Browsing the web on 98/ME in 2019 and beyond

[Bruninho]

On 4/1/2020 at 6:09 PM, cc333 said:

Screenshots!

c

What I don't get is how your system font family looks right on Firefox but not on my Firefox install. I tried 31.8 ESR and it installed, ran and i couldnt go to any site I type on address bar. it refuses to go without any sign of life.

[cc333]

12 minutes ago, Bruninho said:

What I don't get is how your system font family looks right on Firefox but not on my Firefox install.

I noticed that as well, but I switching the system font to Tahoma (Western) seemed to fix it.

13 minutes ago, Bruninho said:

I tried 31.8 ESR and it installed, ran and i couldnt go to any site I type on address bar. it refuses to go without any sign of life.

This happened to me as well, but oddly, deleting the profiles folder, recreating a fresh one with FF 3.6 and going into 3.6's about:config to disable js solved this problem for me.

c

[Bruninho]

I can run SeaMonkey 2.24 on Windows 98, but I still have the wrong system font, plus it crashes if I load any big news site such as brazilian globo.com, probably because of Javascript. SeaMonkey 2.28 refuses to work complaining of DLLs. I then proceeded to try 2.21 because my research says its same as Fx 24.x, the one that worked with one of the guys that posted here 2 pages ago.

I managed to load my own website, VOGONS and MSFN forums. Haven't tried Youtube yet.

My Windows 98SE is fully updated, has KernelEx 4.5.2 and the KernelEx updates.

 

EDIT: Switching the Windows 98 system font in appearances tab to Tahoma fixed that issue. Thanks for the tip. Tahoma is similar to the default font, no?

My SeaMonkey is still crashing though - I tried youtube and crashed. Must be JS, indeed.

EDIT 2: Fixed a typo on my post - I was meant to say SeaMonkey 2.24 not 2.21

EDIT 3: I'm now trying higher SeaMonkey versions but with JS disabled to check how well they render the CSS. Starting with 2.29, it can render my website pretty well and also the brazilian news site and the youtube page (no videos). I will continue trying higher versions until I cannot go higher, but I already know I can't install 2.49.5. No support for SVG fonts (like FontAwesome) so far. And so far, I'm quite, quite surprised with the results. If someone could get JS to work at a decent level, then there MIGHT BE hope...

EDIT 4: Can't go past 2.32. When i disable JS, the browser is completely unusable and no url on address bar will load (2.31, 2.32, 2.33, 2.35). I am reverting to SeaMonkey 2.29 - which worked wonders.

Edited April 8, 2020 by Bruninho

[roytam1]

2 hours ago, Bruninho said:

Let me try it and report to you in a couple of minutes. I've installed Firefox 9.0.1, It still has the wrong system fonts all over the UI, but its working somewhat and I don't know how.

 

EDIT: For SeaMonkey 2.28, I need MSVCR100.DLL, it's complaining about this missing DLL. I don't know where to get km75rc3 either.

EDIT 2: Got the DLL from my Win2K VM. Now complains about KernelXP.DLL and NTDLL.DLL... I definitely need to start using dependency walker.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/kmeleon/files/k-meleon-dev/K-Meleon75RC3.exe/download

and you can just grab msvc*.dll from KM75 installation.

[Bruninho]

Somehow I cannot revert back to what was working with SeaMonkey 2.29. So I decided to do another snapshot of the VM with a freshly updated KernelEx, saved it, so I don't have to redo some steps again. Now I will retry these browsers again to see if I can repeat it again and find out where I failed after having successfully worked out 2.29.

@roytam1: Thanks! I'll get it, of course.

UPDATE: Now testing K-Meleon 75RC3. Apart of Apple's website, all sites I visited worked wonders (but JS was disabled for all of them). Here's the list of sites I visited:

https://www.globo.com, https://www.youtube.com, https://www.brunocastello.com (my website), https://www.invidio.us (youtube mirror), MSFN forums (but I didn't attempt to log in), https://www.vogons.org (also didn't attempt to log in, but I know it will for sure).

Youtube and Invidio.us didn't play any videos, I expected that, since there's no video codecs or plugins installed here.

