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Sample HTTP web sites to test vintage Netscape 4.77

Pepinno

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2007
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610
Location
Barcelona
On these days I've dug out of storage an old laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 755CE -- which I bought back in 2012 for 30 Euros.

10 years ago I posted a thread about it here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?t...-on-a-semi-vintage-ibm-thinkpads-price.29906/

So now I'm in the process of installing Debian 2.2 Potato on it. I am already well into the project: I have XFree86 3.3 working, and Netscape Communicator 4.77 running.

In that thread from 10 years ago, I could post to these forums from Netscape 4.7 in Windows 95 with that machine. Nowadays, that is impossible because modern SSL/TLS is not supported by that vintage Netscape version.

So I am researching Internet corners where plain HTTP (without SSL/TLS) is still served. And I have found this:
So I just wanted to share those two links, because I've found them to be useful to benchmark the web browsing capabilities of 486 machines.
 
You can run the Apache webserver easily enough as a proxy to serve http out of any modern web page...

However the issue with RAM, CSS rendering, etc. remains. You just can't go back...
 
You can run the Apache webserver easily enough as a proxy to serve http out of any modern web page...

However the issue with RAM, CSS rendering, etc. remains. You just can't go back...
Yeah, I could run a http proxy on my LAN and use it as a gateway to the modern web which is "protected" with HTTPS, but as you say I would be able to connect, but not to properly render all the CSS and modern JavaScript used in today's bloated web sites.

Anyhow, here I share this beautiful screenshot (and yes, that is the real resolution of this laptop's screen, no zoom nor cropping involved in any way here):
2022-11-27_screenshot_IBM-Thinkpad-755CE_Debian-Potato.png
 
The forum was broken for HTTP accessibility a few years ago because a few people would not shut up about things they were obviously doing in PM's that the forum shouldn't of been involved in and the modern browsers were absolutely throwing a fit at the idea that when accessing the domain the option of connecting without HTTPS was an option and they're all hard coded that HTTP = "Your connection is insecure and might be vulnerable to attacks" BAD.

You will have no choice now but to use a remote or local proxy for HTTPS resolution and formatting conversion.
 
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There's still heaps of http sites around. I recently did an audit of my large collection of bookmarks, and probably half of those sites still only work with http.
 
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