Release MacSurf 2.0 · mplsllc/macsurf · GitHub
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macsurf
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MacSurf 2.0
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mplsllc
released this
11 Jul 19:54
v2.0
5db3ca1
MacSurf 2.0
A real web browser for Classic Mac OS 9. Real CSS, a modern JavaScript engine, HTTPS handled right on the Mac. No proxy. No second machine. Just your G3 or G4 and the live web. This is the big one, and I could not be more excited to finally put it in your hands.
Here's the headline: if MacSurf ever opened to a blank window on you, that's over. Fixed for good. And 2.0 repairs an affected Mac all by itself the first time you launch it. No cache-clearing, no Virtual Memory dance (that one never actually did anything, we measured it). If you'd given up on MacSurf, this is your invitation to come back.
First, the ask
MacSurf is what I do full-time, and it only keeps moving at this pace if it pays its own way. So if it put your old Mac back online, I'd be grateful for a few dollars. Supporters get the dev logs and a real say in what I build next. And if I never ask, I can't expect any, so here goes:
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/macsurf
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/MacSurf
Discord: https://discord.gg/mrwZK8zHr2
Huge thank you to Shlooom , Kestral , and Mothra on Patreon, and kilgeist and Turuun on Ko-Fi. You keep the lights on.
Ko-Fi · Patreon
What's new (and I'm thrilled about all of it)
The blank screen is dead. This one haunted me. Two separate bugs were behind it. MacSurf was deciding whether a chunk of memory was real by checking it against some hardcoded addresses, and those addresses were just wrong on Macs with more RAM, where the program loads higher up. So it threw away perfectly good memory and quietly stopped fetching anything. On top of that, the list it keeps of unreachable servers was getting saved to disk with no expiry, so one bad moment on your network could condemn your home page forever. Both fixed. MacSurf now asks the system where it actually lives, and that dead-server list only lasts the session. I reproduced this on a maxed-out machine and got to watch it go from a blank window to loading two full sites. So good.
A ton more of the HTTPS web works now, and yes, that includes macintoshgarden.org. Lots of servers send their security certificates a little out of order and trust the browser to sort it out. MacSurf's TLS stack used to be too strict about that. Now it sorts them, and a whole family of sites that used to kick you down to plain http open securely on the Mac.
Heavy forums load in seconds instead of minutes. Images wait until you actually scroll to them. A busy 68kmla thread with a big attachment used to take anywhere from 20 seconds to two minutes. Now it's a few seconds. Night and day.
The address bar finishes your URLs for you. Start typing a site you've been to and it completes it from your history, with a dropdown of the other matches. Arrow through them or just hit Return.
Real History and Bookmark managers. A proper History window that groups by day and can be cleared (Cmd-H), plus a Bookmark manager with folders you can rename, move, and drag around (Cmd-B).
And it just looks better. New toolbar, a pill-shaped address bar, an animated loading spinner, a real progress bar, a fresh set of buttons, and a new About box. Typing in text fields is snappy again, every letter shows up the instant you press it. Get Info finally reports the version instead of "N/A." Multi-line copy/paste, favicons, and the duplicated Apple menu are all sorted too.
Under the hood it's still native TLS 1.3 through macTLS, modern ES2023 JavaScript through macQJS, built on NetSurf with CodeWarrior and Carbon. On a 233 MHz G3.
The honest part
Still in-progress...