS properties, selectors and functions of today did not exist back in these days.

I tried last week to do a vanilla JS version of the scripts I use on my website. Failed miserably. I could not even do a proper global variables with multi dimensional arrays vanilla JS to reuse in more functions. I mean, I could at least write a vanilla JS parallax script for the background of my site. But it does not work for these browsers either.

so basically, your idea of a “transplant” would simply not work.

Hmm, OK.  I guess the only two options, then, would be to either re-implement from scratch a modern JS engine/Gecko in its entirety (very nontrivial, I would think, but probably ideal since it could be highly optimized specifically with 9x in mind for maximum speed and efficiency), or tweak/extend KernelEx so that Gecko 3x works more or less completely as is (probably not as fast or efficient, but should be much more possible with the tools at hand, and a slow, inefficient browser that is stable and usable is far better than a fast one that crashes constantly).

We're already 80% there, due to the fact that, JS notwithstanding, Gecko 3x otherwise starts up and renders sites with little or no adjustment.  The key is to make the necessary adjustments to KernelEx, Windows, Gecko, or some combination thereof, such that JS will work.

If I knew more about coding and such I'd give this a try myself, but alas I don't, so all I can do is churn out ideas.

c

Edited by cc333
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If you saw the FontAwesome github project, they have TTF versions of their webfonts, so no need to convert them ?
I dunno about IcoMoon, Bootstrap glyphs. I've only used IcoMoon in one or two projects with very customized icons in web fonts.

I still believe the JS problem is due to browser not being able to handle such big JS scripts size. The usage and size of these scripts grew up a lot when jQuery was introduced, and has been growing up every year. That's another reason why I want to ditch jQuery for the projects and try to use more vanilla JS.

If someone can manage to make the browser handle the size of the JS scripts, some sort of slow async caching or something like that... then you could avoid the crash, but not guaranteed that the JS would run as expected.

We now have browsers for Win 98 that run without JS but can render pages perfectly - They now understand the current modern CSS trends, like Flexbox and CSS Grid. They understand box-shadow, border-radius, CSS gradients and such. I know that, because my website makes use of CSS3 Flexbox and the page was rendered as expected - minus my background images, because they are provided by a JS Parallax script.

Edited by Bruninho
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I looked hard into the link you gave for GitHub about FontAwesome but could not find any downloads, I am not a member. I have converted them to TTF from another website download but I am not sure if they are going to be the same as the ones you are talking about. When viewing MSFN home page the shareaholic buttons and inspecting the element or page source it uses version 5.9 of FontAwesome. There seems provision for TTF by the look but it did not allocate the gliphs. It might be because I have not got version 5.9 files. I have Opera allocating some gliphs of shareaholic buttons but they are not the same as Win10 Opera. This issue is not as serious as the font selection for text using Marlett which is fixed by disenabling WebFonts in Opera 12.02.

Mozilla 9 will run with JS fully enabled. I have increased the size of JS cache and the way it is handled, more zoom range selections, all types of stuff in the grepref on page 8. If it is JS trouble then Mozilla 9 will give message that this script is taking too long to respond or something like it and then asks do you want to stop it and whether to make it permanent. I did not opt for permanency unless it was proven to be trouble consistently after reboot etcetera. I only did this once if I remember properly and years ago before the grepref mods. Mainly I just said no to stopping script and it ended up parsing it. I do not have that trouble anymore. Later Mozilla does not have this feature of stopping script or warning about being too slow.

I have gone a bit overboard on disabling ciphers pref("security.ssl3.rsa_seed_sha", true); This one is considered safe I believe where as my upload will have it false. Fixed.

One website that went to the new standards is DailyMotion several years ago and did not provide older HTML support. I have got the speed of CometBird 9 working well and does not have any stalling but not all web pages render properly.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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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. 

Edited by Bruninho
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The FontAwesome I downloaded and converted was 5.13.0 dated 20/03/2020. It could be the latest? Opera had the shareaholic gliphs prior to recent FontAwesome install. I did notice I have more gliphs working in YouTube now in the peoples comments. Other sites have the FaceBook and Pinterest etcetera symbols but MSFN home is a good test for the Marlett replacement in Opera and button gliphs.

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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

Edited by Bruninho
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@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.

Edited by Bruninho
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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....

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@Bruninho:

Vogon icons: https://www.vogons.org/styles/vogons199x/theme/icons.woff or https://www.vogons.org/styles/vogons199x/theme/icons.woff2

Very easy to find by looking at the html btw. No TTF seems available. WOFF (unsure about WOFF2) can be converted within a 9x system that has KernelEx with Fontforge, otherwise an online converter should be fine and I believe internal font family name should be set to vogons-icon (as per Vogon CSS).

LAV & VSFilter: these are DirectShow (ActiveX) filters, the only browser that could instantiate them is Internet Explorer, they won't work with any other browser. I don't think there is any solution for playing youtube vids in a browser on a 9x system. Download and play locally is what I do for youtube.

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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:

 

Screen Shot 2020-04-09 at 7.26.22 PM.png

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@Bruninho:

SeaMonkey 2.32 was released in 2015 Mozilla 35. It will not connect to the new HTML version in YouTube but try DailyMotion or Veoh for rendering. Make sure YouTube plays on later OS. If browser is set to use a player to open when a video is selected than this will work so long as the site has no embedded player, just have to search for some. Many sites use the YouTube embedded player. Your uploaded fonts are version 5.12.1

I tried it and it is not compatible with the new HTML standard and therefore not much better than CometBird 9 or Opera 12.02 and not as good without JS.

@Loblo:

You still have the thick blue bars between the MSFN posts don't you? You do not use IPS - Theme and have no width issue?

Edited by Goodmaneuver
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On 4/8/2020 at 8:51 AM, Bruninho said:

Also, I think that what makes JS crash with these browsers is the size of these scripts. They are too big for them to handle...

That makes sense.  However, JS on these same browsers (such as it is) works fine when they're run on a natively supported OS (XP), so I'm inclined to think its depends on some sort of API that KernelEx hasn't fully implemented yet.

c

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