RETROZILLA - MODERN BROWSING IN WINDOWS 95 |
RetroZilla is a modern-day rebuild of the Mozilla Suite circa 1997 codebase intended for putting vintage Windows 9x PCs on the internet. That said, it seems there's not a lot out there about how to get this browser working as intended as it's not just a "turn-key" operation. It's basically just a re-branded Mozilla Suite.
Minimum System Requirements The official source for RetroZilla 2.2 is Here. I'm using tuning and tweaks from the MSFN Forum's Community Edition REtroZilla thread. First off, you want to make sure that your Windows 9x install is fully up-to-date. You can get updates at Winworld or at the Microsoft Update catalog possibly for newer systems (I think there's some 98 SE updates in there for sure). The reason for this is RetroZilla will likely leverage newer technologies introduced later through updates to work. If you are on a 486 system like me you probably want to just do a Basic Installation. I've found doing the complete one causes it to not launch. Also keep in mind that when it does launch, it can take a minute or longer to come up. This is a very large web browser compared to say, IE4 or Netscape 4.08, so it's going to really CRAWL at first. There are some settings you can change to speed things up and remove some background services on a 486 system to m ake it run smoother. You want to do this after ALL updates have been applied to the O/S. When you launch the first time, you are still not done, as the browser will still not work with the majority of modern secure HTML websites. The reason being that there are around six out-dated Ciphers for security installed that need disabled, and 2 new Ciphers that need added for this to work. To do this, you will need to go to About:Config in RetroZilla, and then you will need to search in the search bar for the Ciphers, and turn these six off...by setting them to "False"....
Then you will need to create and enable these two ciphers. This is done by right-clicking on the blank space, and then creating a new cipher, then typing in or Copy+Paste the values in below from a text file, and set them to "True"...
With these two new ciphers and the less secure ones disabled, you should be able to connect to the modern internet for aat least 85% of modern websites with your vintage Windows 9x connected machine already. That said, it won't be perfect. But it will work quite well. Some testing I've done with this configuration includes Facebook low resource (I don't use Facebook anymore BTW), and a lot of HTTPS modern sites. I also signed in and used VOGONS on there a few times as well. Web surfing on a 486 DX4-100 with this can be slow and at times, kind of clunky, because modern websites have scripts that can be a REAL pain in the arse, taking up HUNDREDS of megabytes to load. Luckily, you'll have a chance to "skip" or "stop" them if it starts getting too much for the PC's memory, and therefore, can still access the site. However, I will be adding a section on adding one of my favorite Mozilla/Firefox plugins - NOSCRIPT - to this setup so you can completley block scripts on a website except those you absolutley need, which just makes surfing with thihs kind of configuration about as secure as using a modern computer on a modern O/S because auto-run scripts will not be allowed to run unless you allow them to, and it will save on memory because you won't have all these stupid background scripts running on the website you are accessing. |