Thread

the best web browser for 68kmacs

68kMLA Software 19 posts Jan 12, 2014 to Feb 6, 2014

#1 Sun, 12 Jan 2014 - 17:23 68kMLA

so far i really like netscape 2.0 its fast and seems to work good with the exception of these could javascript errors i keep getting.

[attachment=0]Screen Shot 2014-01-12 at 12.21.07 PM.png[/attachment]

I mean its no big deal… i can just tap ok once or twice and then its fine.

anyone know how to stop these errors? i looked all through the settings and can't find a way.

Going to google.com brings up like 10 of these errors.

#2 Sun, 12 Jan 2014 - 17:28 68kMLA

I thought on 2.0 there was a javascript setting. Options/security. But maybe that was for windows.

#3 Sun, 12 Jan 2014 - 17:30 68kMLA

Maybe you need 2.0.2 specifically to disable it. Did some googling.

#4 Sun, 12 Jan 2014 - 19:39 68kMLA

your right, 2.0.2 WAS the trick now i have the option to disable javascript.

after going through a ton of dead links, found it over at macgui.

[attachment=0]Screen Shot 2014-01-12 at 2.36.29 PM.png[/attachment]

#5 Sun, 12 Jan 2014 - 19:43 68kMLA

yes much much better now!

#6 Mon, 13 Jan 2014 - 18:03 68kMLA

Yep, Netscape's quite usable once you turn off Javascript.

I should dig up a copy of iCab and see how that compares...it's been forever since I tried it.

#7 Mon, 13 Jan 2014 - 20:17 68kMLA

Icab was working well, but the PPC version seemed to crash a lot on my G3. The Netscape browser is way more smooth. It had a lot of time to be worked on the Mac. It was what AOL used and worked on my plus, I moded the keyboard to power an apple modem and used dial up AOL for backups. It was funny seeing any web page in black and white.

#8 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 - 18:46 68kMLA

To be honest with you, it would be very interesting to see a web browser developed for 68ks that is compatible with more modern internet standards (such as IPv6, HTML 5, and so on).

Firefox might be a good place to start...

#9 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 - 19:50 68kMLA

Firefox might be a good place to start...

Someone in the IRC channel pointed me towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillo, but the only ports for it are DOS, Windows, OSX & Linux.

It might be compact enough to run on later 68k machines, though it uses a 3d rendering libary that doesn't seem to have an early Mac version...

#10 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 - 19:53 68kMLA

That would be sweet. I asked ClassicHasClass about it, but according to him Classilla would require a lot of hacking to work even just on 68k 8.1...

#11 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 - 21:19 68kMLA

Seems to me that a 68k would be dead slow in processing anything modern. I don't even want to think of SSL encrypted connections.

#12 Fri, 17 Jan 2014 - 21:48 68kMLA

I dunno; I was surprised by how generally zippy Netscape was when I tried it (I didn't even have to turn off Javascript for performance reasons so much as just to get rid of all the error-message popups.) Doubtless a newer browser with CSS and such would be slower, but still, you never know.

#13 Sat, 18 Jan 2014 - 08:43 68kMLA

Unless you're only accessing pages made prior to 2003, I'm unsure how snappy a 68k-powered browser is going to be.

#14 Sat, 18 Jan 2014 - 16:27 68kMLA

I got here without any trouble (aside from the error messages,) and Netscape isn't even optimized for heavy Javascript usage like modern browsers...

#15 Sat, 18 Jan 2014 - 19:50 68kMLA

On second thought, I seem to remember reading about something called Browser6, which was a web browser for System 6.

I don't know how it performs in a modern environment, however.

#16 Sun, 19 Jan 2014 - 01:05 68kMLA

Let's keep in mind for a moment that phpBB3, having been released in late 2007 and since then largely only been given functionality and security patches, not modernity upgrades, isn't really a shining example of the modern Internet. In fact, I would argue that it's barely different in overall functionality than phpBB2 and other really old bulletin board and other early web applications, such as Snitz, YaBB, etc.

On the actual topic: Back in the day, I almost universally had the best luck with Internet Explorer 3, or 4 if the system could possibly support it. This has basically held true for me all the way out through IE 5.2 on the latest OS 9 releases. Mozilla worked, but I never quite wanted to use all of its functions at once, and it always wanted way more memory than any system I owned at the time period had.

#17 Thu, 30 Jan 2014 - 02:32 68kMLA

So to port dillo you'd need to update m68k port of FLTK which might be possible.... I was able to compile the code with ECGS on Red Hat Sparc with a few fixes so... yeah it might be possible

I think there was an old FLTK 1.1 binary somewhere. If you want Dillo I suggest starting from the D+ browser port... its supposedly implemented more cleanly and in a single binary unlike Dillo which loads plugins which can leak memory as well. It receives little maintenance but in reality that matters little.

http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/index.old.php

That said... I think Netsurf would be the better option. It already runs on Atari.... and Amiga so it might be possible. That said I think they use modern compilers and cross compile to the target machine which really would be a handy thing to have for classic macs but I don't know if it exists.

#18 Thu, 6 Feb 2014 - 10:55 68kMLA

I found iCab worked quite well on my 540c.

Just don't try using the incomplete CSS support. It works quite poorly.

#19 Thu, 6 Feb 2014 - 13:43 68kMLA

I remember setting up Netscape 2.0.2 to use a RAM disk as a disk cache.

Having images and pages cached in RAM really improved performance, I guess a bit like the SSD's of today.

Later, I found an application called AppDisk which worked even better as the moment I quit, I regained all the lost RAM.