How about using Arache from DOS instead? It's bundled with FreeDOS, and as long as you've got a vesa compatible card and a packet driver it should be better than trying to get an ancient historical browser running on win16.

d1stortion wrote:

archive.org is your friend, not todays sites that are increasingly not even mainly designed for PCs, but for touchscreen devices 😀

Oh yes. I love archive.org. On my Windows 95 box I have a few shortcuts that go straight to certain pages on the Wayback Machine from about 1998 or so, such as Apogee1.com and idsoftware.com.

vetz wrote:

I'm one who have claimed to be surfing Vogons on my 486 and I know feipoa is doing it as well. Both of us use Windows 98SE and a much more modern browser. I haven't tried after the forum was upgraded though, so stuff might have changed.

Excellent! Whenever I read you mentioning that you were posting from a 486, I must have just assumed it was a DOS/Win3.11 machine. I only very recently learned that Win98 will work on a 486, so I will be giving that a shot!

megatron-uk wrote:

How about using Arache from DOS instead? It's bundled with FreeDOS, and as long as you've got a vesa compatible card and a packet driver it should be better than trying to get an ancient historical browser running on win16.

I actually have Arachne installed, but I've never owned a NIC with a packet driver for DOS. I am now looking into finding an old NIC that has such drivers.

I am now clear on the fact that WFW is just simply a terrible software enviornment, and was even when it was in common use. I remember writing homework assignments on it in the mid 90's and getting screwed many times when the program I'm using just crashes. (This probably started my habit of spamming Ctrl-S constantly while working on ANYTHING.) It's not terrible for everything though... SkiFree seems to work well. 😉

Windows 2000 will also work on a 486. Hope you have RAM 😀

Can anything useful be done with NT 3.51? What browsers can you run on NT 4?

I love it when old 90s sites are still intact and up. Brings me really back in time. One case I knew of was the Final Fantasy VII site, it was up just until that stupid rerelease they did recently.

...at least the PAL region one for FFVIII is still up. Until they decide to bastardize this one on Steam as well, perhaps 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

I love it when old 90s sites are still intact and up. Brings me really back in time. One case I knew of was the Final Fantasy VII site, it was up just until that stupid rerelease they did recently.

...at least the PAL region one for FFVIII is still up. Until they decide to bastardize this one on Steam as well, perhaps 🤣

Space Jam.

swaaye wrote:

Can anything useful be done with NT 3.51? What browsers can you run on NT 4?

NT 3.51 can actually run Office 97, if that means anything.
http://toastytech.com/guis/nt3513.html

BAM. Writing this post from my 486.

Win98se and Firefox 2 made it possible. The stock IE actually will render as much of a site as it can and not crash. This is a huge improvement over the WFW experience.

Unfortunately Firefox is incredibly slowwww. At least the UI in IE is "zippier" - Firefox is even sluggish when typing anything.

Still, very happy since I pretty much got my wish: The ability to surf the web, or at least some parts of it, on a 486.

I'd recommend using a Seamonkey 1.x release over Firefox 2. For a full suite it is a faster browser. How ironic. It's also more 'retro fitting' since it retains the Netscape 4 look 😀

There's also specialist lite-and-break-everything browsers such as OffByOne. You might wanna try that as well, I used to use it but its downloading is progressbarless 😜

K-Meleon also ought to be superior to standard Firefox 2.

I've always had K-Meleon crash for me and the performance was nowhere good as advertised - and that was on a Pentium...

I recommend Opera (10.10 runs on Windows 95 OSR2 and passes ACID3!) For Windows 98 or newer you can get at least 10.xx series which is a modern browser even by today's standards.
Opera is way underrated. It's plenty fast even on Pentium class hardware.

Arachne is not that great either...

However it is pretty fast if you set it to cache to a ramdrive and enable LOADBTM in 4DOS.

And anything compiled with the latest MSVC will refuse to run on 2K or XP SP1. That is basically every modern browser.

If only I'd seen this thread earlier...

I tried this a few months back. I posted a thread here somewhere. I tried IE3 and Netscape 4.08, both on WFW 3.11. I couldn't get IE4 or IE5 to work properly on my system 🙁.

megatron-uk wrote:

How about using Arache from DOS instead? It's bundled with FreeDOS, and as long as you've got a vesa compatible card and a packet driver it should be better than trying to get an ancient historical browser running on win16.

Considering it is a DOS web browser it's actually quite impressive - even more impressive is the fact that the author has updated the DOS version just a few months ago.

It definitely handles websites better than any Windows 3.1 browser. It does stall frequently but hasn't crashed on me unlike Opera 3, IE 5 and Netscape 3. I haven't tweaked it though, just default settings.

If you want to play with it in MS VPC 2004 you need the DOS packet driver for the Digital Semiconductor dc21x4x NIC. Drivers for other NICs can also be found here

start the DC.COM executable with the following command line:

dc 0x60

Then run Arachne.

I know this topic is 6 months old at this point.
But its worth mentioning Opera 3.60 works pretty well on Windows 3.11

I am posting from it right now

There was this post on os2museum just recently that describes setting up a proxy server that will provide an image of a website that can be sent to a primitive browser as a clickable image map.
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2282#more-2282