This is fantastic. To me, this is one of the greatest side-effects of agentic coding; adding new functionality to vintage, abandoned or obsolete hardware. It gives me hope for a solarpunk future where e-waste gets a more functional second life.

When I owned a iMac G3, the Classilla browser was surprisingly good. Looks like development ended in 2021.

Also, the branding was "Mac OS 9".

That's impressive, too bad modern web requires more than 2000x the transistor density to run JS at decent speed. We really f*** up.

That would be "Mac OS 9"

Somewhere in Korea there's an industrial overhead crane tracked across an entire 5-story warehouse, operated from a G3 in a network that is about to implement web-based zero trust. It has a twin in Japan. You have just extended the life of these two perfectly functional $100M investments.

Do I know this to be true? No. But I do not know it to be false, either.

Very cool, congrats on the release. Looks fantastic, wish I had a G4 to test it on!

I've just added it to the Web Browser Directory (Corrections and additions welcome)

https://www.webbrowserdirectory.com/browsers/macsurf/

Cool! I've been wondering for some time if a good low-distraction but pleasant environment could be an old Mac OS on a (good looking) Hackintosh. The UI was baked with UX research at least.

This is Mac OS 9, which is pre-hackintosh. The term "hackintosh" refers to running x86 versions of Mac OS X on non-Mac x86 systems, where OS 9 was exclusive to PowerPC.

The distinction matters less than simgt's actual point about low-distraction environments. Whether it runs on PowerPC or x86 is beside the point of whether that UI philosophy is worth revisiting.

The "low distraction" pitch gets funnier when the browser crashes every 20 minutes.

Anyone had luck running it under infinitemac? I can't boot anything beyond 9.0 and it throws some error upon launch - seems it needs at least 9.1.

It needs carbonlib - is that installed on the OS? I was able to get it to work on 9.1 with the last released CarbonLib.

CarbonLib shipped on the 9.1 CD but plenty of installs never got it. Apple's SDK transition headaches circa 2001 in a nutshell.

I was expecting to see PowerPlant with C++, given Codewarrior, or even better MacApp with Object Pascal being used.

Time to fire up the ol PowerMac G4 MDD (last native support for Mac OS 9)

Freaking love it! Gonna put this on my 1998 Bondi Blue iMac G3 today.

Let us know how many minutes it runs before you get a system crash and a sad-face Mac icon.

This is what the Amiga is missing!

Have you tried the Netsurf port for it?

But can 68k handle TLS 1.3 at usable speeds? Rendering is probably solvable with a port, but the crypto overhead might make it unusable in practice.

I always enjoy it when someone makes "obsolete" hardware natively talk to modern network services that it was never meant to talk to. And bringing an entire browser to a system this old is a serious achievement. I don't own any hardware that can run classic Mac OS, but I'm gonna try it on an emulator later, really curious how it handles several of my own websites.

Though the fact that the author uses AI is kinda meh.

Absolutely love it.

Hey everyone! This is my project, I've been working really hard (yes using AI to help) for about two months straight now. I am not just letting it be, I am going to keep tooling with it every day to make it better and better.

The latest version uses real, third-party verified, TLS 1.3 so I am pushing all the limits that I can. Thanks for sharing!

Always surprising but fun to see a "MPLS" MN state flag graphic in some random github readme. Then I see the username "mplsllc" :) Hello neighbor!

SSL handshake failures at midnight because the root cert store is from 2001. No update path. Have fun.