Having the _exact_ same problem myself (on Pentium4 and win98, that is).
Started to happen some time earlier this year, no idea why... while Opera 10.64 and Firefox 2.0 is fine with google.

Yes, same here.
And it's not your nt or 486 fault.
It happened to me to a core 2 duo and xp.

I guess age is starting to show it's teeth...

IE 6 might be thinking it can do more advanced SSL, or Google presumes the system is capable of more if on IE6. (Remember, most sites use TLSv1.2 and SNI now.)

Not too surprised. Although Google has had a history of working with very old browsers for the longest time.

Nice that bing works for now. My browser of choice for old machines is Opera 9.6

See if enabling TLS in advanced options works.

DosFreak wrote:

See if enabling TLS in advanced options works.

Enabling 'TLS 1.0' does nothing, same error as earlier.

probably new version TLS used by the HTTPS websites which IE6 can't understand.

A SSL-MiTM local-proxy with a self-signed CA certs trick might able to workaround this.
The local-proxy will negotiate with faster/older SSL when dealing the IE, and it will deal with slower/newer SSL when negotiating with the HTTPs websites.

Google is already serving up older versions of its site to outdated browsers, so it's a bit strange that a browser shouldn't be able to get anything at all.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29012038

Of course, that was the case last year and things may have changed since then.

Are you able to make sense out of why IE 5.5 in w95 loads Google fine?

I pulled my dual PIII-850 out of the closet today, which has XP sp3 and IE6 installed. Google loads fine, however Yahoo and Wikipedia do not.

smeezekitty wrote:

Not too surprised. Although Google has had a history of working with very old browsers for the longest time.

Maybe plain Google still does. But a lot of the services already declare even IE9 as outdated. Which means that anyone on Vista has to use a third-party browser.

dr_st wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

Not too surprised. Although Google has had a history of working with very old browsers for the longest time.

Maybe plain Google still does. But a lot of the services already declare even IE9 as outdated. Which means that anyone on Vista has to use a third-party browser.

I'm on Vista now. But I haven't used Internet Exploder on a regular basis in 11 years. Third parties browsers are the way to go since IE sucks

IE really doesn't suck as much as before (IE6 era), but indeed I still find third party browsers better.

It is just interesting and a bit strange to me that Microsoft would rather have Vista users switch to third party browsers than release IE11 for Vista (which probably wouldn't be a big effort, plus it would allow them to fully EOL IE9, for which they are currently obligated to provide security patches for the duration of Vista's life cycle - another year and a half). I guess that with the Vista user base being so small (3% of users?), it's hard to forget that it's still officially supported.

there was a DNS error

You probably have tried it already:
ipconfig /flushdns

But other browsers are displaying Google, so that's probably not it. It was working for me last week. I'll reassemble my PC and check again if I have time.

A packet capture would show exactly what's going on. I suspect it has something to do with lack of TLS support as well. After the SSLv3 POODLE vulnerability caused most sites to only accept TLSv1.0+ connections, a lot of legacy users/browsers were left with no option other than to upgrade. Like DosFreak mentioned, enabling TLS1.0 in IE6's advanced options may help.

However, SSL security is a big and fast moving deal on the web today. The obsolescence rate for legacy browsers is only going to get faster as popular websites disable older protocols to mitigate against the latest discovered vulnerabilities.

If you care to take a packet capture with Wireshark or something similar, I'm sure a bunch of people here (myself included) would be glad to take a look and tell you exactly what's up.

FIPS 140-2 is a bitch as well (doesn't apply in this case). Recently had to troubleshoot that on a classified network. Our equipment was locked down tight with the option enabled but was unable to hit a sharepoint site. Error made it look like the site was down. Luckily I remembered troubleshooting this before and disabling the requirement fixed it. The requirement wasn't really necessary anyway so no functionality was broken by disabling it.

Just tested it on my machine running Windows 98 and IE 5 (not 6). I got the DNS error, activated TLS 1.0 and now Google works.

Looks like sites using AES 256 work (bing) but RC4 128 (yahoo, google) don't in IE6

Also wow Opera is craptacular and slow at rendering modern websites. Firefox working fine on 98se.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/ … s-sites-in-2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

Having same here. IE 5.5 in Windows 3.1 (PMMX) just works (shows google) but IE 6.0 in Windows 98 (PIII) gives a "site not found/DNS error" for google.