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Looking for a site that will reduce HTML or make compatible with older browsers

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edy:
As someone who likes to hang on to retro tech, I often find myself booting up old computers or old phones with ancient browsers. The problem is, when I try to navigate to modern websites they often fail to load or have certificate/security issues.

My question is, does anyone know if a "pass-through" type website exists which will basically grab a page that you want, scrub it (or convert it) to be compatible with older browsers, and then present it to you?

For example, I would visit the converter site (call it "www.oldbrowser.com") with a request like this:

   http://www.oldbrowser.com/www.eevblog.com (or something like that)

It would then grab the page (at www.eevblog.com) and present it to me scrubbed of most of the modern HTML5 stuff and let me at least see most of the text and some basic images, and without security cert issues. It could also convert all the links so that they also have "http://www.oldbrowser.com/" in front so when I click on a link it will load it through the converter website as well.

That way, if I want to maybe load up a page even just to see some text, it will display something. Back in the day they had "m" versions of sites for mobile, but now everything is being handled by scripts trying to detect your OS and screen and it customizes it for your device. Unfortunately none of that seems to work with the oldest browsers. The sites are completely BROKEN on older browsers, they die after a while trying to load the page or will crap out due to memory overload or not draw or format anything correctly, even on a page where all I want is the basic text and images.

Does such a site exist? Is anyone working on such a project or see it as a useful thing? I can't imagine it would take much to make this happen. If I register "oldbrowser.com" and then when someone requests a URL from it (in the format I suggested above), it would fetch the page in question, try to recode certain tags or eliminate others altogether, or do some conversion (there are likely scripts already available and document conversion tools in Linux that could clean it up) and then return that modified page to the user.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I just want my old browsers to at least fetch some useful information still.

Here is an example of an old website that is still working and displays perfectly on my BlackBerry Curve:  :-DD

http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm

cdev:
You could download the openssl source code and compile it for your old computer, using a compatible compiler you still have, also download the certificates.

retiredfeline:
A lot of sites require Javascript to work. You can observe this if you have the Noscript add-on installed in Firefox. So those would be a problem for your scheme.

MIS42N:
I think it would be more sensible to have an in-house site to do this. Have a server on your own network. I think it would be technically feasible, it would need a modern browser back end, Apache front end, glue in the middle to take the output of the browser rendering engine, recode it as HTML2 (or whatever level the ancient browser could handle) dropping all the bits that can't recode.

I don't think one person could do this, but there are Special Interest Groups for all sorts of minimalist projects. Many variants of Linux. Good luck.

cdev:
What about all the backend chatter?

They have intentionally made it so older browsers break in order to make it nearly impossible to be anonymous on the web.

This is because they sell that information.

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