Hey everyone,
I've been chipping away at a project for a while now, and with the recent release of version 1.4, I figured it was finally time to share it here and get some wider testing.
It’s called MacSurf. It’s a native Mac OS 9 browser built from a fork of NetSurf, compiled in CodeWarrior 8. My main goal with this was to completely avoid proxy servers or remote-rendering tricks as I wanted something that actually runs on the metal and talks directly to the modern web. I’ve been doing most of my testing on a g3 imac.
Getting to 1.4 took a lot of plumbing, but the core foundation is there now. It has native TLS 1.2/1.3 baked in using a custom BearSSL setup, so modern HTTPS works right out of the box. It handles actual CSS3 and ES5 JavaScript natively (via Duktape), and I wired it up to the QuickTime Graphics Importer so PNGs and GIFs have real alpha transparency.
That said, it’s definitely still an alpha and the modern web is heavy. Lighter pages and retro sites render beautifully, but throwing a massive modern DOM at a 25-year-old machine is a great way to blow through an application memory partition. The JS engine works, but keeping it from completely choking a G3 on heavy React sites is the next big mountain I'm trying to climb. I have been spending most of my time targeting simpler sites like 68kmla to tackle css and javascript issue, it's very much a work in progress.
I've got compiled builds and all the source code up on GitHub. If anyone feels like grabbing a release and taking it for a spin, I'd love to hear how it handles on your specific hardware. Because I know it's the first thing people discuss, I do use claude and gemini to help me build the code, I couldn't do it on my own without it. I completely understand that is a deal breaker for a lot of people so I want to mention that up front. With that said all the code is there, including the md files, if you want to see what is going on with the app.
I've been chipping away at a project for a while now, and with the recent release of version 1.4, I figured it was finally time to share it here and get some wider testing.
It’s called MacSurf. It’s a native Mac OS 9 browser built from a fork of NetSurf, compiled in CodeWarrior 8. My main goal with this was to completely avoid proxy servers or remote-rendering tricks as I wanted something that actually runs on the metal and talks directly to the modern web. I’ve been doing most of my testing on a g3 imac.
Getting to 1.4 took a lot of plumbing, but the core foundation is there now. It has native TLS 1.2/1.3 baked in using a custom BearSSL setup, so modern HTTPS works right out of the box. It handles actual CSS3 and ES5 JavaScript natively (via Duktape), and I wired it up to the QuickTime Graphics Importer so PNGs and GIFs have real alpha transparency.
That said, it’s definitely still an alpha and the modern web is heavy. Lighter pages and retro sites render beautifully, but throwing a massive modern DOM at a 25-year-old machine is a great way to blow through an application memory partition. The JS engine works, but keeping it from completely choking a G3 on heavy React sites is the next big mountain I'm trying to climb. I have been spending most of my time targeting simpler sites like 68kmla to tackle css and javascript issue, it's very much a work in progress.
I've got compiled builds and all the source code up on GitHub. If anyone feels like grabbing a release and taking it for a spin, I'd love to hear how it handles on your specific hardware. Because I know it's the first thing people discuss, I do use claude and gemini to help me build the code, I couldn't do it on my own without it. I completely understand that is a deal breaker for a lot of people so I want to mention that up front. With that said all the code is there, including the md files, if you want to see what is going on with the app.
