There’s an interesting thing about retrocomputing — the moment that you realize your 25-year-old machine can do almost everything your average person uses a computer for. The problem is that the average person mostly uses a computer as an internet appliance, and the big missing piece for most old machines is hooking up to the modern internet. HTTPS is good to have, but isn’t so easy to implement when your browser gets megabytes of RAM instead of gigabytes.
That’s why MacSurf by [mplsllc] is so interesting, especially version 2.0 just released-– its explicit goal is to get as much of the modern web onto an OS 9 equipped PowerPC Macintosh as physically possible.
Before you get too excited– no, you won’t be hitting up YouTube.com or even GitHub. That’s just too big and bloated now, even if you can get past the HTTPS hurdle. You will, however, be able to access, say MacintoshGarden.org, whose out-of-order HTTPS certificates sent the last version for a tizzy. The forums at 68kMLA work, and threads load quickly thanks to the as-needed image loading added this version.
Other nice things added include a proper history and bookmark manager. There’s still no tab support, but have you seen the modern web? You’re not fitting more than one webpage into RAM on a G3 no matter how hard you try. You can, however, download the web browser directly from the http-only MacSurf.org homepage.
We featured the first release of this netsurf-based browser, and have to admit we’re impressed with the speed of development. If you want a totally modern system on PPC instead of just an up-to-date browser, you might want to check out MorphOS.