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Comment by EamonnMR | Hacker News Reader

This is sad to see. I wonder if there are smaller browser codebases out there that might be possible to port.

Author here. I looked at some of those (and I did recently dust off the classic Mac port of Lynx: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/02/maclynx-beta-3-really.ht... ) but they suffer some similar problems in that they are generally "toys" and won't view sites most people today would require as essential. The biggest bugaboo is JavaScript. Classilla's JavaScript is far more advanced than WaMCoM and Mozilla 1.3's, but it is still based on Firefox 3.0, which by modern standards is ancient. And that doesn't include what's missing from the DOM, either.

It's wild that you managed push the project as far as you did! My main use case for browsers on classic is to download apps on Macintosh Garden and Macintosh Repository, so hopefully they never enforce TLS or require JS. It's a shame that just as ultra light plain HTML sites are becoming cool again we're also seeing TLS pushed to the point where there old machines are getting shut out.

Might be possible to slap these patches on top UXP and get it building. http://thereisonlyxul.org

Author here. Sadly, not without a current toolchain, plus all the custom changes for Mac OS 9 on top of NSPR and other pieces. CodeWarrior is a solid compiler but the classic Mac OS versions definitely show their age compared to modern gcc and clang.

I wonder how much work would be needed to generate PEF from a modern PowerPC toolchain...

There's Retro68. It might be able to pull this off. You'd still need all the other pieces, of course.

Regardless, thank you for all of your work and contributions. Keeping those old PPC devices alive did more for the environment than I think you'll ever be able to quantify. Not to mention, I had a lot of fun with old PowerBooks and iMacs surfing the web.

Hey, thanks. It's nice to hear it said.

Oh wow! I didn't know that was a thing -- it looks as though that's exactly what I was thinking of.

With that in place... I suppose the next step would be to start writing a Mac OS browser shell to run WebKit in.

Might be interesting to have a way to seamlessly have the browser "run" on something modern, while displaying locally, and intercepting things like downloads to be on a local filesystem. I know most of this exists, but it's typically complex to set up.

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