Running Win95C here on my LAN. Want to use a browser to download the occasional file (though I will use FTP tied to my iMac on the LAN much more). What is the best browser option for Win95C (32MB, 5x86 160, SCSI).
Thanks.
bp
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Netscape? Just guessing...
Check out the early versions of Firefox, I think 1.5 might support Windows 95.
On my Windows 95 machine I had used Opera 10.10. Though I needed to install the Windows Installer for the MSI extension Opera needed. I could pretty well actually use the internet to get any files needed, or just from my own server. 😀
There's a custom build of Seamonkey at http://toastytech.com/files/95browsing.html that looks useful.
I used to use OffByOne for quick broken browsing today's internet on a 486. Not the best browser, but it can be an option.....or probably less of an option with all those regressive sites out there. It can download, but it's pretty raw and lacks a progress indicator.
I've been using SeaMonkey 1.1.19 on windows98 (I'm using it right now), but I'm not so sure about using it with 32MB, for simple websites this works pretty well...
Come to think of it, if it's just for downloading then a text-based browser like eLinks or w3m might suffice.
Personally experienced on real and virtual machines, you will have to try cos I can't remember the exact version number but if you google it you can get the last Windows 95 version of Opera
For Windows 95, you have the following options:
IE 5.5 SP2 (5.50.4807.2300). If you go this route, the last hotfix is "KB867801: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer" which covers security updates through bulletin MS04-025. IE5.x (and even 6) run rather spritely on old hardware, but I have no idea how well it parses pages these days as I haven't used it in years. I believe 5.5 is closer to the 6.0 rendering engine than 5.0x, for what that's worth. Older version of Maxthon classic will give you tabs and a pop-up blocker.
Gecko: Go with ToastyTech's fix mentioned above - these are more modern than Firefox 2.0 or SeaMonkey 1.1.19 as he compiled it against SeaMonkey 1.9.20pre and Firefox 2.0.22pre. Firefox continued to see nightlies for six months after the release of 2.0 (the last was 2.0.0.22pre-20090415). Of course I'm not sure what you gain from that - but might as well go with it.
I was actually surprised to learn that opera petered out at 10.10 - since 10.63 runs fine on NT4. I'm now curious as to what the missing dependencies are...
RE: OffByOne - when I found that years back I thought "oh hai! a modern, tiny browser for old systems". I think I found it about the time it was seemingly abandoned. The modern soon disappeared.
Of course, with 95C - are you using the webby shell? If so, and it's running acceptably, I doubt you'd see much performance degradation from moving to 98 and you'd get expanded compatibility. (You could still go 98 with 98Lite).
