If you want to take a trip back in time, so to speak, try using an old browser. No, I don’t mean use that copy of Internet Explorer 3.0 that’s stitting around somewhere on your hard drive, I’m saying: use an old browser. So old that it doesn’t recognize backgrounds or font colors.
One of my long time favorite sites for “classic” browsers is browsers.evolt.org. From there you can get pretty much any version of any browser to download and install. You kind of have to know what you’re doing so that you don’t install Netscape 1.1 overtop of your current version, but it’s interesting to look at what current sites would like in a browser like Mosaic or IE 1.5. (Side note: did you know that before Microsoft’s IE, Sprynet’s browser was called Internet Explorer?)
If you’re not bold enough to try installing an old browser on your system, a link I came across recently was dejavu.org, which allows you to emulate some old browsers via a Java applet in your current browser. -ram
Posted in Technology