E-Maculation

I just tried firing up Netscape Navigator 3.0 to see what it could still get to from its bookmarks.

The winner is...

Excite! It bleeds a bunch of Javascript, but the search form still works, as do the links to interesting topics.

Lycos sort-of loaded, and everything else just died. Emaculation.com didn't fare any better.

I didn't realize Excite even existed anymore, let alone was still serving up search results and directory listings....

I saw a video a while ago about how some ancient browsers (early versions of Internet Explorer, for instance) will not work without some sort of proxy as they send http requests that modern servers do not understand. I can't specifically recall which video that was, though.

It goes both ways; modern servers use TLS security, which uses certificates and encryption models the old browsers don't understand. The specification for JavaScript has also changed significantly.

The older browsers sometimes request an active HTTP transport variant that has been long deprecated as it is extremely inefficient on the server side.

The modern WWW doesn't really have much similarity to the original at the HTTP layer, despite being largely the same at the HTML layer.