ClassicConnect

[VCSMaster]

Hello, I've been having trouble connecting to FrogFind and having some intermittent issues with TheOldNet lately, has anyone heard about these potentially being down for maintenance / for good, or technical issues, etc? Or is this issue just me?

[xproot]

[VCSMaster]

Well, Internet Explorer 5.1 supports SSL, I can access Google but it does not work very well, especially over v.90, and it often includes results which I outright cannot access. I've not tried Duck Duck Go, but I don't think this browser supports TLS very well if at all. I'm not sure it was even invented when this came out.

I can't even connect. I get a connection error attempting to access the landing page, and while I can connect to the landing page at TheOldNet, I can't actually get any websites to load with the service.

[VCSMaster]

Yeah, I just checked, "lite.duckduckgo.com" does not work on this browser, sadly. Security reply invalid.

Supposedly. someone ported an embedded TLS engine to OS9 pretty recently, but they only implemented 1.1 (which was already available in OS9 if you install Eudora 6??) and elected not to do 1.2/1.3. Sadly, the repo is also locked and I know next to nothing about security technology and can't finish the work myself.

Maybe someday someone will build/modify a browser for old machines that will have proper "modern" support.

[nick99nack]

I wonder what happened to frogfind? I think the source code is available for it at least. If it doesn't come back, maybe I'll host a copy of it...

Google used to work fine in older browsers, but they removed a lot of the older code recently. Even GMail doesn't have the basic HTML version anymore unfortunately. It's getting harder and harder to find search engines that work.
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

[VCSMaster]

Yeah, I used to only check my email in browser and had the theme set to default for "Basic HTML." The day they announced it was going away, I installed Thunderbird and the day it went away I logged out of my email on browser for the last time. I now only check with Thunderbird.

I do a lot of travel for work these days, and it's unbelievably annoying to go to a hotel with a jammed up wifi band and no ethernet port, get my 3 megabits down, and be forced to wait minutes for my email to even load the login. It's aggravating to say the least!

Yeah, it would just be a shame to lose frogfind as a service. It was so nice to have a google-like homepage on my older browsers that didn't fail to load and look goofy!

Turns out the web archive is throttling TheOldNet, which is a shame. I wonder why they're throttling them but not Protoweb? Or maybe they are and I'm dumb. The throttling must be pretty extreme, though, because it is extremely noticeable even over dial-up on Pentium class machines.

[VCSMaster]

[HIDEN]

With FrogFind being broken still and Google + other search engines dropping support for old browsers, I kind of want to play around with the idea of a meta search engine (as in one that gets results from other search engines) that is fully compatible with old/basic web browsers. Perhaps I could create an alternative frontend for SearxNG.
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Known to cause cancer in the state of California.

[europa]

That sounds like an awesome idea. FrogFind is great, but I oftentimes ran into the limitation that it would put any links you clicked on through a "reader view" of sorts, which greatly limited what kinds of sites you could access through it.
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Your System ate a SPARC! Gah!

[VCSMaster]