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Home Forums 68kMLA What is the oldest Mac/browser combo that you would browse the web and download
Post #19 by nglevin
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I tend to use Netscape 2.02 with CERN's first website as its home page on my 33 Mhz Quadra. Most of the time I use it to download old Mac files from various websites, always through HTTP not S and usually by direct linking.

Someone recently showed off the web through 2.01's eyes, in celebration of the browser's 16th anniversary. It is surprisingly not as bad as what you'd see from more recent browsers that support early CSS.

This version of Netscape allows you to load images separate from page content, and it doesn't support CSS at all. So you typically just see naked HTML sort-of-3.2. And even though it supports JavaScript 1.0(!), I typically leave JavaScript disabled because this was before we had fast JS runtimes, and almost nobody apart from a few rescued, old GeoCities sites still have page content coded directly to that standard.

No mandatory old, slow Java runtime, either. Netscape 2 was the last version before Java became standard with Netscape releases.

EDIT: Before I forget, the venerable Netscape Defrost extension seems to address most crash issues I've had with the older Netscapes, versions 2 and 3. Anyone who wishes to browse the web as I have should consider that a must.

mp.ls