There’s a lot of love for retro tech — I may even be guilty of a little of it myself — but what about old browsers? Does anybody love them? I decided to try to find out.
Browsers date, and fast. Don’t believe me? Google Chrome, generally held to be the world’s most popular browser right now didn’t even exist nine years ago. Internet Explorer did, but even Microsoft’s abandoned IE in favour of Microsoft Edge for Windows 10.
Over the weekend, I found something. Specifically, Mozilla. Not the open source foundation, but Mozilla the lizard mascot, which for some reason that time has forgotten Netscape sent to me many years ago.
This got my brain waxing nostalgic, and wondering all sorts of questions. Stupid questions if I’m honest, but hey, I figured, working out how modern web pages look on old browsers could be fun. After all, they were built for the dialup age, on processors that may as well be abacuses by modern standards. Theoretically, they should fly on new systems.
Or, you know, crash embarrassingly.
Either way, I thought it might be fun.
Yes, this says a lot about my mental processes at the time. You may judge me. I know I would.
A quick note before I start: I’ll provide download links where I can, but it bears noting:
THESE ARE NOT SECURE BROWSER PRODUCTS.
DO NOT USE THEM FOR ANY SENSITIVE WEB ACTIVITY SUCH AS ONLINE BANKING.
Ahem. I just feel better letting that out of my system.
Lynx
Lynx has the cachet of being the oldest still-developed browser in the world, having kicked off development all the way back in space year 1992. I remember it well; we’d all ride around on our dinosaurs, screeching into brass instruments shaped like feet to obtain victory and get online, or as we called it, trumpet winsock.
I feel like I should apologise for that joke. I feel like I should, but I won’t.
Anyway, Lynx is still in development today. I grabbed a Windows version from here and set to getting up on the world wide web, VT100 style.
Lynx on a modern desktop is certainly eye catching, that’s for sure. It does work after a fashion, and indeed can be remarkably fast once you get up to speed with its entirely idiosyncratic way of wandering around an entirely text-based web page. Be ready for some stark contrast and perhaps an issue or two with longer text pieces broken up.
Amazingly, you can load the YouTube homepage in Lynx. You’ve got to wade through a lot of cookie allowances to do so, but it will load.
No, you can’t actually watch anything. Don’t be silly.
Would I seriously use it? There’s a certain perverse joy in the text-only web, but it’s not quite an enjoyable experience. If I were trapped with a net connection that emulated the bad old days of dialup and I needed to send out an emergency message or two, though, Lynx would be my first port of call. It ain’t fancy, but it works.
NSCA Mosaic
NSCA Mosaic is the daddy of visual web browsing. The originator. If you’re reading this right now, presuming you’re not a high court judge who has all his web pages printed out for him (seriously, this is a thing that happens, apparently) then you owe a certain debt to NSCA’s Mosaic.
Incredibly, you can still download NSCA Mosaic direct from NSCA itself. That’s kind of mindblowing, because it’s not like any other browser vendor still provides direct download links for its products. No, they’re not updated at all any more; it’s just an FTP archive you can grab code from.
It’s right here, if you’re keen.
However, as I discovered, you’ll need to be exceptionally keen, because, by and large, you’re not going to have much luck getting NSCA Mosaic to run on anything without the use of a virtual machine running a similarly ancient operating system. I didn’t expect much on the Mac side of the fence, what with the shift to Mac OS X happening well after NSCA Mosaic was dead and buried, but sadly the same appears to be true for every version of the Windows client as well, no matter how many compatibility settings I tried.
So I cheated. There’s a web browser emulator at Dejavu.org that can mimic web browsers for you, so I used that to check out how Mosaic would have looked, had it worked.
It wasn’t entirely pretty, and it’s not the same thing really as running the code, because you’re already running it inside another browser. I was impressed with how it handled images, though, and it was at least impressively quick once pages had loaded for simple navigation tasks.
Like, really grey, always. It was the style at the time, and we liked it that way!
Would I seriously use it? Well, I can’t, not properly, so, umm…. no.
Netscape Navigator
NSCA Mosaic gave way to Netscape Navigator, and it lasted a good long time, even after the whole thing was bought out by AOL. Yes, that AOL. There’s no direct repository for older versions of Netscape, and many online links point to the Netscape homepage, which now only redirects to AOL itself anyway.
That being said, here I did have some joy getting a version of Netscape Navigator up and running. No, it wasn’t Netscape Navigator 2, which was pretty much the browser to use all those years ago, but not for want of trying. Again, Windows 10 just didn’t want to play ball with much older code written for a largely Windows 3.11/95 era. Again, I could use (and did take a quick peek) at the virtual browsers at Dejavu.org, where the available Netscape version looks much like Mosaic did at the time. Funny, that…
Moving further down the product line, Netscape Navigator 9, however, would install, and what’s more, it would work… mostly.
I could see most of Fat Duck Tech via Netscape Navigator, and, if you’re particularly mad keen, the one thing it didn’t like was Google’s ad code, which means that it’s effectively got an ad-blocker built in.
Netscape’s performance, however, meant that the nostalgic rosy glow quickly evaporated.
It’s also seriously laggy, especially when scrolling down single lines. For some reason the code will happily jump pages with the space bar, but any kind of smaller scale scrolling gave way to very weird, juddering motion that I’d hate to have to endure on any kind of ongoing basis.
Weirdly, while Lynx would load YouTube but not actually do anything with it, what with no video support ever kind of being the point of a VT100 style web browser, YouTube rather quickly informed me that Navigator is no longer a supported browser, instead pushing me towards Firefox, IE or Chrome.
Would I seriously use it? Look, seeing that Netscape ship steering wheel pop up on my screen did fill my heart with a certain nostalgic glow that I cannot deny.
Equally, though, this was a painful way to shatter those memories, because it just couldn’t handle much of anything.
Hey, where’s Internet Explorer?
I didn’t test IE for a couple of reasons.
Mostly, though, it’s because I don’t like and never did like IE, and this was my own silly little experiment, so I get to set the rules.
I was doing this in my own time for fun, and I never found IE much fun to use at all. The Windows 10 box I was mostly testing on wouldn’t have much liked early IE, and given its (ahem, DOJ) “close” relationship with the Windows OS, I didn’t much fancy what it might do to the Windows 10 registry.
If anyone wants to suffer on my behalf, feel free to track it down, try it out and let me know how you got on.