Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

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stefan.seiz
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Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by stefan.seiz »

I am using SheepShaver and Netscape Navigator 4.7.

With modern SSL Algorithms having advanced quite a bit, Netscape can't connect to most sites via HTTPS anymore.
How do you guys fix that? Is there a way to use some kind of Proxy which can make this work (by translating old-ssl to new-ssl)?

Thanks!
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

These old browsers are indeed not compatible with most modern web sites.

You can try Classilla. It is not supported anymore, but it is the most recent browser for MacOS 8.6 and 9: https://sourceforge.net/projects/classilla/files/

Or you can try an older version of iCab: http://www.icab.de/download.html
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adespoton
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by adespoton »

And yes... there's at least two different proxies available for old browsers: one MITMs the SSL for you and converts the data to HTML1 compliant content, the other does the browsing for you and forwards clickable GIFs of the resulting website to your old browser. We've got threads somewhere on here with links to the projects (and at least one VM that comes with them already preconfigured).
emendelson
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by emendelson »

adespoton wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 7:23 pm And yes... there's at least two different proxies available for old browsers: one MITMs the SSL for you and converts the data to HTML1 compliant content, the other does the browsing for you and forwards clickable GIFs of the resulting website to your old browser. We've got threads somewhere on here with links to the projects (and at least one VM that comes with them already preconfigured).
Could you possibly point us to the exact address of those threads? I've been searching the forum with no luck at all.
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adespoton
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by adespoton »

emendelson wrote: Sat Oct 09, 2021 12:20 pm
adespoton wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 7:23 pm And yes... there's at least two different proxies available for old browsers: one MITMs the SSL for you and converts the data to HTML1 compliant content, the other does the browsing for you and forwards clickable GIFs of the resulting website to your old browser. We've got threads somewhere on here with links to the projects (and at least one VM that comes with them already preconfigured).
Could you possibly point us to the exact address of those threads? I've been searching the forum with no luck at all.
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emendelson
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by emendelson »

Thank you. The first seems to be for VirtualBox only. The second also seems to need VirtualBox or something similar. Unless there’s a solution that runs under macOS, please don’t waste any more of your time on this.
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adespoton
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by adespoton »

emendelson wrote: Tue Oct 12, 2021 6:09 pm Thank you. The first seems to be for VirtualBox only. The second also seems to need VirtualBox or something similar. Unless there’s a solution that runs under macOS, please don’t waste any more of your time on this.
Both of them are proxies that run under Linux; one can probably be recompiled for macOS, the other can't. There are VMs and Raspberry Pi builds available.

One or both might now be available via homebrew; the links on here are to MacIPgw which is designed to be an entire gateway system, providing printing and networking to Apple ][ computers, old LocalTalk Macs, as well as browsing proxies. But the proxy projects are actually third party -- trickier to set up independently, but should be possible.

I tried setting them up under OS X 10.6 natively, but one had a dependency on a Chromium version that wouldn't run on 10.6, and the other had some annoying low-level library issues. I haven't had a chance to try doing the same thing on a modern macOS. Since it's designed for Linux, it'll probably take a few configuration changes to get things working with the macOS network stack.
emendelson
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Re: Using old webbrowsers incompatible with todays ssl

Post by emendelson »

You're clearly the most experienced person on this forum who has worked with these. If you make any progress with macOS versions, please let the rest of us know!
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