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Web browsing in Win9x..

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Raven

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I put Win95 on my Presario 425 a week or so ago, and got on the web with modern browsing capability under K-Meleon. It was slow as hell, but functional. I prefer Arachne on that machine. (It's worth noting that I had Firefox 2.0.0.20 running on there too, but it was SOOOOO slow.. even more off-topic I can get Firefox 4 beta running on 98SE...)

Anywho, since then I got the Presario 3020 and installed a bigger HDD (2GB was a tad constrictive for a Pentium box). I put Win98SE on there and all the modern tweaks and such, and again went with K-Meleon as it's the lightest modern browser out there.

I realize that the machine in question is a Pentium, and thus "off-topic" but the software isn't, since it could run on a 486 (albeit painfully slowly).

Anywho, I was curious what others use for web browsing in Win9x, and how their experiences have been with them. K-Meleon is usably quick on my Presario 3020, but it's slow enough to be annoying - I imagine that's the fault of Javascript and the large amount of crosslinked content causing lots of CPU usage, right?

Disabling Javascript a good idea? I know it'll break some stuff, but if it's 90% of the slowdown I'll deal..

What are your thoughts on this subject, all?
 
There is also Opera though I don't know if the last Win98 versions ran on a 486. Opera is fast until its overly aggressive caching methods run the system out of memory. K-Meleon always seemed among the slower web browsers. The fastest web brower for a 486 was probably IBM's Web Explorer but you would have to install OS/2 to use it.

But yes turn off javascript and every extension you can; only turn them on if absolutely needed. Some blog writing software generates very complex Javascript that I expect could take hours to process on a 486.
 
windows 2000 can run on a 486, but that's not vintage software so i think your reasoning is a little flawed and this should probably be under general off-topic. in any event, i find firefox 3.6 runs pretty well on pentiums as long as you go disable javascript, and make many other tweaks in the configuration. that's what i do.

IE6 is even faster, but it's pretty obsolete now with some of the newer standards you run into on the web now and its definitely NOT safe!
 
I use K-Meleon on my 98 box, though I don't do all that much web browsing on it; it's usable on a Pentium system and quite nice on anything higher. I actually keep Javascript turned off as a general rule, except on sites that need it; I find that it's far more often abused than used. (I need to see if there isn't a NoScript-like extension available for K-Meleon...)
 
Caluser2000 said:
Pitty there isn't a recent Windows Dillo port ;) http://dillo-win32.sourceforge.net/

http://dillo-win32.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Click to expand...
Yip it works. Posting from Dillo now. :p

Just crashed. Bleeding edge I guess..... Loads in a flash though. Being GPL'd anyone with programming skills can up and run with it, which is nice. Good effort non the less.
http://dillo-win32.sourceforge.net/faq.html

Flicked off the person responsable an e-mail of thanks.

I know the specs say Win95 up, but it'd be interesting to see if it actually installs and runs on NT 3.x. Can anyone test it out?
 
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I used IE5 on a Win 3.11 system and it ran ok as long as you had quite a bit of RAM but it did crash on quite a few websites. IE6 is ok on Win95 but as stated it has rendering issues on flash sites but to be honest I just use the web on old machines to google files I need not for modern web browsing. The horse power for modern websites with flash video and music is lacking on any machine you would want to run Win 9x on, same with RAM limitations.

Someday kids will be hacking a modern browser into old Win95 machines with special hardware addons just like people today are giving C64 machines TCP/IP. For most people getting TCP/IP with DHCP onto old gear so you can easily IRC and FTP is good enough, anything else is just gravy.
 
Dillo is significantly faster than K-Meleon, but the rendering engine is HORRIBLY broken - I imagine it's not HTML4 compliant at all.

I'm posting from it right now, and while it's speedy you spend as much time trying to navigate a broken page as you would waiting for a chunkier browser to load, lol.
 
