Running Mosaic 0.9b on the modern Web

By at 11:40 pm Wednesday, Jan 2

Inspired by the news that Netscape Navigator is officially dead, Torgo-X installed and ran a copy of Netscape 0.9b, one of my favorite flavors of the browser, and experimented with running it on the live web.
Moreover, NS 0.9b is like many early browsers in that it doesn't send a "Host: ..." header (lacking in HTTP 1.0, but now mandatory in HTTP 1.1), so that makes accessing most current web sites even harder. So I can't access Amazon, Google, or Wikipedia. IMDB pages actually load, if you hit Stop at strategic times. Still, the crashing; and also inexplicable DNS failures and network hangs.

Between the Host problem and the Content-Type problem, I can't even look at enough web pages such that I could make this NS 0.9b crash as much as I remember it being prone to. Or maybe it's just that Wine is more forgiving of wonky system calls that MSWindows 3.11 and/or Winsock were.

Link (via JWZ)

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Cory Doctorow

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