Facebook I went to the login page (but didn't attempt) and Twitter was redirected to the mobile website. Formula1.com also rendered well. 

One thing to mention about some sites - they may not appear to render properly to you, missing some images, but thats because JS is disabled - some sites do some lazy loading of images with JS hence why they may not look right at some point, but HTML and CSS are properly rendered. I'm pretty satisfied - only needs JS working. I will now proceed to testing with JS enabled. And early signs showed that all pages will crash on me with JS enabled, so KM75RC3 will work well with JS disabled only.

Edited April 8, 2020 by Bruninho

[cc333]

1 hour ago, Bruninho said:

EDIT: Switching the Windows 98 system font in appearances tab to Tahoma fixed that issue. Thanks for the tip. Tahoma is similar to the default font, no?

Tahoma is the default system font for Windows 2000 and XP;  it gets installed with the unofficial Service Pack.

1 hour ago, Bruninho said:

EDIT 3: I'm now trying higher SeaMonkey versions but with JS disabled to check how well they render the CSS. Starting with 2.29, it can render my website pretty well and also the brazilian news site and the youtube page (no videos). I will continue trying higher versions until I cannot go higher, but I already know I can't install 2.49.5. No support for SVG fonts (like FontAwesome) so far. And so far, I'm quite, quite surprised with the results. If someone could get JS to work at a decent level, then there MIGHT BE hope...

Interesting that 2.29 works!  What is the comparable Firefox version?  Twenty-something?

To fix the SVG font problem, you can do the following (these instructions are for Opera, but with a few adaptations, they work on Mozilla browsers too):

1. Download the two fonts mentioned in this post:
2. Go to about:config and make sure gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled is set to false.
3. Drop the fonts into %WINDIR%\Fonts
4. Restart Firefox
5. Enjoy the newly available font glyphs!

1 hour ago, Bruninho said:

EDIT 4: Can't go past 2.32. When i disable JS, the browser is completely unusable and no url on address bar will load (2.31, 2.32, 2.33, 2.35). I am reverting to SeaMonkey 2.29 - which worked wonders.

2.3x must be based on some version between 31 and 38.

EDIT: Confirmed!  SeaMonkey 2.3x is based on Gecko 33 and newer, so now we know that the effective limit of usability (so far) is Gecko 32, upon which SM 2.29 is based.  We might be able to get Gecko 33 or even 34 to work with some careful tweaking, however.

c

Edited April 8, 2020 by cc333

[Bruninho]

1 hour ago, cc333 said:

Tahoma is the default system font for Windows 2000 and XP;  it gets installed with the unofficial Service Pack.

Interesting that 2.29 works!  What is the comparable Firefox version?  Twenty-something?

To fix the SVG font problem, you can do the following (these instructions are for Opera, but with a few adaptations, they work on Mozilla browsers too):

1. Download the two fonts mentioned in this post:
2. Go to about:config and make sure gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled is set to false.
3. Drop the fonts into %WINDIR%\Fonts
4. Restart Firefox
5. Enjoy the newly available font glyphs!

2.3x must be based on some version between 31 and 38.

EDIT: Confirmed!  SeaMonkey 2.3x is based on Gecko 33 and newer, so now we know that the effective limit of usability (so far) is Gecko 32, upon which SM 2.29 is based.  We might be able to get Gecko 33 or even 34 to work with some careful tweaking, however.

c

I can confirm that SeaMonkey 2.32 works, I had to delete the profile folder and transplant the profile from Firefox 3.6 with JS disabled.  Then it began working.
We can get Gecko 33 working at least, but with JS disabled. We need to find a way to browse with JS enabled later.

The profile trick also fixed Firefox 31.8 ESR for me too, also with JS disabled. But I will not use that Firefox version because its one of the versions where Mozilla started mimicking Google Chrome's look, which I despise... I use SeaMonkey because it reminds me of Netscape, and also, is more stable than Firefox.

For now, I have the following browsers installed on Windows 98SE (plus KernelEx updates, official MS updates, unofficial updates, VC redist, DirectX, and rloews patch for more RAM):
- SeaMonkey 2.32 (main browser), Netscape 9.0.0.6 (roytam1's NSS update), K-Meleon 75RC3 (roytam1's) and Firefox 3.6.28 (also roytam1's, just in case I need to fix the profile folders again).