I don't use modern browsers on old hardware, myself. That's what new hardware's for in my mind. I use Netscape 2.something under Win 3.11/95 and Mac OS 8.x

I use Netscape Communicator on Win98, HP-UX 9.x and OS9.

I have two systems that still run MOSAIC. An Yggdrasil install (on a P/100) and an HP-UX 9.03 install (on a 9000/425e, 68K 25MHz).
 
I use modern browsers on old hardware so I can browse for and download retro software and tools on them. Mostly I browse on my main box, and mostly I transfer files from it to the retro boxen, but sometimes if I'm sitting at a retro box and don't already have the file on my main box, I'd rather go grab it using a web browser. Most old browsers can't handle it, and those that can are slowly becoming incapable. Arachne is my favorite as of yet, but it's inconvenient on a Win9x box to reboot to DOS to use it, and if I load a packet driver for my 3c509 on my Presario 3020, it crashes the system, so I can't use it from within Windows on that box.

I was surprised to see in another thread that Opera 8.5 works fairly well with the modern web. The only version I've ever tried on older boxen is the latest.. what version in particular do you use, Chuck(G)?
 
We still use Opera 8.5 on one of the Windows 2000 workstations at work...but the most we use it for is checking webmail/weather and looking up component datasheets.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Yip it works. Posting from Dillo now. :p

Just crashed. Bleeding edge I guess..... Loads in a flash though. Being GPL'd anyone with programming skills can up and run with it, which is nice. Good effort non the less.
http://dillo-win32.sourceforge.net/faq.html

Flicked off the person responsable an e-mail of thanks.

I know the specs say Win95 up, but it'd be interesting to see if it actually installs and runs on NT 3.x. Can anyone test it out?
Click to expand...
There is no need to... under NT 3.51 Firefox2 runs very good, even with Flash.
 
TNC said:
There is no need to... under NT 3.51 Firefox2 runs very good, even with Flash.
Click to expand...

Whoa really? That's a dream of mine, having the 3x interface with a modern set of software (Firefox 2 + flash, and if that works a video player could be shoehorned on probably..)..

I'll have to investigate this! Thanks for bringing that up..

Edit: I tried to remove the "newshell" from NT4 once but was unsuccessful, has anybody ever got NT4 to revert back to the NT3 shell and window manager or seen/read it done?
 
Google is your freind-"To make NT4 load the Program Manager shell UI, open Registry Editor [regedit.exe or regedt32.exe].
Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
look for the "Shell" entry (which is registry type REG_SZ), change it from Explorer.exe to Progman.exe,
close Registry Editor and restart the computer. When NT4 reloads, it will run the Program Manager
UI and you will NOT see the Taskbar and Start Menu being displayed."
 
Caluser2000 said:
Google is your freind-"To make NT4 load the Program Manager shell UI, open Registry Editor [regedit.exe or regedt32.exe].
Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
look for the "Shell" entry (which is registry type REG_SZ), change it from Explorer.exe to Progman.exe,
close Registry Editor and restart the computer. When NT4 reloads, it will run the Program Manager
UI and you will NOT see the Taskbar and Start Menu being displayed."
Click to expand...

LOL not exactly what I meant. Changing the "shell" is one thing, but I mean completely changing the underlying OS features, i.e., task iconization instead of minimization to bars (ever minimize a window while explorer was dead in any later Windows? It's ugly and unuseful), 3x-style window decoration, etc.
 
Raven said:
LOL not exactly what I meant. Changing the "shell" is one thing, but I mean completely changing the underlying OS features, i.e., task iconization instead of minimization to bars (ever minimize a window while explorer was dead in any later Windows? It's ugly and unuseful), 3x-style window decoration, etc.
Click to expand...
What you asked for is what I gave you. New Shell just refered to the betas of explorer.exe for NT4. No dought if you track down the appropriate dlls responsible you could have a more NT3.x like experience. If you like the NT 3.X look just use that. The under lying OS is still the same.
 
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