BeOS R5 Browsers in 2021
BeOS browsing support is now probably at its worst level ever, more or less.
The TLS Apocalypse, whereby the majority of secured websites dropped support for less than TLS1.2 has happened; and with most websites now required a secure session to use at all times, this means there's very little you can access with any browsers, including nearly all download sites should someone create a working browser. Even BeBytes is out of reach.
BeOS was never flush with browser options. On x86 you had:
* Firefox or Mozilla Seamonkey, last updated for Firefox 3 / Seamonkey 1.9 of 2006
* Opera 3.6 of 1999
* NetPositive 2.2, included in the OS so theoretically from 2000 but with standards support more like 1996
* Netsurf 2, more updated but quite behind the others in capabilities
There was also a beta Net+ "3", older than 2.2, with some very basic JavaScript support, and the otherwise identical Net+ in Dano, which had ssleay (a predecessor of OpenSSL) instead of licenced RSA SSL code
As far as I know, Net+ supported SSL2 and 3, Opera SSL2, 3 and TLS 1.0 and Firefox SSL3 and TLS 1.0. Net+ cannot refresh the SSL Labs client test page (due to no Javascript), and Opera can't even open it. Firefox works, giving a quite pathetic result. Net+3 does not load it either.
Also, the SSL root certs in all three cases are hilariously out of date.
So - what can be done?
For particularly aged browsers, you can use Crypto Ancienne as a modern https to http proxy, the author of which has actually tested on BeOS/PPC, and which can be built on BeOS/x86 with minimal effort. However, our browsers are actually too *new* for this approach.
It may be possible to hack Net+ to act a bit older and proxy traffic, as mentioned in the linked blogpost; but there may be more chance of getting a newer build of Netsurf to work - there is still an active Haiku port which has TLS 1.2 support; and it is designed for older platforms with problematic compilers and so on.
There are also text-mode browsers, or modified text-mode browsers like Lynx and Links that may be updatable; which realistically these days will give a Net+ style experience anyway
Or, possibly moreso on BONE than 'clean' R5, a heavier proxy like Squid or similar could be used.
On PPC, a hacked up Net+ is probably the only option.
Hey there: Crypto Ancienne author here. Version 2.0 is out and heavily rewritten for BeOS (read all the adventures, https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2022/07/crypto-ancienne-20-now-brings-tls-13-to.html ). There's a pre-built copy with mwcc on the Gopher server in gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/be-power/net and I'd be interested to see if it works well on your 2400.
ReplyDeleteSince you also have Intel BeOS machines I suspect (rather than just Haiku, which of course works fine), have you ever tried to build it on one of those?
One of these days I'm going to sit down with a debugger and figure out how I can worm my way into Net+'s proxy support.
I've got an R5 net_server laptop with mostly working wifi and an R5 net_server or BONE PC with working gigabit ethernet. Everything's in a mess with a house renovation so I don't know when I'll get to them - but I did build an older version on the laptop.
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