Terry,
On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:26 PM, Terry Stewart <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm engaged in a Retrochallenge project ….The
> question is, how many guys like us, those who dabble with old tech, are
> likely to use ancient browsers as their ONLY source of web content. I
> suspect not many. Should I worry about it? Any comments welcome.
I routinely use:
OmniWeb on NeXTStep 3.2. I won’t be back in front of my NeXT Cube to verify
version number until late July, but it’s a reasonably early version :-)
TenFourFox on Mac OS 10.4. Version 38 is Beta and I’ll be getting that as soon
as I get back home to my PowerBook G4 and iMac G3.
I can’t honestly say either is my primary platform. At the moment I’m
using Safari 7.1.6. :-(.
I’m not sure what to tell you about modernizing.
I recognize the drive to stay “in sync” with modern standards, but it
really grinds my gears when a site that is mostly useful information gets a lot
of glitz and glamor and goes inaccessible to the machines it was originally
written for. There are (were) so many wonderful sites out there with tons of
great text and just the few pictures that were really needed. Now it’s all
dancing jellyfish and pop-up revenue sources, and I have trouble getting to the
information even with modern browsers.
I *love* the idea of actually being able to *use* the classic machines
for as much as possible, and the functions of going out to a website, getting
the text and picture content, and displaying it are well within what the NeXT
and iMac (and several others I want to bring up; VAX/Alpha on VMS, etc. etc.)
can do - if the websites will only serve content to the standards the old
machines were written for. But when the standards evolve away, it needlessly
turns really neat hardware into doorstops as far as that functionality goes. I
don’t love that process. TenFourFox rocks particularly hard in this context, by
the way, but … I don’t know of a NeXT port.
Of course it’s at least twice as much work for the website developer
and I can’t really expect it, but I keep wishing developers could put out two
(or more) versions of their sites, one suitablle for my (it was invented
*here*, dad-gum-it) NeXT and one for my jellyfish-friendly cellphone (hey, is
it updating its software again today :-P?). And, hopefully, my X.9 laptop will
be able to read at least one of the two. The Dilbert Zone did this for a while
- I read the simple version of the strip every day on the NeXT. They went to a
more markteer-driven format, and I quit reading them because it quit loading on
OmniWeb.
Hm. I’m sounding a little like a grumpy old geezer …. ah well, so be it.
I do have to say this: whatever you decide, you are one of the good
guys for two reasons; first you are making loads of great information available
about these machines and second, you actually give a hoot about people using
them, enough to at least ask! Thanks, and I promise not to back-bite whichever
way you go.
> On a related note, I'd be interested if anyone on the list CAN'T read this
> page properly:
> http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/temp.html
Loads fine on the MacBook on Safari 7.1.6 but leaves more empty space
than I’m used to in the window, looks nice on the Moto X cellphone running
Chrome on Android 4.4.4. Sigh, sure wish I wasn’t on travel and could give you
feedback from OmniWeb and TenFourFox, will do that when I can but we probably
both know the answer...
- Mark
