How many use old browsers (e.g. =< Netscape 4 or IE 6) as their ONLY source of web content?

[Tapley, Mark]

Terry,
On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:26 PM, Terry Stewart <terry at webweavers.co.nz> 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