We are building a web site that will be usable by older browsers over http.

We want to empower people with very old computers to get some benefit from the web. So a desire for those old dusty computers to have some more life.

For those with certain old computers, say an Apple iBook G4, the web has been closed off for years. There are a variety of reasons for this.

For one, the built-in browser, e.g. Safari for macOS, will have become obsolete in terms of security and web document support (html, css, javascript). Why not upgrade the browser? Well, as new computer hardware and operating systems are released, the old tends to be left behind. At a certain point, an old mac will not be able to run a new system. And new versions of software, including web browsers, may not be able to run on an older system. As this process continues over time, one finds that the old computer is "stuck" with an old system, old programs, old browsers.

If nothing else changed in the world, this would be fine! Old hardware, old software was once new and shiny and wonderful, so why do we consider it "obsolete" just because new stuff comes along? (We don't really need to answer that in detail - we all know the modern obsession with new and shiny, and the need for the tech economy to keep making new and shiny things.)

Well, for web browsers the obsolescence comes from the fact that a web browser is only as good as the web sites it can access. Web "technology" - the way web pages are constructed, the features they begin to assume that browsers have for fancy display or programming through Javascript - is enhanced over time. New features are added and when web sites start depending on these new features, older browsers without these features will not work well or at all with these newer sites.

In addition, the changing security landscape enforced by web sites and services can simply require newer web browsers with new security features which did not exist previously. Older browsers simply don't have these security features and will fail when faced with a newer web site.

Well, we are at a point where all popular, and most other, web sites rely upon new web site features and security and will refuse to run with older browsers. In some future post we may show this through examples and metrics. But for now, if you are in possession of an older computer, you know this to be true!

I am also a "green" at heart, and cringe at the cost of overencryption. When I began working on the web, encrypted sites - the "s" in https - were just beginning. It was very computationally expensive - one needed a more powerful computer to deal with it. This was especially true on the server side. There were actually specialty "add on cards" for servers designed to perform the encryption, to take the load off of the server hardware itself. This is evidence that there is a cost to encryption - it takes energy and engineering to pull it off.

So the question I've had has been - why do we have overly-high hardware requirements for accessing relatively simple, straightforward, and important information?

And can we offer important and useful information for users with older computers which struggle with or simply cannot access modern web sites?

This project seeks to answer these questions.