alt.hn

5/30/2026 at 6:58:23 AM

Macsurf, "modern" web browser for macOS 9

 https://github.com/mplsllc/macsurf

by gattilorenz

5/30/2026 at 3:33:11 PM

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.

by bensyverson

5/30/2026 at 5:19:12 PM

[dead]

by bbbbbbbbbbbvyt

5/30/2026 at 3:44:04 PM

So, making obsolete hardware relevant by using the technology that's accelerating their "irrelevanceness" ?

by manytimesaway

5/30/2026 at 7:01:12 PM

There's no acceleration here. Vintage Macs are 100% obsolete. They can't get any more obsolete than that. They can, however, become MORE relevant for hobbyists through the development of new software for them.

What could be better than that?

by chongli

5/30/2026 at 6:22:15 PM

You are aware that there's a huge retrocomputing community around the world that with hearts and passion preserves old machines and software?

by pndy

5/31/2026 at 12:21:00 AM

Being part of it myself, I think I've heard of it.

But I fail to understand how using the very thing that's shortening hardware life nowadays is "passionate". Different values I presume.

by manytimesaway

5/30/2026 at 3:54:44 PM

To me it proves that a technology can be understood and implemented by one person.

by hyperhello

5/30/2026 at 5:30:42 PM

How is AI making old hardware obsolete faster?

by yjftsjthsd-h

5/30/2026 at 7:47:10 PM

If anything it's the opposite (by making new hardware unaffordable)

by pqtyw

5/31/2026 at 12:22:25 AM

Prices for retro hardware are going up due to hoarders & sometimes social effect, too.

by manytimesaway

5/30/2026 at 4:53:59 PM

Life isn't black & white

by bensyverson

5/30/2026 at 3:52:58 PM

Can hardware became more obsolete?

by prokopton

5/30/2026 at 7:03:03 PM

Yes. Discrete 74 series TTL logic ICs were quite obsolete; CMOS versions replaced them. But now with new generations that are not level-compatible with the TTL versions, the TTL versions are even more obsolete.

by addaon

5/30/2026 at 1:34:40 PM

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".

by Cyan488

5/30/2026 at 2:31:56 PM

Exactly. I don't know why some people'd change the branding.

by felixding

5/30/2026 at 3:57:48 PM

Apple keeps changing the name of their desktop operating system, so Hacker News has some sort of filter to automatically change "Mac OS" to whatever the newest name is in order to fit Apple's brand guidelines. This has the consequence of making some submission titles read as anachronistic when the sumission is about an old OS version.

by ndiddy

5/30/2026 at 2:37:39 PM

The project didn't, only the HN submission title.

by Springtime

5/30/2026 at 6:49:29 PM

Not the submission title, just the automatically revised submission title. Pretty sure I submitted it with the proper casing/spacing

by gattilorenz

5/30/2026 at 8:55:18 PM

HN has this thing where it would automatically "fix" submission titles.

by grishka

5/30/2026 at 3:55:54 PM

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

by manoDev

5/31/2026 at 5:41:48 AM

WebAssembly can run without needing an interpreter, as it’s a binary and not a scripted language.

May JS die a quick death so that WebAssembly can take its place.

by rekabis

5/31/2026 at 10:55:21 AM

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/

by whatismybrowser

5/31/2026 at 2:34:37 AM

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.

by matt123456789

5/31/2026 at 6:15:58 AM

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

by pjmlp

5/30/2026 at 1:51:34 PM

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.

by simgt

5/30/2026 at 4:42:23 PM

It's a significantly newer Mac OS than Mac OS 9, but this is basically my life. Mavericksforever.com.

by Wowfunhappy

5/30/2026 at 8:27:18 PM

That's awesome, thanks for sharing.

by simgt

5/31/2026 at 5:31:37 AM

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.

by wolrah

5/30/2026 at 6:20:16 PM

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.

by pndy

5/30/2026 at 6:56:13 PM

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.

by mplsllc

5/30/2026 at 7:24:15 PM

Yes, some older version but I've grabbed carbonlib 1.6.1 from macintoshrepository and that helped with launching MacSurf under that premade 9.0 machine

by pndy

5/30/2026 at 6:05:26 PM

That would be "Mac OS 9"

by LoganDark

5/30/2026 at 1:39:54 PM

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

by gcp123

5/30/2026 at 6:57:21 PM

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

by SoftTalker

5/30/2026 at 8:52:18 PM

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.

by grishka

5/30/2026 at 1:30:03 PM

Absolutely love it.

by hyperhello

5/30/2026 at 6:27:07 PM

This is what the Amiga is missing!

by Torwald

5/30/2026 at 7:20:05 PM

Have you tried the Netsurf port for it?

by mplsllc

5/30/2026 at 3:00:59 PM

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

by iwontberude

5/30/2026 at 6:58:15 PM

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!

by mplsllc

5/30/2026 at 8:38:53 PM

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!

by gazook89