Thanks for the font and glyphs fix, I will attempt to do them now.
 

Edit: For some reason, whenever I open SeaMonkey (or any newer Firefox than 3.6) I have to copy again the profiles folder. Annoying...

 

Edited April 8, 2020 by Bruninho

[Goodmaneuver]

Mozilla has not got the WebFonts problem. I is not the fonts. All that is required in Opera is to turn off WebFonts in [ Opera:config | User Pref | Enable WebFonts ] untick the Enable WebFonts.

[Bruninho]

21 minutes ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Mozilla has not got the WebFonts problem. I is not the fonts. All that is required in Opera is to turn off WebFonts in [ Opera:config | User Pref | Enable WebFonts ] untick the Enable WebFonts.

I can confirm that the solution for the SVG glyphs on Mozilla browsers doesn't work.

[cc333]

2 hours ago, Goodmaneuver said:

Mozilla has not got the WebFonts problem.

1 hour ago, Bruninho said:

I can confirm that the solution for the SVG glyphs on Mozilla browsers doesn't work.

Huh, OK.  It worked on 3.6, at least.  I guess built in support still works in these more recent versions.

By the way, I have 2.29.1 up and running, of course without JS (leaving it on resulted in the same crash as it's Firefox cousin).

Is it possible there's some APIs that Gecko's JS engine uses which KernelEx isn't representing fully?  This requires extensive investigation, I think, because it would be relatively easy, I would think, to extend KernelEx to encompass the missing API functions, if any, even if they're only minimally functional stubs (which would be better than nothing, and may allow JS to fail more gracefully rather than crashing the browser, at least).

Nevertheless, even with the JS problem, this is a super excellent advancement in the state of web browsing on Windows 98!

Here's a thought: what about taking an earlier, known working JS engine (say, Firefox 3.6) and grafting it onto SM 2.29's Gecko in place of it's original engine (in effect, a transplant)?  The old JS engines are inferior to the new ones, of course, but at least they run, and a running JS engine would provide a usable base onto which 9x-friendly implementations of newer JS features can be built (or at least give a good idea of how the newer JS engine could be rewritten).

c

Edited April 8, 2020 by cc333

[Bruninho]

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.

[Goodmaneuver]

>>but with a few adaptations, they work on Mozilla browsers too

>>It worked on 3.6, at least.

Mozilla has a select button font problem (or I have not the fonts used installed) but disabling downloadable fonts did not work. Perhaps the TLS 1.0 could not talk to the server to download the fonts with FF 3.6? Can you show the improvement, explain the improvement or name the web site that the fonts worked.
 

Edited April 8, 2020 by Goodmaneuver

[aviv00]

wine for old windows will solve this problem one time for all

[Goodmaneuver]

Wine is for Linex isn't it? I use WinME on a real machine.

I quote this from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/SVG_fonts

"SVG Fonts are currently supported only in Safari and Android Browser.
 Internet Explorer hasn't considered implementing this, the functionality has been removed from Chrome 38 (and Opera 25) and Firefox has postponed its implementation indefinitely to concentrate on WOFF. Other tools however like the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin, Batik and parts of Inkscape support SVG font embedding."
 

[Bruninho]

I use fontAwesome glyphs since 2016 all the time at work, basically they are webfont files now, in five different formats to cater for all browsers: eot, svg, woff, woff2 and ttf. My own website uses them for social networks icons and menu icons (this one on mobile devices only).

if you visit my site and see 3 social networks icons on top, then your browser can read these webfonts.

currently I use the version 5 of FontAwesome (https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/tree/master/webfonts)

And this works on all major (modern) browsers (edge, safari, chrome, firefox) and also Opera.

I thought that they should be working on SM 2.32 since its Fx 35.x based but no...

Bootstrap’s and FontAwesomes glyphs are the most used ones in the world. 

like goodmaneuver said earlier, it’s possible that something is preventing the download of these webfonts by the browser to correctly exhibit them

Edited April 8, 2020 by Bruninho