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Running Windows 98 in the Browser

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Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#91

Post by gosub100 »

bluetomcat wrote: post #24
nippoo wrote: post #3

The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.

The core OS APIs still allow writing fast and snappy applications, but most apps nowadays are not written this way. Apps are using generic libraries that bring "the gorilla and the jungle" with them, browsers are relying on a JIT to draw their own UI, etc.

you can see this if you emerge (gentoo) or build from ports (*bsd). You try to compile vim and suddenly you're in the config page for CUPS (printer support) which then wants to know if you need Unicode support for a language you've never heard of (and if so, which font packages do you want to show it on).

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#92

Post by actionfromafar »

gwervc wrote: post #20
nippoo wrote: post #3

The thing that always strikes me with these kinds of demos is how absurdly efficient old OSs were / had to be. It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, as modern operating systems have to handle a lot more, but even Windows XP (which handled a lot of the same basic Internet browsing tasks as I still use now!) is almost comically fast on modern hardware.

Even functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability than…

Windows NT 3.51 had driver isolation. Unicode could have been added to Windows XP.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#93

Post by galangalalgol »

pjmlp wrote: post #51
gwervc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability than…

Even further behind, an Amiga 500 would be more than enough for many folks.

The memory footprint of workbench was incredibly low. A base alpine image with no support for any graphics is several times that size. What are we doing?

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#94

Post by hecatia »

_ea1k wrote: post #89
Aardwolf wrote: post #17

Amazingly, opening google.com in the internet explorer browser worked after running the "networking.bat" from the desktop Many other pages don't load, possibly non supported https standards

It made me wonder how hard it would be to get Firefox running inside of there.

Getting KernelEx should not be hard to be able to get a newer Firefox version in it.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#96

Post by userbinator »

nightski wrote: post #88
M95D wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Or it's true because of software bloat and resource waste these days. When I was a teenager, I wanted to see what was the maximum resolution my monitor supported. It was a Samsung Syncmaster 14" entirely analog, no OSD, with analog adjustment knobs on the bottom. The video card was a Matrox Millennium II 8MB VRAM and the OS was Windows 3.10. The maximum resolution that I could get was 1600x1200 @ 41Hz inter…

There's a lot more to it than just increasing the resolution. Graphics, animations, font rendering quality, huge images, the list goes on.

Most of that is GPU-accelerated anyway so the OS / CPU doesn't need to do much beyond telling the GPU what to do.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#97

Post by userbinator »

Run a DOS box inside that, and you actually have a VM running inside that VM.

Win9x (and I believe it started with Windows/386) are based on a hypervisor architecture with minimal protections. The Win32 environment is essentially a protected-mode DOS application that also runs its own application format, and is itself a VM, along with each "DOS box" that gets created.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#98

Post by Publius_Enigma »

mijamo wrote: post #79
candiodari wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd especially expect latency to have gone down. Instead, latency went up.

Latency of what? Starting the OS is definitely faster. Launching software is also orders of magnitude faster. HDD don't requires hours of defragmentation to avoid slowing down to a halt. I was only a teenager in the windows 98 era but I remember I was just always waiting for the computer. This is not something I have experienced in a long time now.

Latency of text entry, as one example.

In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#99

Post by projektfu »

actionfromafar wrote: post #92
gwervc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even functionally it's very comical because of how we were able to do on Win98 (even 95) almost everything we are doing today: editing documents, browsing the web (with images), playing games, watching videos, printing documents, listening to music. The only functional improvements I can note over two decades are: Unicode support, higher resolution of everything (from hardware to content), and system reliability than…

Windows NT 3.51 had driver isolation. Unicode could have been added to Windows XP.

Windows NT 3.1 (the first released version) had Unicode, but it was before Unicode 2.0.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#100

Post by tonoto »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #81
darksim905 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call bullshit. Windows 95/98/2000 did not have any bloatware....

I call bullshit on your call. Don’t you remember active desktop? That was as bloated as anything and crashed all the time. People having a IE crash screen as their wallpaper and being clueless as to how to get rid of it, was hilarious.

It was a fun prank to replace someones desktop to an active desktop.
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