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Comment by limeblack | Hacker News Reader

I have had my fun supporting Mosaic(which is basically the oldest browser that has available source) on my personal sites. You can even still run it on Ubuntu[1]. If you go back that far you can't really use much CSS though. Google's site actually works on Mosaic which is awesome.

[1]: https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic

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lynx should also be available in every modern distribution. If the text shows up in lynx in any reasonable order, chances are that all the screen readers and other strange tools gets it right too.

IIRC my Kubuntu has 'links' (maybe really links2) but not 'lynx' and no simlink?

I'd think older browsers like Mosaic have problems with SSL/TLS, especially now that most web servers no longer support older (compromised) versions of those protocols and SNI (server name indication, allowing web servers to serve multiple domains over SSL from the same IP) wasn't a thing back in the days.

I certainly remember taking a really old version of IE (2 or 3 I think?) for a spin and running into problems because it didn't support SNI.

A lot of older browsers, like elinks or something, actually fork the process to call OpenSSL directly. So long as you update the OpenSSL library, the browser can make use of modern standards.

IE didn't support SNI until IE7 and that was only if it was running on Vista, not XP. IE8-10 don't support TLS 1.1 or 1.2 by default.

https://caniuse.com/#search=sni

https://caniuse.com/#feat=tls

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